SOUTHWORDS

“You’re prancing along, you get thirsty, you spot a little brook, you put your little deer lips down to the cool clear water . . . BAM! . . . Now I ask ya. Would you give a f*** what kind of pants the son of a bitch who shot you was wearing?”

Cousin Vinny, we got trouble right here in River City.

Most days the War Department goes to her gym, the Petri Dish, before sunrise. She’s greeted on these mornings by a deer who, if it was wearing a chauffeur’s cap, would open the car door for her. It might just as well be an Uber driver. You don’t need to order a bunch of camouflage gear from Cabela’s to stalk these deer. Bozo the Clown could sneak up on them. You could play Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on a klaxon horn and they’ll stand there and stare at you like they’ve got orchestra seating.

Sure the fawns are cute in their little spotted outfits, but the bad news is that they grow into eating machines. Going all leafy and pastoral in our neighborhood is something of a fool’s errand. You might just as well pile the whole herd into a Suburban and drive them to Ruby Tuesday for the salad bar. Hostas in the front? Magnifico. Our compliments to the gardener. In the backyard they ate the oakleaf hydrangeas down to the toothpicks. They never met an azalea they didn’t like. And camellia blossoms? It’s like Cool Hand Luke eating hardboiled eggs.

In addition to the buffet, we may have attracted our four-legged buggers with, of all things, a birdbath. The bluebirds, finches, sparrows, robins and whatnot do a lot of sipping and a fair amount of flapping around in it but, for the most part, they behave themselves. The deer, on the other hand, hang on it like drunks down at the end of the bar in the Bitter and Twisted. I’m pretty sure the head deer put both his/her front hooves up on it and tried to lick it dry, because one morning the whole thing was dumped over. This isn’t some lightweight birdbath, either. It’s solid Lake Superior stone. But what do they care?

We’re pretty sure they’re targeting us because there have been off-property incidents as well. You know the way World War II aces put little decals on their Spitfires to represent downed enemy aircraft? My son has three Bambis on his bumper. The only thing is, he didn’t run into them, they ran into him. Same thing happened to the War Department one night when she was on her way home from a Bruce Springsteen concert and a deer ran full throttle, Kamikaze-like, into the passenger side rear door. Truly Born to Run.

One year a friend of ours thought it would be a splendid idea to make life-sized plywood deer using a jigsaw. The body and head were the largest piece. It settled into notches carved into the front and rear legs. There were a couple of ears to stick on and, of course, a tail. All of it was painted bright white and begging to be draped with festive lights, a perky red nose and wreaths for the Christmas season. The neighbors across the road and up the hill just happened to be bowhunters, and the morning after we proudly displayed our white Christmas deer in the front yard, we arose only to find that they’d been massacred with crossbows. Maybe our current deer are, at this very moment, massing to exact their revenge.

I’m a believer in going green — wind, solar, the lot — and I’m convinced that the ultimate fossil fuel solution may in fact be right under our feet. Pretty much everywhere you look in our yard there are little black piles of deer poop. In the garden. By the birdbath. Everywhere. If there was some way to convert all that poop into energy, I’m pretty sure we could be the Saudi Arabia of scat. It helps to look on the bright side.