College . 02/25/2008 02:39 AM . Aaron Olmstead

Rolling down the highway after a long day of interning in Washington D.C., Kirk anxiously thought of the relaxing evening ahead of him. Living in Loudoun County, one of the wealthiest counties in the states, was great, but the commute was more unpleasant than he’d ever imagined. Too many people. Too many cars. Too many stop lights. Sometimes it just felt so suffocating.

Suddenly, his quiet reverie was interrupted by the dull crunch of metal and plastic impacting flesh and bone. The momentum of his little fiesta-green station wagon had been unsuccessfully challenged.

A quick survey revealed that his car had sustained relatively minimal damage, while the wild animal that had impeded his path hadn’t been as fortunate. Bambi was dead.

Strange as it may seem, Kirk didn’t react by cursing the heavens in anger. He thanked the good Lord for raining down manna. His rather unique mentality suggested that the bloody carcass was not so much road-kill as it was a beautiful piece of meat. Thanks to the aid of his trusty, war-torn steed, he was the victorious (albeit unintentional) hunter.

Sketchy, you say? Think again. College equals destitution. Like it or not, the nourishment of the body doesn’t usually coincide with the nourishment of the mind. We have it rough. Really rough. Lacking the care of wife or mother, death-by-starvation is a severe prospect. So if this isn’t an instance of desperate times calling for desperate measures, I don’t know what is.

It could be that Kirk is just a little more atune with the loving-care of his creator than the rest of us. The lillies-of-the-field get dirt, Kirk, a senior in college, gets road-kill. Think I might keep praying for now.

Divine provision or not, I do understand him on the hunger part. Heck, I think about food nearly every moment of every day (judge me if you must, but I like my priorities).

It must have been empathy, then, that kept me from firmly deflecting Kirk’s repeated attempts to make me his personal Johnny-on-the-spot when it came to gutting and butchering. He called me moments after the collision to announce his intention of keeping the battered animal.

I was concerned.

Having lived in the same house as Kirk for several years, I had seen him subsist on a diet of orange soda, Oreos, and Cheez-its. While never having confronted him on this lamentable existence, I had some serious reservations as to this new vulture-esque low. Before these could be voiced, Kirk asked if I knew how to gut a deer. But this was not hunting, and I told him so. My standards precluded my involvement (or so I thought). Determined to get his meat, he pressed me to assist him, and, in typical Kirk fashion, he called me a “sissy” when I made excuses. I laughed and quickly retorted that it seemed rather ironic that the guy who didn’t know how to gut a deer was calling the guy who did a sissy.

With me as an unwilling Tonto, I figured that the mission would eventually erode. But moments later, when I received a call from my buddy Kyle Murray, I realized how easily I had been replaced. Come to find out, Kyle had already aided Kirk in wrapping the lifeless deer in a tarp and Duct Tape and strapped it to the roof his SUV. My joy was renewed when I was notified that woods next to my house were the intended site of the deconstructive surgery.

I gave up on dissuading them, but warned that a permit might technically be required to take the deer. My story of how an acquaintance back in Wisconsin had his guns and truck taken away from him when he had merely shot a buck in a doe season was more than sufficient cause for unease.

The now-nervous compatriots in crime were soon thereafter confronted by three cops who had been tipped of a vehicular homicide.

A caller reported he had covertly watched two men attempting to dispose of a dead body. The initially intense interrogation dissolved when the police officers came to understand that the body in question was a dead deer as opposed to a dead human. Happy to have that clarified, Kyle quickly proceeded to claim ignorance of the regulation involved in such a situation. He was promptly told that the authorities could really care less about them taking the dead animal. One fewer carcass on the highway wasn’t something that they were interested in obstructing.

Free to complete their mission, the funeral procession arrived in my neck of the woods to bring the deer to a semblance of where it rightfully belonged—a two acre lot of trees adjoining my neighborhood.

I was, of course, drafted to be on-site to guide the gutting process but it didn’t really matter, as my resistance had long since waned (Kirk wins again). So the three of us pulled the deer out in front of the vehicle’s headlights and in a group effort, had the lungs, heart, liver and intestines removed in about triple the time it should have taken.

Not wanting to scar some mom and her kids on their midday jaunt through the woods, we hung Kirk’s prize kill from a tree in the most unfrequented corner of the small forest and were careful to erase the evidence.

I didn’t even think about the innuendo of our conversation as we parked and got out of the car back at the house until, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of the neighbors smoking in the shadow of his porch. Our exchange had gone something like:

“Dude, who has the knife…Dang it, I think we left it back by the body.”

“I have so much freaking blood on my hands…”

“We should cut off the head and go put it in somebody’s bed, like in the Godfather!”

The man threw away his cigarette and walked quickly inside, seeming more than a little anxious to be away from the trio of giddy, overconfident murderers.

Kirk did earn legitimate points as a great white hunter when he returned two days later to extract the meat all by himself in 15 degree weather. Now all he needs is a few killer venison recipes. For my part, I’m probably not going to be dragging carcasses off the road anytime in the near future. I like to shoot my deer and far away from the suburbs. But props to Kirk for being creative. That definitely beats Ramen noodles in the microwave or quesadillas from a clothes iron.

Aaron Olmstead is the founder and publisher of Kritik.


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