A Rough Autumn For Deer

It was a rough autumn for deer. While fly-fishing and while scouting for wild turkeys, I found a number of deer lying dead for no apparent reasons. Though I discovered these deer after the onset of the autumn archery season, none of the deer that I found appeared to have been shot by archers who then failed to recover them.

The first of these deer was just the skeleton of a dead doe (female deer). I had been fishing along a favorite section of a local creek and had crossed the creek to approach the next fishable pocket of water. There she was. Unlike most skeletons of dead deer, this one was i...