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This is a story that begins with a beautiful stroll on a perfectly crisp autumn day and ends with a dead deer sprawled out in our neighbor’s lawn, so read no further if either of these is likely to deliver sadness to your otherwise unencumbered spirit.

On Sunday we took our new dog Penelope, a year-old hound mix, for a walk in Rock Creek Park. This park is an enormous wooded area that runs through the middle of DC, but it’s actually a national park and was the inspiration for the whole network of national parks, and lies about three blocks from our house, so whenever we feel like taking the dog out for an adventure or disappearing from circulation for a while, the park offers a ready opportunity. Penny started out her life with us scared to death of water, but I usually try to take us on a path that requires fording the creek (thanks to my new Chacos this is easy and worry-free due to the ability they afford me to seamlessly transition between land and water) on the way back to the house, and she has shown less and less fear on successive trips through the water, to the point of jumping headlong into waist-deep water last time. (Her fear of my new acoustic guitar—complete with trembling, shrinking, and skulking—is another story. I’ll try to tell it soon, but you know how it goes.)

We headed into the park on Sunday, and when we got far enough in, that is, far from roads and park police, we let Penny off the leash because one of her few real joys in life is tearing through the underbrush at high speeds in enormous circles around us. Circles, that is, until the buck previously far off and out of sight happened to make his presence known, and she was gone. A couple of minutes later, we saw him bounding through again from a different direction, Penny right behind, and then they disappeared down a hillside. After a few minutes of silence, C. walked off to try to find her. I stayed at the last place she had seen us, in case she had a good sense of direction. We both yelled a lot. Voices echo quite uniquely in the woods. I recommend experimenting.

Not less than 15 minutes later, just when I’d begun worrying that the next we’d hear of Penny would be the phone call from the person who found her dead body by the side of the road and called the number on the tags, she came trotting on a beeline toward me from over the hill in the general direction of where she’d disappeared. She kept a couple of feet away from me, sensing that this had not been a display of optimal dog behavior, but when I made it clear that I wasn’t mad she came right up and started telling me all about the buck she’d been chasing, how free and exuberant she’d felt while chasing him, and how it was alright, really, that she hadn’t caught him. The chase is the real joy, she explained, the unrestrained liberty of movement and the becoming pure muscle and speed are unparalleled in the realm of dog experience. During the chase, there is no leash.

But wait, you protest. This story is supposed to end with a dead deer.

It does, and it will. Patience.

So we came home from the park, and I spent the rest of the afternoon reading as the light declined at long angles, moving my chair across the lawn as the sunny spot traversed it. It’s been weeks since anyone at my house has mowed the lawn, but since I’ve mowed it thrice more than anyone else, I’m recusing myself from the task until spring. The long grass tickles up near my knees now, but it’s not so bad knowing how the coming weeks will be, when there will be no grass. After a while, I retreated to the front porch because the light became necessary for reading in the dusk. I decided to put Penny on a 50-foot line we’ve tied to the pillar so she could chew on the ends of sticks and choke herself trying to sniff at passing dogs while I read. Unfortunately, during the four seconds between the opening of the front door and the reaching of the end of the line, she spotted another deer in the lawn across the street, and she was gone.

The deer in Rock Creek Park often head out into our neighborhood, especially when the weather grows cold, to munch on our shrubs. They have few natural predators left, and are probably out of practice, perhaps even overconfident, when it comes to evading the chase. This one immediately took off into the back yard of the house, but I presume it was fenced in, because there was a great crashing sound and some clanging, and then the deer tore out from behind the house and started at full throttle down the sidewalk, Penny right behind. The two of them headed toward the main street near here, which was thankfully low on traffic at that time, and disappeared into a small patch of cultivated woods kept in the front yard of one of the houses. I ran after them, but of course it’s been years since my days as a track star, and it took me a minute to reach the scene.

When I arrived, the deer was on its back on the ground. It let out a short groan while Penny barked and circled frantically. I flagged down cars, waving my arms like an idiot, to get them to slow down because she was running back and forth across the street in her enthusiasm and it had become quite dark by this point. She eventually came near enough to grab, and I grabbed her, carrying her back to the house because I didn’t have the leash and just didn’t feel like walking the block back to our house hunched over holding her collar. I put her in the house and returned to the deer, expecting it to be up and gone by this point. Instead, I found it dead, a small trickle of blood on the blades of grass near its mouth.

I still cannot figure out what killed the deer. As proud as I’d be to have for a pet—in the guise of a sweet and affectionate slobberpuss who’s afraid of guitars and water and one particular tile on our living room floor—a vicious and fearless deerslayer, she didn’t do it. There hadn’t been time—they were only only out of my sight for half a minute, and she’s simply not big enough. One car passed during that time, but it didn’t hit the deer. I was close enough to have heard the thud, and the car would have stopped. The only likely option remaining is that our dear sweet Penny chased the deer into that nicely cultivated patch of trees, whereupon the deer hit its head on a branch, or in some other clumsy way brained itself or broke its neck. This seems unlikely too, but more likely than a random heart attack or a sniper’s bullet in an upscale two-story brick family-house neighborhood where homes not quite as nice as the one you grew up in sell for $800,000 in a couple of days.

I returned home and called the DC Capitol Police, who directed me to call the Metro Police, who forwarded me to Animal Control, who suggested I try Streets and Sanitation. Their automated menu system—I listened carefully because the menu had recently changed—directed me to press 1 for trash removal, 2 for eviction trash removal, or 3 for dead animal pickup. I pressed 3. They instructed me to remove all clothing and identification tags from my pet, and place it in a box near the curb. They would be round pick it up the following day between 6:45 and 2:30. They reminded me that the driver would not retrieve dead pets from under porches, in dog houses, or from within the house. The deer was tagless, had no sweater, and was already conveniently lying in the tall grass not three feet from the edge of the road, so I left it to grow cold slowly in the night.

Here's a little evidence that economic incentives can move mountains in a hurry: Sales of the largest SUVs dropped by over half in September, compared to a year before. And sales of the Prius (Toyota's hybrid) is up by 90%. Makes you wonder why the tax code actually gives tax breaks for SUV purchases. And makes you wonder what would happen if it were the opposite. More hurricanes! More! Let's have just a couple of environmental pseudo-disasters to wake us up before the real ones start.