Modern Day Poaching

Yeah, that's right.  I let my baby play with my pearls and make-up.  (Somebody ought to!)  I did end up hiding that little treasure chest though.  It got to the point where TerraDactyl would wake up and immediately run into my room so she could play with my jewelry/hair bobs/make-up box.  

Today was a very weird sort of day.  It started out normal.  DH was in his office working, TerraDactyl and I were hanging out playing.  I heard DH go outside, which he doesn't usually do while he's working, but it's not a totally crazy thing to do.  But, when he came back inside DH came up to tell me that there was a deer carcass on our property, down near the creek (and inside our fence line).  

He said it looked like somebody removed the meat from a young-ish deer and also cut off its head.  Neither of us had heard any gunshots or anything, so either they used a quieter method of killing, or they killed it elsewhere and just dumped the carcass here.  It's a pretty isolated area, but not far from our house.  That's how DH found it.  It was in easy view from his office window.  And the red stood out from the brown and green of the "forest" floor.  

After some discussion as to who we should call, (DFW?  Animal control?) we decided to start with the police and let them decide who else to contact.  DH left a message with the non-emergency dispatcher and they responded pretty quickly.  We had an officer here within an hour.  He had a look around and ended up contacting a state trooper, I think (based on the label on the back of his bullet proof vest).  

The trooper brought a metal detector, but they were unable to find a bullet.  They decided it looked like someone had cut the backstraps off the deer, so it was probably poaching.  The cop had brought up the idea that maybe coyotes had been scavenging.  The missing head makes that seem awfully unlikely to me, but I never actually went down to examine the carcass, just took a quick look through the office window.  

Anyways, they did take the carcass with them, which was definitely one of our main objectives.  We've seen all sorts of scavengers on our property (coyotes, raccoons, rodents, etc) and we don't really want to encourage them to hang out here.  All in all, it was just really weird, a bit creepy, and hopefully a one time event.  It definitely added to the dystopian apocalyptic feel we've already got going on what with the pandemic and everything.

I'll end this post on a slightly more upbeat note (pun intended).  I recently read Patricia Brigg's Wild Sign, which mentions the Hu's Wolf Totem song.  It was particularly surreal because my BIL really enjoys the Hu (NOT The Who, classic rock band).  The Hu are a Mongolian metal band with some really unusual vocals.  Anyway, I was talking with DH during lunch about how odd it was to have two very disparate parts of my life (Werewolf novel and my BIL) overlap when DH decided to re-listen to the song.  And TerraDactyl had the BEST reaction to the song.  She LOVED it!  This video is kind of long, but I decided not to cut it down because there's some great stuff at the very end.  So here's our own little music video: