I found the mummified remains of the biggest deer ever... [Part 1]

I live alone in a cabin on the back of the state game lands. I’ve lived here, by myself, for years, and there’s nothing that’s ever seemed to me to be unexplainable. The strange noises you hear at night become familiar—you understand the difference between a Great Horned Owl diving for cottontails in a bramble and the rumor of an oncoming storm, between big and little hoofsteps, between ghosts and winter wind. Even the silent nighttime slaughter of baby rabbits by red foxes has its own melody.

Sometimes the wilderness is so flooded with the bustle of nocturnal creatures that the day brings a quiet that the night never quite grasps.

There is a wolf that comes close to my cabin and sits near me. I don’t touch it, but sometimes I feed it. I think it’s a female wolf. I think it comes to me because we’re both female. 

I asked her name in the unselfconscious way that only a recluse can while they talk to animals. She didn’t answer. I decided her name was “Tooth” because of her one long sharp tooth, much longer and sharper than the one on the other side.

My life had a rhythm to it, sometimes the rush of a storm-flooded river and sometimes the quiet soughing of wind through tall grass, but always a rhythm that I knew. It had been that way for years.

Until I saw that thing light up the sky.

A meteor, a tail of fire like exhaust trailing its engine, noise a cartoon coyote with an ACME rocket strapped to its back. I saw it rip through the moonlight.

I grabbed my rifle because dumb and going-unarmed-into-the-woods-dumb are two different things. I grabbed my Coleman lantern, too.

Waiting right out front of my cabin was Tooth, her gray-white coat and big glowing eyes making her look like a ghost.

“Tooth, I’m going out to see what it was,” I told the canid as if we were friends since childhood. The look she gave back to me was either dumb or profound, I couldn’t say which.

I ran towards where I thought the meteor had hit, and Tooth followed along next to me, the smell thick in the air. For a moment, her running alongside me, the two of us slicing through the veil of night, I felt like a Valkyrie.

We saw the light blazing blindingly bright from inside a gully. The smell was like sulfur, petroleum. But even from far away, I saw there was no smoke. Why was there no smoke?

At ten yards away, Tooth stopped running with me. I stutter-stepped but kept moving. She whined as I went further than she was willing to go.

Animals’ instincts provide them with the protection common sense affords human beings, except instinct is born in animals’ bones and common sense is something people rarely come all the way to knowing.

The fire wasn’t a fire at all. It was a single pole of light plunged into the mud of the gully still wet from an afternoon shower. I walked closer to the light, and it shrank. I backed up and it enlarged again. There was no sound except a quiet hum, and I couldn’t say for sure that that wasn’t just my blood exciting my body.

I moved back and forth to test the pole’s stereoscopic effect. The last time I came forward the fiery pole disappeared completely. There was a residual glow, or there seemed to be, though it could’ve just been the way my lantern lit the gully.

I looked down and saw an antlered skeleton inside a crater. I shone my light and the crater glistened. Mud and debris were peeled back at its edges. 

The skeleton looked black, like a bogland mummy. I crouched down at the edge of the gully’s headscarp, about eight feet up from the skeleton. I could see the outlines of muscles inside preserved skin. The deer was mummified. Like a bogland mummy, alright.

Tooth padded closer to me from behind, her steps hesitating. I looked back toward her and said, “You should come look. It’s really something.” 

Her pearl-glow eyes darted between me and the skeleton in the gully. She growled low in her throat. Tooth’s lips curled in a predacious snarl. “Fine,” I said, talking to this animal that I thought I might know, “no one’s going to make you.”

I scampered down the gully, skid across eroded walls. Tooth whined behind me, and I allowed myself the delusion that she was concerned for my safety. She yipped once and I turned around and brought my finger to my lips: “Shh!” Incredibly, she listened.

If I had to take a guess at that moment, I’d say that the mummy-deer probably topped out at eight-feet-tall at the shoulders. Yeah, that big. It made a moose look like a puppy. 

It looked like megafauna, one of those freak-big mutants that roamed the earth before language and fire.

