A Quasi-Franch Tale: California Style

Shhhhh….don’t tell anyone, but I used to live in California. It is not one of the eras in my life upon which I look fondly. I prefer to look at it as merely a blip on the radar, albeit a six year blip. I made sure to get the heck out of Dodge as soon as I turned 18 and headed off to college. I never acclimated to the culture there and have no desire to ever go back. That being said, I do have a few stories from there. While we did not live in an agricultural community by any means, it was a small town. Even now, the population is just at 1500 people. We lived in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and were surrounded by pine and oak trees, large boulders and manzanita bushes. There was a little creek running through our property and beside it was a stand of willows. One afternoon whilst out exploring, we spotted a buck sleeping in the willows. This was unusual to see in the afternoon. We often saw the tell-tale patches of flattened grass, indicating where deer had slept the night before. Never had we seen a buck sleeping so late in the day. We were excited at our discovery and decided to see how close we could sneak up on the buck. We edged closer and closer. We couldn’t believe our luck. The buck didn’t flinch as we got within a few feet of him. It was about this time when we realized the buck was dead. We weren’t as sneaky as we thought. From what we could determine, the deer was probably hit by a car and limped off into the willows. It was very exciting to be able to check out a buck up close. Almost as exciting as the time we climbed up on the fence to watch through the neighbor’s garage window as he butchered a deer he had shot. Anyway, we were one part disappointed and two parts excited at our discovery. We planned to wait for the deer to decompose and then we would claim the antlers. We thought that would be a pretty cool trophy. We checked quite often at the decomposition of the carcass, and one day we were disappointed to find that a coyote had taken off with our prize. I guess that’s the way it goes.