No good deer deed goes unpunished

So lately I've been feeding the deer out behind the lair. I've got two salt blocks out for them and I toss apples, pears, carrots, etc. out for them when the fruit gets a touch overripe. The deer have been getting to be fairly regular visitors as of late, and if my camera wasn't busted I'd have some great shots of them as they come within 15 feet of the house to defoliate my shrubs after eating their apple-tizers. One in particular is pretty recognizable--he's a buck with a lop-sided rack that is stunted or broken off on one side. He's bold and he'll come right down to the house and I'm waiting for the day that I don't put enough fruit out there and he just rings the doorbell to get his hand-out. I mean, he acts so entitled that you'd think that he was a Democrat voter demanding his welfare check or something.

But unlike most welfare-check-cashers, the deer at least performs a service--he and the others amuse and entertain me. At least I thought so until today.

As I was driving out towards the main road and going downhill on the one-lane dirt road that I need to use to get to it, a deer suddenly bolts out of the woods right in front of me, causing me to make a split-second decision: clobber the deer or swerve into the ditch. Now I've hit deer before and I know the damage that they do to the nose-end of my Jeep so I went for the ditch, knowing that I could slide in and back out again with minimal damage to me vehicle. The end result was that I did avoid the deer and by going into the rather deep ditch at a good angle, I was able to power back out of it and fishtail back onto the roadway again with nothing more than a few possible scuffs to my already rather worn paint job. But as I did this, I got a good look at the deer that forced me off the road and I'll be damned if it wasn't my funky-antlered, shrub-stripping welfare buck. Of course he didn't even stick around to apologize to me for nearly wrecking my faithful Jeep (this deer reminds me more and more of a Democrat) and while he's still welcome to feed here, the next time I see him in the back yard I think that I'm going to wop him with an apple.