Last night, I went out to my parent’s house to watch the eclipse from there. They live a little further away from the city, and a lot farther away from any shopping plazas, so the night sky viewing is a lot better there.
When I pulled into their driveway, I noticed a car parked across the street from them, but didn’t think anything of it. For whatever reason, there is a really good cell reception point right there and it’s not too unusual to see someone parked there talking on the phone.
The eclipse hadn’t started yet, so we were in the back yard playing with some Night-Vision binoculars that I picked up on e-bay recently, when we noticed a town police car pull up to the parked car. With it’s lights flashing. Again, we didn’t think too much about it…
Until we heard the shots, that is.
It turned out that the car was sitting on the side of the road because it had hit a deer. I guess the deer’s leg was broken because it was still there, and the police were called to put it down. The problem that the officer had was the deer was pretty small, (about the size of a collie) and he just couldn’t hit its head with the way it was flopping around.
Eventually, he was able to put it out of its misery, and by then, we had wandered around the front of the house to see what was going on. All in all, the officer had to use about 7 or 8 rounds to finally kill the deer.
We called a hunting neighbor of my folks to come and get the meat, and then, after talking to another neighbor who had come outside to see what was going on, we went back to watching the eclipse.
I’ll have some pictures of the eclipse whenever I get them from my Dad’s camera. If any one wants to see how it looked from Western New York. The sky cleared up just in time for totality, so the pictures came out really well.
Oh, and someone remind me to tell the mouse story sometime. (It’s a lot like the deer story, but with a happier ending.)
It took you 7 shots to kill a mouse? :-)
Posted by: Harvey at October 29, 2004 12:52 PM