Pointe-Verte — A band of heroes in Point-Verte, N.B. spat in the face of certain death this week when they rescued a deer from a snow-covered beach. That’s right — a beach, as in a totally landlocked piece of ground. Not quite as threatening as, say, walking onto a thin sheet of ice covering a river or lake or something actually dangerous like that, but definitely risky enough to plunge New Brunswick’s terror-o-metre into at least the orange zone.
Villagers decided to take matters into their hands after the Department of Natural Resources seemed to not care about about the trapped wild-cow-thing, or “whatever it is.” Minister of Natural Resources Denis Landry had this to say about the matter: “It is our understanding that the creature came from the forest — the Gallant government’s official term for those annoying places without Wi-Fi. It is our policy to avoid negotiating with forest-dwellers, or as we like to call them, luddites. Apparently, these deer don’t like how much snow there is. Well, newsflash — no one does. Look, we don’t have sufficient resources to plow our city streets, let alone some Internet-less limbo. If those godless killing-machines can’t deal with it, maybe they deserve to die on a beach.”
But not everyone sees it that way. Residents of Pointe-Verte were quick to identify the flaws in the government’s logic.
“Yeah, they’ll kill you,” said local hunter Fenton LeBlanc. “You and everyone you care about. You don’t have to be able to spell Wick’apettiah to know how bloodthirsty those freaks are. But that don’t mean they don’t deserve to live a full life, and die a natural death like any other of the good Lord’s creations.”
“We all know how a deer’s supposed to die,” said Point-Verte Mayor Daniel Guitard. “A bullet from a shotgun — ideally, point-blank to the back of the head. Y’know, if the hunter’s not already half in the bag, or in other words, if it’s before noon.”
At the time of extraction, the buried deer was tired, trembling and uncooperative. The Point-Verte “Nature Warriors” theorized that the deer’s resistance to rescue was probably a product of its species’ inexplicable and irrational fear of humans.
“I knew I had to do something,” said Dominic Roy. “I couldn’t let that poor thing die prematurely. Deer are prey and they need to die right. God made ’em for us to kill, and we have to make sure they stay safe until they’re old enough. This one was especially special, ‘cuz she was a doe! If we lost her now, we wouldn’t just be losing one deer, but all her future offspring. We need to protect ’em now to make sure that there’s deer for our kids to kill.”
Once the actual challenging work was done, the Department of Natural Resources decided to help so they could potentially take credit in the media. They transported the deer to an undisclosed location that they would only describe as a “more suitable habitat.”
Though unconfirmed, one wildlife technician reportedly said, “I know those things have hoofs, and not proper hands or fingers, but after we let it go, it ran a bit, then stopped, turned, and I coulda sworn it gave us the finger.”
Hunting season commences on Oct. 6, and one thing the people of Pointe-Verte and the provincial government do agree on, is: that deer is going to be hamburger.