Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Allow me to be dramatic for a moment. A murder happened on my lawn three weeks ago. For most of the country, probably the world, it wouldn’t even be a murder. It would just be life, but for my family, and many of our neighbors, it was a murder.

In our neighborhood, we had a friendly deer. Her mother had been killed by a car, and she’d been taken in by a lady down the street, who raised this little fawn child on her own lawn. Eventually, Ginger, as she came to be known, made friends with one of our neighbors, so she was in our yard quite a lot. My whole family got to know her. She joyously ran out for scratches and pets. We got to watch generations of her children zoom and play in our backyard. She had beautiful children.

Three weeks ago, she turned up on our lawn dying, having been shot by another neighbor. 

We knew a deer had been shot the night before when my daughter got home from college and found a man with a flashlight rooting through our yard. My husband ran out with yard illuminating flashlights to find that this stranger (with a small flashlight) was tracking a deer he shot. He didn’t find her that night. We all said we hoped it wasn’t Ginger because if it was Ginger, then we were living a nightmare.

The next morning, my daughter looked out the window and saw Ginger laying in our yard. For a minute, everything was okay because she was here and she was just resting in the cool morning air. Her head was up and she was looking around. She was breathing, we could see her body rising and falling. But as we watched, we saw the breathing was wrong. Something terrible had happened to Ginger. 

I went upstairs to where I work, opened the window, sat down, and watched. Slowly, Ginger’s head went to the ground in a way that I’ve never seen her do before. Her breathing became more shallow. And that’s when the monster arrived.

As I was watching poor Ginger die, afraid to go outside because I didn’t want to frighten her in her suffering, the hunter came by. It took everything in my being not to scream out the window, “Leave her alone you fucking monster!” I didn’t say it, but it was in my heart. 

He spotted her where she was dying near our lamp post. He went to get his truck and came back. The first person he encountered on the porch was my older daughter. She growled at him that he had no rights on our property. When I got outside, I also told him to stay off our property. I told him he shot our friend. He told me that he didn’t know this was Ginger because he had just moved in. I’m sure it gave him pause when he told me he wanted to collect her before the meat spoiled, and I informed him we were vegetarians. Ginger came to die on the lawn of the vegetarians. Not one hunter wants to deal with angry vegetarians.

Ginger was dying. It was clear. We gave him permission to put her out of her suffering, but the girls and I left the house because we could not be here while this happened. My husband stayed but went inside for the final shot. The shot was taken and Ginger died in the neighbor’s yard as she ran in fear and pain in a place she called home. In a place she felt safe. 

I’ve heard so much since then. I’ve heard that he shot her the morning before she died. I’ve heard that he shot her that night, which is well after dark and outside of the “safe” and legal hunting time. I know he was on my land after dark without permission tracking an injured deer. I know he showed up on my lawn the next day tracking that same injured deer and eventually finished the murder he started. I have heard that he told neighbors that he shot her off of his own porch, but he told the game commission he shot her well down in his yard and away from other people’s homes. I have heard that he told one neighbor‘s wife that he had been given permission by her husband to hunt on their land, but in reality no one had given him permission on either side of his house. I saw the text from the people who sold him his house in which he explained that he was going to have to kill that deer because it would bother his dogs. They told him no. They told him this was a neighborhood deer and that everyone loved her. From this I know he stood at the top of my driveway and lied to me about not knowing who this deer was. Nothing mattered to him and in my sadness I no longer care about what is true. I just want to see a veritable unicorn gamboling through my backyard again.

The game commission was called and investigations were undertaken. When nothing was done and we complained enough, they came back. The local news was here. I was interviewed yet nothing changed. (KDKA covered it if you want to look it up.) The game commission told my neighbors that the crime was committed when the deer was saved after its mother was hit by a car. Because of this first crime, no crimes were committed after that initial one. I think we can all come up with scenarios in which the initial crime does not forego the final outcome when that outcome is also a crime. Yet here we are. 

In a year where it feels like all I do is lose, I wanted to win this one. I wanted to see justice prevail, just once. It is not to be. And I am left afraid of my yard and my neighbor. Apparently, even the fact that my house is less than 30 feet from my neighbor’s house, I need to have my yard posted. The violence of the world has come to my door and those people who were supposed to protect me from it (the game commission) have failed. They were supposed to give the laws teeth, yet they have failed. Hunting is allowed to happen within less than an arrow shot of my house and I have no recourse for safety or peace of mind except to tack flimsy signs to my trees and hope for the best. Apparently, the hunter can simply ask later and to hell with the law. The game commission has failed all of my neighbors. And human decency has failed Ginger.

Despite my husband trying to clean up the scene so we wouldn’t see the horrors, Ginger’s blood is still on my driveway, like a final benediction on the cruelty of man. Rains and a bit of snow have come and gone, but the blood stain remains. Like Wilde’s “Canterville Ghost”, the stain keeps coming back until someone makes amends, but the hunter is emboldened by impunity and will never make the gesture. 

I crochet in a chair beside the window. It has lovely, kind, soft, blue, Northern light shining in. It’s a diffuse light that makes me happy. I can still sit in my chair and type and stitch and live my working day, but I don’t even want to open the blinds now. 

For a lot of people, my story paints me as nothing more than a soft-hearted fool who doesn’t understand how nature works. Animals are food. Hunters kill them. I should grow up. Well so be it. But if you’re going to paint me as a soft-hearted fool, get a big brush. Make sure you get all of me and make it a thick coat. I have no intention of changing my ways now. 

Justice for Ginger. May I live to see the day that word from the orcas reaches the deer.