Posted on 09/16/2005 7:25:15 AM PDT by smoothsailing
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2005
Woman a magnet for suicidal deer
Catawba resident has talent for colliding with whitetails
BY ANDREW DYS
The (Rock Hill) Herald
CATAWBA
Dynamite Deb drives and hits deer. She rides and hits deer.
"Maybe now I'll walk," the damsel dubbed Deerslayer said.
After hitting three deer -- two within a 12-day span, the last one while riding a motorcycle -- Debra Adkins, at 54 years old going on 18, might try staying home at night.
"Hope not, she's my best customer," said Jerry Wingate at Clinton Family Ford's body shop. "Call her the Deerslayer. She's killed more deer than me, and I sit out in the cold tryin' to do it for years. She just turns the key, and they come runnin'."
"I only killed the first one," Adkins corrects. "The other two ran off after."
Adkins is no animal hater, but she's a magnet for suicidal deer. The first one hit her SUV last year on the Thursday before Easter when she was just two houses from her rural Catawba driveway.
She was coming home from bowling in the late-night league in Rock Hill. Direct hit. That buck limped off and died in the neighbor's flower garden.
Then, the Thursday before Labor Day, in a new Mazda SUV, she hit another deer about two miles from the house. Late-night bowling did her in again.
"Dear Hon'" read the note Adkins left for her husband, Bill, who was asleep when Adkins got home that night. "You might want to take my car to work. I need another estimate. I hit another deer. Sorry. Love, Me."
But after a recent prayer meeting at church and nighttime breakfast with friends, deer coincidence ratcheted into outright bad karma.
Adkins and her husband were riding separate motorcycles to and from church in nearby Charlotte. The motorcycles were equipped with deer whistles, which make noise that is supposed to scare off deer.
"Somebody told me deer stay away from bright lights," Adkins said. "So I took the main road. Normally, I would take the back roads. Bill was behind me. All the way home, I'm thinking about deer. Deer on my mind. Deer. Deer. Deer."
Blurs with antlers and white butts crossed Anderson Road. She swerved to miss the first but the second one sideswiped her.
Adkins went down in a sliding heap. She survived without a broken bone, but her bruises are deep and she's stitched up like a hand-me-down summer dress.
Two days in a hospital and all Adkins will give up is riding at night. "Two Bibles in the saddlebags saved me," Adkins insists. "And my helmet."
Bill Adkins cleaned the fur off the motorcycle and fixed the bent parts, but he can't say much to his wife about driving and deer.
"About two or three years ago," Bill admits, "I left church and ... one hit me right in the front and side. "It hit you?" his wife of 36 years asks with a raised eyebrow. Jolts of pain hit her when she laughs, but the suffering is worth it. "You didn't hit him, huh?"
This article was printed via the web on 9/16/2005 10:05:28 AM . This article appeared in The Post and Courier and updated online at Charleston.net on Friday, September 16, 2005.
My driving instructor said to swerve to avoid deer if possible, because they can kill you if they come through the windshield. She did say anything smaller than a sheep was fair game, though.
Come to think of it, I was driving a New Beetle at the time, so maybe the rules are different for SUVs :)
That is just bad. Hysterical, but bad.
Or being a terrorist magnet like me... inside the WTC 1993, right across the river on 9/11, now I travel back and forth between NYC and DC, targets #s 1 and 2. Maybe I'll just go to Israel.
PETA response?:
Ban Bowling
She looks like Nancy Pelosi...
One of the reasons for the high deer population is everyone wants to take a buck (legally or illegally) so they can have the rack for display. This causes more doe to survive. When that happens the surviving bucks mate with more doe than normal causing a spike in deer population. To decrease the deer population you need to shoot more does.
Maybe because it is Pelosi.
Agreed.
The only deer I hunt anymore are on "doe days". I don't need any more "racks" and does are more tender.
I think that if you hit dear with that frequency, you have to begin to worry about your driving...
While my mother was still driving, she took out more deer than most any hunter I know. I once had a deer hit me as I was going down the road. I can safely say that it hit me, because it ran into my right rear quarter-panel. Sounds like venicide to me.
And I thought I had it bad running from every little tornado that comes along.
I have a friend who has a deer head that SHE shot abover her bed. A 12-pointer, or something like that. I'm not familiar with hunting terms. :)
Anyways, her bed is next to a window. I'm always joking with her, "I'd be scared to have that above my bed, what if there's a lightning storm? I don't want an illuminated deerhead that I killed looming over me." She said to me once, "Nah, I actually want another [deerhead] to go on my other wall." I kind of paused and said, "You never watched Bambi as a kid, did ya?" "Nope." XD
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