Awhile back, my dad and I were driving on a vacant country road when I noticed that there was a deer lying in the middle of the street that had been plowed over by a speeding car. It’s two back legs were broken, and it just lie there, frantic. After yelling at my dad to stop the car, I tried to try to help as the deer as best I could, who was making hopeless attempts to stand on his fractured hind legs.

A yellow bone protruded out of his left leg, and his right was twisted into a completely unnatural position. And I began to cry, because no matter how much I tried to help him, he just lay there, nearly lifeless. I sat there in the middle of that road with the injured deer at my side, praying to whatever god was up there. And the animal made on last attempt to maneuver himself. It was fruitless. I watched him and tried to comfort the creature for what I had hoped wasn’t its last moments of life.

Frustrated with the whole ordeal, my dad grabbed me and threw me back into the truck. Frantically I scrambled to the back window of the pickup truck, and I saw him. He was panting with his tongue out of his mouth, scraping his hooves against the concrete ground. Determined, he conjured up the strength to lift his head once more and looked at me as I moved farther and farther away from him. But soon enough, his head fell back down on the cement, and I could see that he had just accepted his harrowing fate.

Although I was devastated, dad dragged me to lunch anyway. We sat down at a table and he looked at the menu, I had lost my appetite. There was a small notebook on the table, so I decided to pick it up. On the first page of the book, somebody had decided to start a crossword puzzle. I looked down at the small sheet of paper and the noticed the only word filled in was d-e-e-r.