Kitchen Table Tales - Stuffed Deer

When Dad was a teenager, he used to take his friends, Dan Shieder and Joe and Sam Bonney to go deer hunting at his dad's ranch outside of Kerrville. The ranch was about 1000 acres in the hill country of Texas and was pretty rocky with hills and lots of mesquite trees and brush.

The story is that in the old Flanary house in Dallas (a big house on Lemmon Avenue in which Byron's grandparents (A. B. and Lolah Armstrong Flanary and their helpers ((he had Parkinson's)) and his parents Joe and Mae Rene Flanary Egan) lived, there was a stuffed deer. This was not just the head on the wall - this was an entire deer. It lived in the parlor (it was a very big house).

When Judge Flanary died, Joe and Mae Rene moved to the house at 3637 Stratford, with grandmother Lolah and young Byron (aka Biff) who was a sophomore in high school. There was no room for the stuffed deer, so Joe took it to the ranch.

When Byron and the boys went to the ranch to hunt, they would be assigned blinds from which to hunt, so they wouldn't shoot each other. During the night before the early morning hunt, Byron would go out and place the stuffed deer near one of blinds. If the unwary hunter saw the deer and shot it, the others would have a good laugh, and if the hunter didn't see it - an even bigger laugh.