The Turnbo Manuscripts
by Silas Claiborne Turnbo
1844-1925
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A DEER RUNS A QUARTER OF A MILE AFTER ITS THROAT IS CUT
By S. C. Turnbo
Jim Graham, a prominent citizen who lives in the northeast corner of
Boone County, Ark., vouches for the truth of the following.
"One day," said Mr. Graham, "while I and Jim Ewing were hunting in the river bottom known as Jake Nave Bend Ewing shot a doe and it fell on its tracks. It was a common custom among hunters to cut a deer’s throat after it was shot down in order to make it bleed. In this way the meat would be drained of blood, and thinking that the one Ewing had just shot down was dead I went up to it and after laying my gun down on the ground I reached over the prostrate animal and stuck the blade of my knife into the deer’s throat with the intention of severing the neck veins and wind pipe, but just as the knife penetrated into the flesh of the deer’s neck the animal contracted itself into a knot and then instantly expanded itself and with one hind foot the deer knocked the knife from my hand and it struck the ground 30 feet from me. The deer now jumped up and run. To say that I was astonished to see it get up and run away is putting it mildly. But I had to laugh at Jim Ewing for while the deer was running off he stood and looked at it in a way that he looked like he had forgotten something. The dog pursued the deer up on the point of a hill when the deer turned and ran back into the bottom where the dog caught it near the same spot where Ewing had shot it and soon killed it. The deer in running up the hill and back had run about one quarter of a mile. After the animal was dead we found that the bullet had just grazed its head, but the deer in kicking the knife out of my hand had completely severed its wind pipe."
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