Did I ever tell y'all my owl story?

I shared this with some friends on Live Journal this morning and thought maybe you guys might find it amusing.

Around 1993ish I was driving down the road in my grandfather's pickup truck when I started hearing all kinds of racket in the cab. The truck had been sitting in grandpa's driveway for a few months so I figured it may just be an animal that had decided to make the cab his home. Not that unusual when you live in the sticks. The top hatch that latches to the gate was open, anything could have crawled in there. I figured it was probably a possum.

Anyway, so I pulled into a parking lot to let the poor critter out and, let me tell you, by then the noise was deafening! The banging and the shrieking... As I approached the gate, it became clear that whatever was in the cab had wings and was flailing about violently. I was so afraid he was going to hurt himself! I opened the gate and saw...... AN OWL?! I quickly got out of the way, but he would NOT fly out! Then I saw blood. :( So, I closed the cab back up and rushed him to the only vet office in town and roused the veterinarian from her sleep (her house was behind her clinic). She called Wildlife, they came and took him away for treatment and rehabilitation, but not before tranquilizing him first. He was so scared. Poor guy. A few days later he was released. I'll never know how the hell he managed to fly into the back of my grandpa's truck though.

I had many more strange experiences driving down that country road, including an Irish Setter flying into my windshield, being shooed away by a big-gummed woman doing a low crawl searching for her teeth in the pitch of night, and, my personal favorite, a little boy being dragged by two big pigs on leashes.

This, folks, is why I don't get angry with the country bumpkin stereotypes.