Lost Pet. Brown With Curly Hair. Weighs One Ton.

I'm a bit of a newspaper junkie. Whenever I travel I always pick up the local paper to see a different perspective on the world.

While big city newspapers -- or "metros" as they are often called -- are interesting, I especially enjoy reading small-town weeklies. Local news dominates in these publications and state or national issues are rarely mentioned.

Instead, they cover their market's minutiae, all the births and deaths, and trials and tribulations of the average people who are their readers. They also report on the occasional oddball local story -- like a tomato that resembles Abraham Lincoln -- that would not be considered "newsworthy" for a daily publication.

My hometown weekly paper had one of these obscure tales buried on page seven of a recent issue. However, this particular story had nothing to do with produce.

No, it was about a lost family pet. There's nothing strange about that, right? After all, pets go missing everyday.

Except in this case, the pet was a buffalo.

The buffalo broke out of its pen and though the owners tried to find it -- they even used a helicopter in an effort to spot the burly beast -- they were unsuccessful. Finally, they recruited a hunter who tracked the buffalo down. It had wandered several miles and must have been intent on making it back to the Great Plains. The hunter put it down with 3 shots.

Now, before you get too weepy-eyed that some sadistic hunter shot somebody's poor little pet, please keep in mind that this pet was a buffalo. Buffalo are not only big, they can be pretty ill-tempered and you don't want to spook them. Having one as a "pet" is a little comparable to having "Snuffles" the alligator or "Fluffy" the tiger greet you when you come home from work every evening.

Besides the fact that a buffalo was involved in this incident -- I'm pretty sure it would not make the Top 100 Most Common Pets List -- the other thing that piqued my interest was the last sentence of the story:

But even this feat (of tracking down and shooting this buffalo) proved to be no challenge for (the) avid hunter who was also reported to have killed a deer with a pocketknife last season.

That is worth repeating. The hunter who tracked down this buffalo had reportedly killed a deer with a pocketknife.

A couple years ago, I hit a 12-point buck in Kentucky with an SUV going 35 miles an hour. The collision caused $7000 in damage to my vehicle. That deer not only got up, but I swear it stuck its tongue out at me before running off as if nothing had happened.

With that personal experience in mind, I'm supposed to believe that this hunter managed to kill a deer with a pocketknife, a feat that I was unable to accomplish with a 2-ton SUV?

OK, I suppose it's possible. Perhaps the deer was sleeping when the hunter came upon it. Thinking fast, he pulled out his Swiss Army Knife and mortally wounded it.

Or maybe he lay in wait, crouched up in a tree stand until an unsuspecting Bambi came strolling by and pounced on it with knife in hand.

Or the more likely truth is that he'd already wounded the deer with his rifle and he finished it off with his hunting knife. Perhaps that is the real story and it has gotten exaggerated over time with the deer getting bigger and bigger and the knife getting smaller and smaller.

Give it a couple years and I bet the deer in this story will have become a moose with rabies that cornered the hunter in a cave and the only weapon he had on his person to fight his way out was one of those file thingies that flip out of toenail clippers.

Now that would make for a great story. And I look forward to reading about it in my hometown weekly newspaper.