The Old Deer Head

Early the other morning, watching CNN with Taz stretched out upside down beside me on our favorite overstuffed chair, a piece of firewood fell from the stack beside the fireplace. Taz jerked awake, growled, looked around and started barking at the deer head hanging above the fireplace.

It took 5 minutes of petting and shushing to quiet him down. He just knew that damn deer had knocked over the piece of firewood, and he wasn't about to let it get away with it. He's been suspicious of it ever since he was a puppy, when he first noticed it up on the wall looking down at him.

For quite a while after the firewood incident, any strange noise would result in Taz instantly looking up at the deer head first to make sure it wasn't responsible. That's when I started thinking about how long that old deer head has been with us.

I shot the deer in October of 1958 just a few miles from our ranch in the Colorado foothills. It was on a steep, rocky hillside and when I tried to turn the big buck over to dress it out, the deer, my rifle and I slid, tumbled and rolled down the hill in a cloud of dust and rocks. When I untangled myself at the bottom I discovered that one of it's antlers had poked an inch-deep hole in the inside of my thigh. I was going to the Colorado School of Trades at the time to learn gunsmithing, and I had entered a big buck contest at the start of deer season. All of the entrants were officially measured using Boone and Crockett rules and my buck had a high enough score to make the record book and win the $50.00 first prize. Dad and I took it to Jonas Brothers in Denver to get it mounted.

The next time I saw it was in 1960 after I had moved to Las Vegas and opened a gunsmith shop with Cecil Fredi. Mom and Dad came to Vegas to visit and brought the deer head with them. We hung it on the gun shop wall where it gathered compliments from celebrities like Red Skelton and Brook Benton, and former Cleveland mobster turned Desert Inn owner, Moe Dalitz.

After Carol and I met in Vegas and then moved back to Colorado to get married, the deer head was with us, overlooking our family in a house in Golden and then back to the ranch where it had started from. When we sold the ranch house in 1973 and bought a campground in Cottonwood, Arizona, it hung on the office wall watching over us.

We sold the campground several years later, and the deer head was back in Las Vegas again, hanging in my brother's living room while we took a three year vacation traveling around the country in our travel trailer.

When we finally settled down again on the Oregon coast, our youngest son, Rick and I drove down to Vegas to get some things we had left with my brother including the deer head. On the way back my brother was driving when a Nevada highway patrol car pulled us over. Instead of asking, “Can I see your driver's license?” the officer asked for my brother's hunting license!

For a while there was total confusion until we realized that the tarp had blown back on the rental trailer we were towing and the deer head was exposed. After a few thumps on the deer's hollow head we were allowed to go. “He didn't even check your driver's license!” I told my brother.

“That's good, because I don't have one!” he answered.

For fifty years the old deer head has been a part of our family, getting petted by little kids, (visitors and family,) festooned with silly decorations and hats, but stoically watching over happy times and sad times, birthdays and holidays, births and deaths.

The great experiment

I made up my mind some time ago that if the occasion arose, I'd do a small experiment and see if marijuana would have any effect on my Parkinson's symptoms. A few days ago I got the chance to share a “joint” at our barbecue. It was the first marijuana I'd smoked in over 20 years and I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

Much to the amusement of JC, after deeply inhaling I started coughing and hacking. My eyes were watering, and I coughed some more until finally I stopped long enough to take another drag. The whole coughing and crying thing started all over again and I waved off the offer of another puff.

I didn't know if two puffs were enough to have much effect, but I carefully watched the tremors in my left hand as the high began.

I definitely had inhaled enough to get high, but the tremors remained. I tried stamping my left foot in a steady rhythm, but there was no improvement; still just as spastic as before. About an hour later, disappointed and still coughing, when asked if I'd like to try it again, I answered “No thanks, I'm trying to quit!”

I thought the experiment was over and a failure, until the next morning when I said “Good morning!” to my dependable, 4:am, alarm clock dog, Taz. The loudness and tone of my voice startled us both. My voice lately sounds more like a whisper than anything else, so something had definitely changed for the better. Was it all of the coughing I'd done, the marijuana, or both? Over the next day I gradually resumed talking in my Muhammad Ali voice again, but I think that the results call for another experiment, maybe something with less smoke like... cookies?