The Animal Uprising™ has long used deer as suicide troops against cars and trucks. They lie in wait then jump out in front of the moving vehicles in hopes of making the driver crash. It works pretty well as a tactic, too. But the deer have now decided to cut out the middle man, so to speak. They are now going directly for the humans. Skiers to be precise.
CARRABASSETT VALLEY, Maine – Dr. Ray Stone had no warning before he was knocked off his feet last month while skiing down the Haulback Trail at Sugarloaf/USA. "My first thought was, 'What hit me?…a (snow) boarder? drunk skier? linebacker?'" Stone wrote in a letter to The Irregular, a weekly newspaper in Kingfield.
It was none of the above. A whitetail deer attempting to cross the trail crossed paths with Stone as he was making a turn.
"I just never saw this deer coming," Stone said Friday. "I was going pretty quick down the top half of Haulback, arcing from left to right and all of the sudden I just got knocked right off my feet and I was falling."
The deer also went down.
"Its legs were just pumping away really fast, they never stopped moving," said Stone, a family practice doctor who lives in New Gloucester and works at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.
The collision was witnessed by skiers riding in a chairlift, said longtime Maine skier and ski writer Dan Cassidy, whose story about the incident eventually prompted Stone to write in that he was the skier who hit the deer.
Cassidy, who has been skiing in Maine for 45 years, said he had never before heard of a deer-skier collision.
We now know the next front in the war of the animals. They are coming for the skiers. Moguls with razor-sharp antlers. From now on, stay in the lodge. Its much, much safer. Worse yet, the good doctor's wife, when told of the accident, imediately asked if the deer was ok.
Who's side is she on, anyway?
