Driving Encounter With a Deer

¶ … Driving Encounter With a Deer

Last November, I had a car accident that could have been much worse than it was. I was traveling a little faster than the highway speed limit without any traffic and just relaxing listening to music when a large deer suddenly appeared only a few hundred feet in front of me. There was no time to think but I tried to steer around it just on reflex. I was in the left lane of a two-lane highway and the deer walked across the right lane from my right and stood in the same lane of traffic that I was in.

Before I even realized what was happening, I steered into the right lane and managed to avoid a head-on collision that could have killed me. The deer was standing across my lane and if I had hit him directly with the front of my car, the animal would probably have ended up crashing right through my windshield. He weighed several hundred pounds and also had a large set of sharp antlers on his head. If I had hit him in the middle of the lane, I would probably have either been crushed by his weight or impaled on his antlers.

I managed to steer my car into the right lane but not quite enough to avoid a collision altogether. The only part of my car that actually hit the deer was my driver-side mirror. If I had been able to steer just another few inches to my right, I could have avoided any collision with the deer. However, I almost lost control of my car after the evasive maneuver that I did take and I had to over-correct my steering several times in both directions to avoid driving off the highway and into trees. Unfortunately, at the speed that I was traveling, the impact of the mirror was enough to kill the deer.

The actual collision happened so fast that my mirror was there one second and completely gone a split second later. The impact with the animal's rump tore the mirror completely off my car too fast to see. I felt the jolt but my mirror just seemed to disappear into thin air. I also felt a second jolt which I realized was the rest of the deer hitting my rear driver's side door after the impact with the mirror spun the animal around. Almost immediately, I could smell the very strong scent of deer and I had a frozen image of an explosion of fur next to my face. The sun was setting to my left and I caught a glimpse of the fur cloud in the afternoon sunlight.

I pulled over at the first rest stop to inspect the damage to my car. The mirror had snapped off so cleanly that it almost looked like it had never been there at all; only an empty housing was still connected to the car. Even the electric wires had been sheared off as though sliced off with a razor. The only other damage to my car was a shallow depression in the rear door where the deer had hit the car when it was spun around by the impact with the mirror. After I calmed down, I got back on the highway in the opposite direction to find out what happened to the deer. I was worried that it might have been badly injured and suffering, although I do not know what I would have been able to do if I found it writhing around in agony.