The sheep dogs came out the winner today.

      Before we started raising sheep I couldn't imagine someone using roadkill for anything, no matter how fresh it is. But when you have to feed seven big Pyrenees sheep dogs everyday you do what you have to do. They eat about 200 lbs a week so that gets expensive, but without them we couldn't raise the sheep.  They're like security guards, they stay with the sheep at all time and keep predators like coyotes away Like any dog they want a little meat in their diet no matter how good the dog food is that you feed them.  Every morning my daddy goes to the store in Bell Buckle to sit with the other farmers and solve the world's problems, he leaves there comes to my gate to check on things, then we meet up and go to work. This morning while I'm getting ready he calls me, "what are you doing ?" I said,"I'm about to leave why?" He said,"I hit a deer", obviously my first response was "are you ok?" He said, "well yeah but come help me". So my husband and I get in the other truck and go down there expecting the truck to be wrecked or him hurt, was that the case? Of course not, he wanted help getting it in the truck to take to the sheep dogs. I said, "did it die or did you have to shoot him?'' He said, "naw I had to shoot him, but for the record he hit me. I didn't hit him." Amazingly there was  hardly any damage to the truck, the deer took most of the impact I guess.
     Now to the second part of the story..it's deer season here and we like to hunt. Even before we killed deer for the sheep dogs we went hunting. I've always been a daddy's girl but it's in overdrive during deer season. Before I was big enough to shoot a gun he would hold it for me and let me pull the trigger and I loved it. No matter how big the deer was he always made me feel like I killed it, even though he did all the work. Since I've got older we go to separate places so we cover more ground and have a little competition to. If I'm not able to hunt one day he will go watch my spot but refuses to shoot anything. This drives me crazy if your going to be there be prepared, as he use to say. There are only two people in this world that could shoot a deer I've been watching and wouldn't care if they did, and that's daddy and my husband. Of course I think daddy would feel to guilty if he had to tell me he killed a deer where I hunt at, but he has no problem telling me that I should have had my butt over there watching for deer instead of doing whatever else I was doing if he sees something. And I'll throw this little side note in for future reference, some days I can hit a mouse in high grass at 300 yards and then there's the days I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn at 5 yards. For today I had a good spot picked out and I knew all I had to do was sit there and wait. I waited and the deer I had been waiting on came, I shot and I missed. He jogs over to the side of the fence looks back at me and is gone. The phone call I had to make to tell daddy that I missed a monster was not one I was looking forward to. The first thing he said when he answered was,"did you kill him?" I said "nope I missed". He said, "well how far away were you?" After a minute of silence I said, "I could have thrown a rock at him." His reply was, "what the hell's wrong with you? You couldn't kill one with a gun and I killed one with a truck..we've been in to big of a hurry today."
     So the moral of this story is sometimes you just have those days but you can always make the best of it like we did, the dogs got what they've been wanting and we saved a little money. As for my big miss of the year, there's always another deer, another spot, and another day. You just have to ask yourself, will I remember this 100 years from now? Probably not unless daddy is still rubbing it in, but I'm sure he'll have plenty of other things by then to talk about it.