Its antlers were terrifying—the palm of each like a demon’s wing, every point in the shape of a sharp sickle. They were wider than albatross wings, maybe twelve or more feet wide.

I went to touch the antlers. Tooth barked at me. That gave me pause. Even in my excitement over this perfectly preserved find, I remembered that wolves only bark at threats. I turned back around and said to her, “It’s dead. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Tooth barked again and pawed the ground underneath her. She wanted to leave.

I looked back at the mummy-deer. “Well, if it’s been here, it’s probably not going anywhere.” 

I climbed out of the gully. Tooth seemed very relieved. She came and put her nose close to my crotch. The moment wouldn’t come again. I reminded myself that fear was just a feeling and boldness was a choice. I pet Tooth’s fur. I felt her relax under my hand as I did. I made an audible “Whoa…” that Keanu Reeves would’ve approved of.

We went back to my cabin. That night, Tooth slept on the porch.

•

I thought of driving my truck the couple hundred miles to the public university halfway across the state, but a phone call would probably work just as well. First, I wanted to go out and make sure I’d really seen what I’d seen. Tooth had ventured off to either hunt or visit her den (though part of me doubted she had one). I went back alone.

At the gully, the mummy-deer was gone. There was a dinosauric impression where its body had been, so I knew I wasn’t crazy. Like as not, I’d seen what I’d seen. Right in the middle of the crater, where the impression was the deepest, there was a big, smooth stone. It was the size and shape of an ostrich egg and the dark green color and texture of raw tourmaline.

Had someone taken the body? The only other cabins in the area were for hunters, and they didn’t come until late September at the earliest. If there was another recluse like me, the game warden probably would’ve mentioned it in the series of his complaints that he reviewed in my presence, in his misbegotten sense of what conversation was supposed to be.

Would a bear be able to haul away something that, even mummified, probably still weighed as much as the bear itself?

I decided I’d make a phone call to the university and the game warden and let them know what was going on. I didn’t want to get in trouble with the feds or whoever for not reporting something that was (maybe) a very big deal.

I scuttled down the gully and picked up the dark green eggstone, then headed back home.

•

I put the dark green eggstone in my truck so I’d remember it if I decided to go to the university.

But I delayed the phone calls. More often than not, my phone gets no signal, so I either have to walk the rocky mile up the crest of the ridge or, more often than not, drive my truck down the road a ways until I get four bars. I knew I should’ve called right away, but I was hungry. I’d come to regret that.

After I’d cooked myself some mountain pie with venison and bad homemade french fries, I allowed myself one more dodge at procrastination before using the phone.

I checked the humane traps I laid with cantaloupe inside them. Some asshole groundhog had been terrorizing my garden. I told myself the cantaloupe was the last resort before I caved and bought a Conibear body trap.

When I got out to my garden, there were dead animals everywhere. Not just the one groundhog, but several of them. They looked like they’d been smashed with a sledgehammer.

“Jesus…what the hell happened here?”

Tooth barked behind me and I just about shit my britches. I whipped around. “Goddamnit, Tooth, you scared the bejesus out of me!” I pointed out the groundhog bodies and said, “Well, go ahead, get it while it’s hot.” But she wouldn’t even get close to them. She wouldn’t even look at them. Her ears were flattened on their sides and she was making this sickly grin that definitely doesn’t mean a wolf is happy. She yipped a few times and her tail went between her legs. 

And then I saw where she was looking: There was a trail of carcasses—every kind and every size—leading out into the forest.

•

I followed the dead bodies along their bloody trail. It was the craziest goddamn thing I’d ever seen. There were dead raccoons, snowshoe hares, opossums. I followed the trail for a good half-mile through brush and bramble until I came out into a prairie clearing. 

I could not believe what I saw.

There was a pile of antlered bodies in the middle of the clearing. I walked up to the pile to examine them. They were all mature white-tailed bucks, about a dozen of them. Some of them could’ve been two-hundred pounds. And they’d all been killed the same way; they’d been gored. Their bodies were riddled with deep gashes through their hides, wide enough I could see inside the wounds.

