Okay, here's the crazy story I promised

Halloween night, like 30-45 minutes after crawling into bed, right when I was on that tentative border between sleep and awake, I heard sounds.

...and these unidentifiable sounds snapped me awake in an instant.

After listening intently for a few minutes, I thought it sounded like a dozen people walking through our property, stepping on dry branches and breaking them. It was a staccato of very fast, very loud cracking/snapping noises.

I was confused as hell...

...and jumped out of bed to investigate.

I couldn't see anything out of the bedroom windows, so I wandered into the hall and looked out the back door/window.

Nothing.

THEN, suddenly a whirl of large, black shapes that appeared to be floating over the grass.

Creepy?

Yeah... Halloween night, the moon giving off just enough light to see basic shapes/dimension, and it was right around midnight.

Just as I'm thinking how this is very creepy and coincidental for Halloween at midnight, two of the shapes tumbled, one over the other, and then there was a tidal wave of water as they fell into the pond.

I think I swore at that point.

Then I flipped on the outside light.

...and saw two enormous bucks clambering out of the pond, one trying to stab the other.

They bolted past the door/window, closely followed by two more.

More loud clattering ensued as they fought on our lawn, their antlers clashing again and again as three bucks appeared to be ganging up on the largest one.

...and everything clicked in my head at once. Large black, floating shapes (it was dark, so you couldn't see their thin legs), the noise of their antlers as they fought, the fact that, up until last year, there were two older bucks in this area, each with their own harem, and in the last two years since we've lived here, we've seen more and more young bucks wandering around...

Guess it's *rutting season*... and the young ones were ganging up on one of the older bucks to take over his harem of does.

So, yeah. It Halloween was an interesting night, in the un-traditional sense.