Elk Kill Permit: Year Two

You may remember that there are seven steps to acquiring a kill permit:
 1) Sustain substantial elk damage to your landscaping.
 2) Cry.
 3) Call the people who work for the department of Fish and Wildlife.
 4) Complain.
 5) Cry some more.
 6) When the F&WL officer shows up, show him your elk damage while repeating steps four and five.
 7) Hang the kill permit on your fridge.

 I said that was all there was to it,  that you would now go 30 days without seeing an elk.

But, in Year Two, I found out that on day 29 --plot twist---the elk show back up. Bold as brass, two elk in the middle of my yard, in broad daylight.

Please note the absence of flowers on top of the green stems in
the background. Stupid Elk.

"Get the gun," I hissed at my husband, while shooting pictures of them from the back deck so I could prove to the wildlife officer the audacity of elk.

He complies, as any good husband would. "Which one do you want?" he asks me.
"That one," I say, pointing.

"The baby?" my children gasp. "You want dad to shoot the baby?"

There are now all five Sume's on the back deck, one of them aiming a fire arm; all of us talking, hissing, pointing or gasping. The elk eat on, oblivious.

Baby? Are they nuts? That thing is HUGE. Baby, my eye. That thing is a baby the same way these six-foot tall, nearing 200-pound, big-footed fridge dwellers that I call my children are babies...
Dang.

"Which one?" my husband asks again, "The mama, or the baby?"
Double dang.

"Technically, mom" says one of my long-ago babies, "they aren't in your garden, they're in the grass."
"Seems a shame to shoot an elk for eating grass." says another.
"Yeah," says the third. "Seems that grass eating elk would be the kind you would want in your yard."

Clearly, I have failed to instill in my children a proper respect for vengeance. Bet if elk ate XBoxes instead of flowers they'd feel a little differently, I think grumpily.
"Okay." I sigh, "Just scare them off."

So, there you have it, the sad truth. Kill permit on my fridge, elk in the gun sights, and I blinked first.