Something roared in the distance. It was an anguished braying like a bull moose, but also like the growl of a bear gone mad with hunger just before it hibernates. I’d heard plenty of animal calls—bears roaring, mountain lions yowling, the gut-deep growls of wolves—but never anything like what I heard just then. 

I heard it again and it was closer than before. One more time and it was closer, still.

I ran. I sprinted back toward the forest as fast as I could. I ducked behind the first thick-bellied oak that I saw. Once I was out of the clearing, I looked back to the stack of deer bodies in the middle.

I saw it plain as day, but my mind struggled with comprehension, even though I was looking straight at it. It was the mummified deer. Its whole black body seemed like a vacuum in the middle of the daylight. It was wet with blood so that its mummified flesh looked slick with crude oil. 

It was the largest antlered thing that had ever existed. It had to be. It was north of eight feet at the shoulders, and its antlers could have been thirteen feet in the air at the tips. 

Its eyes were jaundiced yellow and didn’t have irises in them. Not that I could see.

The black deer appraised the stack of white-tailed bucks that it had killed and hoarded. And suddenly it raged. It rammed the stack with its antlers, spearing the dead bucks with his satanic tines, rearing back and slamming into the carcasses again and again. It was the kind of mindless violence you associate with crystal meth tweakers, not animals.

There was no point to what it was doing. That was what was frightening about it. It was all the things about violence you don’t want to see, in combination—organized fury in the body pile, nothing to be gained in the black deer battering them—rabid and blood-frenzied toward a completely meaningless purpose.

I saw it raise its branches of bony, sharp points above its head as it roared. Its blood-drenched antlers sent a shiver of unholy fear through my body. I felt a sensation like low blood sugar and a co-occuring asthma attack. I peed a little. I peed more than a little, actually.

I moved quickly back along the trail of dead varmints I’d followed out to the clearing. When I was halfway back to my cabin, the black deer roared again. This time its rage was indignant, like it realized it had been had. 

I cranked up the gas and booked it. I ran and I ran until I felt my heart ready to split open through my chest. I prayed that I wouldn’t hear the roar again. Even though I knew it was stupid to cry, that it would do nothing but slow me down and sap my energy, I cried as I ran.

And then, as I was within a thousand feet of my cabin, I heard it: The black deer’s thundering hooves carrying it like a one-ton missile in my direction.

I told myself not to look back. But even as I ran, even as my muscles started to give out and my lungs couldn’t keep my wind, I looked back. And every time I looked, it was closer to me. 

Then, there was fifty yards between me and my cabin and fifty yards between the black deer and me. I stopped and stared at it. I don’t know why. Even now, I have no earthly idea why I did it. The black deer stopped, too. I saw the steam of its breath evacuate the heat of hell from its lungs. It lifted its terrible head in the sky and let out its roar.

We both ran; I ran for my home and the black deer ran to catch me. Its thundering gallop was so loud that the sound of its hoofbeats filled my mind.

I leapt up the cabin’s porch steps. I almost let myself celebrate. I was so close to the door handle. But when I turned it—oh, oh, no, no, no—my front door was locked. 

I never forgot to do it, not since a bear had broken into my cabin and stolen two-hundred dollars worth of beef jerky that I’d made.

I was doomed.

I turned around just as the black deer rammed its head. And I almost got out of the way fully, but for some reason I didn’t let my left hand let go of the door handle. An antler point like a vampire stake impaled my hand at the wrist. I felt the bones break and muscle ripped apart and I screamed. I fell to the ground, my back against my cabin’s outer wall. 

The black deer reared back. It looked me in the eyes—really, really looked, like it was, I thought, sucking up my fear for its pleasure. And then it ran the edge of one of its antlers into me. Another stake pierced my body, this one breaking my clavicle and sending gouts of blood into the air. There was so much blood.

It pulled back with as much violence as it had speared me.

I thought the final blow was coming. I thought my death was coming, too.