Three deer on an apparent hunt for coffee and treats gave one Grand Falls, N.B., man quite a start Monday as he was out on his daily walk.
Bertrand Beaulieu was walking through downtown when he said he heard a sound, and turned to see three deer whizzing past him so close he could almost touch them, and crashing through the front door of the Canadian Tire gas station.
“I was right in the middle of downtown, and you don’t see wildlife right in the middle of downtown,” Beaulieu told Global News.
“I think they were looking for coffee.”
He said the first deer crashed into the front door, forcing it open, then the other two deer quickly followed — at which point he started filming the unbelievable scene.
In his video, you can see a store clerk open the front door of the store and one by one the deer scramble back out of the gas bar with no treats in tow.
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Beaulieu said the deer ran back in the direction they came from, and he went inside the store to see what kind of mess the three hairy customers had created.
Surveillance from inside the store shows the deer stumbling through the door, and then over each other, before crashing into a shelf of chips and drink bottles.
They scamper around the store, presumably looking for an exit, slipping and falling and banging into shelves, making quite a mess of the place before leaving.
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“There was pop bottles on the floor, and candy and papers, deer hair and a little bit of blood,” he said.
Beaulieu said while he was outside waiting for the deer to come back out he could hear them banging into the windows.
“They were lucky,” Beaulieu said.
“There were two doors side-by-side, one you have to push to get in, and the other one you have to push to get out, and fortunately they hit the one that you have to push to get in. I think they would have hurt themselves if they had hit the other one.”
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Beaulieu said he doesn’t think the deer, which he believes were coming from the river, were being chased by anything, but simply got a scare from being in the hustle and bustle of town.
“I think it’s a once in a lifetime event and that I won’t see that again in my lifetime,” he said.
Beaulieu said there were no other customers besides the deer in the store at the time.