Mortal Enemies: Episode 2

I am a night owl, not a morning person.  It's so bad I don't even like to talk the first fifteen, twenty minutes I'm awake, but at nine pm I get a second wind.  I normally go to bed around midnight.  The Husband however is the complete opposite.  He falls asleep at nine-thirty on the couch and I wake him up at midnight to go to bed.  However, the past couple of nights I've been waking him up to go on covert missions.  He gets up and gets into his diesel truck and 'sneaks' down the tenth of a mile road between our house and the berry field, armed with his rifle, a horn, and an intense need for revenge.  The Objective: eliminating the threat posed by another mortal enemy...

The Deer.

When I was growing up I loved deer.  I liked that they are so pretty and graceful.  I liked the way they seemed to leap when they run.  I liked that they were kind of introverted creatures, like me.  However, I have learned that I bought into a myth.  The only time deer are introverted is when it's hunting season.  All the rest of the year you can find them grazing right beside the road, running out in front of your car, punching holes in my plastic, and mowing my berries down like a kid going through Halloween candy.

Deer hoof vs. Plastic



Every year we have a problem with deer.  It's normally worse with the sweet potatoes.  Deer love them.  When the vines have just been transplanted, they love to eat the tender shoots.  Later, when the potatoes are grown they paw them up out of the ground.  All of you hunters putting out deer corn, you need to be putting out sweet potatoes.  Trust me.

Now that the berries are right down the road from us we can keep a better eye them.  This is good and bad.  When you can walk out of your house and see them lurking towards your field in search of those tasty leaves, it can get under your skin.  Revenge for all those years of eaten sweet potatoes and berries infects you, and you find that you have turned from a docile farmer to a deer assassin (play any Muse track here, my suggestions: Assassin, New Born, and Uprising).  We've shot at them, scared them off, put up a fence saturated in disgusting deer repellant stuff (the fence actually worked until it got partially blown down by the hurricane force winds we had last week).

Hence the covert missions.  We ambush the unsuspecting creatures about one am, just as they're getting to the sweet spots.  It scares them off (although I envision them running in the woods snickering under their breath about what a sucker we are, waiting until we're back in the house and coming right back out for round two) and makes The Husband feel better so I guess all in all it's a valiant effort in the war against the mortal enemies.