e Possum Cop Chronicles
Lucky
I have a friend – we’ll call him “Bob”. Bob grew up in a little commercial fishing town on the Texas coast.
The town isn’t so little anymore, and things there have changed significantly over the years.
Forty years ago or so, there were deer – GOOD deer - running all over town, only it wasn’t like it is now where the deer are so used to all the people around that they’ll come up and eat Cheetos out of your hand if you ignore all the signs posted telling you not to do so.
Nope, the deer back then were still wild, and a few of the permanent residents weren’t above poaching one every now and again to put food on their tables. And as it oftentimes goes, it didn’t hurt if the venison they were after had a nice set of antlers.
That’s where “Lucky” enters the picture, sometime around the late-80s or early-90s.
“Lucky” was a deer that was drawing attention from the locals on account of his impressive antlers, and there were more than a couple of guys after him. Shots had been fired, but Lucky wouldn’t go down.
Bob was after him, too. Unfortunately, Bob has never been what you’d call a “straight shooter.”
I don’t mean he wasn’t honest; I mean he couldn’t shoot straight. Oh, he was pretty good with a shotgun, but if you handed that dude a rifle, he couldn’t hit squat.
But one day, a friend of his was telling him about a little .22 rifle he had just bought that was the most dead-on gun he had ever owned. The guy said that even Bob could drive a nail at 25 yards with that gun. It didn’t miss.
Bob asked if he could borrow it, and the guy let him.
There was then, and is now, a gun range on the outskirts of this little fishing town. And one day during deer season around noon, Bob was driving around, and he saw Lucky standing under a mesquite tree near the entrance to that gun range. Bob stopped and looked. There wasn’t anyone around; just him and Lucky. Here was Bob’s “shot”, as it were, only he didn’t have that little dead-on .22, so he went to his house to get it. Surely, Lucky would be gone when he returned.
Nope. Lucky was still standing there when Bob got back. Bob couldn’t believe it. He pulled up to within about 25 yards of Lucky and stopped.
He then rolled down the window and shot Lucky in the eye, dropping the deer where he stood.
What now??? Bob panicked. It was broad daylight. How was Bob gonna get a Lucky home without getting caught? The game warden lived right down the road for chrissakes.
Bob went home and called up couple of friends, and they met at Bob’s house to devise a plan. Then, they gathered some guns and went to the range.
While Bob’s buds were shooting, he snuck off on foot and found a spot to hide near the dead deer.
When his friends stopped shooting and saw that the coast was clear, they drove out slowly and waited for Bob to drag Lucky to the road. Then, they stopped, got out, and chunked Lucky in the back of the truck.
So, this is usually the point when the game warden comes in and saves the day. Nope. They made it to Bob’s friend’s garage and processed the deer that day. Bob tagged the head and took it to the taxidermist.
Yep, to this day, Lucky is still around, hanging on the wall in Bob’s dining room. Bob has long since left his poaching days behind him, but sometimes, maybe over a plate of spaghetti, he sits, and with a smile, remembers back to a day when he was young and HE was the lucky one.
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