Fred Aiken Writing

None of the other deers knew why Nigel’s antlers led them where they needed to go. All they knew as a community was that if they were going to make it as a species, then they were going to have to listen to the oration and soap boxes that came from Nigel’s antlers. 

All the other deers hated Nigel, though. They each thought that he was a dick, and whenever they as a group did not need to hang around him they typically found any and all excuses to not be anywhere near Nigel. 

No one knew exactly who mentioned it first, it was one of those things in which one deer sort of blurts out something, and the idea takes on a life of its own, but someone mentioned the possibility of taking Nigel’s antlers off of him. That was all he was good for, nothing else, and so it stood to reason that the one deer within their community that unequivocally bothered all the other deer, would need to be killed, and his antlers harvested for the survival of their community. A council of elder deers pondered on the question for many moons in the privacy of the woods, since there were many different voices to be heard.

One deer elder stated posited that each deer life was sacred, and they as a species should never want to openly try to kill one of their own. He quickly was ignored.

Another elder suggested that in order to keep their hands clean, they could simply lead Nigel to a part of the woods where they knew hunters liked to hang out, and they would let nature take its course. They would mourn Nigel’s death, and openly wonder why he had chosen to graze where hunters gathered. But then an elder pointed out that hunters liked to collect deers’ antlers as trophies, and they might never see Nigel’s antlers again if they were to be poached by hunters.

No, they decided that they would need to be the ones to kill Nigel. As gruesome as the idea was, the deer elders had no other choice if they were going to be able to collect Nigel’s antlers after he died. They each whispered into each others’ ears their ideas about how to go about killing Nigel so that no one knew specifically whose idea had been chosen, so that when it played out and Nigel was dead, and Nigel’s family asked what had happened, no one elder could come back and say specifically who it had been that had suggested how to kill Nigel.

They settled on ramming Nigel off of a cliff. It seemed to be the cleanest way to go about it, as well as the safest method to ensure that it was Nigel and only Nigel that died. And so they went about enlisting youthful, verile deers that could effectively ram Nigel down a cliff to his death. Each day they would send a young deer out with Nigel to scavenge and gather various berries and acorns and the like, all with the expressed purpose of finding a cliff and pushing Nigel to his death. 

When Nigel returned without his young companion, the elders asked what happened, to which Nigel responded that he had no idea. For some reason his antlers told him to go really fast all of a sudden, and then he noticed the young fawn running behind him to his death. He assumed the younger deer was merely suicidal, and there was nothing to be done. The same sort of incident occurred over twenty-three times before the elder deers realized they would never be able to kill Nigel. Instead, they would have to learn to live with him if they were going to utilize his antlers to guide them from danger.