A friend and I were planning to meet up at the trail head of a local hiking trail. The weather wasn’t great, so I was hanging out in my car waiting for his arrival. As I sat there, a pickup came into the lot and the driver got out and looked around the trail head area a bit. I don’t think he noticed I was sitting in my car. He came back to the pickup and carried something large in a black plastic bag to a sorta wooded area right at the entrance to the trail. I couldn’t really tell what he was doing as he was behind a tree. But I could have sworn the bag was body shaped and there was something like an arm hanging out of it as he carried it. After doing something behind the trees, he came back to his truck with the empty bag (he clearly had dumped something), got into his truck and drove off. When I saw he was dumping something I made sure I couldn’t be seen when he was on his way back to his truck. Whatever he was up to, it seemed obvious he didn’t want anyone to see it.
After the guy drove off and I was sure he was gone, I started looking around the area he had been. My first thoughts were not ones of him dumping a body, but I did see SOMETHING hanging out of the bag, he clearly did dump something, and he did look like he looked around before doing what he was doing. Besides, dumping bodies like that doesn’t happen in real life.
After a few minutes I found a body. But it was a deer, thank goodness. Not a large one, though. I must have seen one of the legs sticking out of the bag.
We found a headless deer while walking along a wooded stretch of road in SW Portland Oregon. It seemed like whoever dumped it there probably cut the head off for the wall of their den and got rid of the rest because they did not want to deal with it.
So maybe it was something like that. I mean, not being hunting season.
It wasn’t hunting season, or not the season for what he killed (buck vs doe, e.g.), or it was killed at a location he had no business being, or he had no hunting license, or it was killed with an illegal weapon (firearms during bow season, e.g.), or some similar reason he needed to get rid of the evidence before he met a game warden.
“Were-deer?”
“There.”
“What?”
“There, deer. There, trees. There, pickup truck…”
“Why are you talking that way?”
“I thought you wanted to.”
“No, I don’t want to.”
“Suit yourself. I’m easy…”
Maybe it got hit by a car in front of his house and he didn’t know what else to do with it. The highway department here doesn’t pick up roadkill like they did back in the day.
I didn’t move the deer to see if there was an obvious wound from a bullet, arrow or being struck, but the side I could see didn’t show any obvious signs of trauma. My first thought is that it was a poached deer. It may be he was positioning the deer with the wounded side down to keep it from being obvious. When I saw it was a deer my curiosity about what the guy was up to dropped. I don’t think he hit the deer since it seems most people around here just leave them at the side of the road. It could be someone hit the deer in front of his house and he didn’t want it rotting there.
I might see if the deer is there in a few days, just out of curiosity.
