It was dark Sunday when the accident occurred right at the foot of Pakua-shan or Mount Eight Trigrams, a tourist attraction in suburban Changhua.

Lee Shih-chieh, the motorist, thought he probably had run over a dog. He reported the accident to police anyway.

On checking, the victim was identified as a Formosan sambar, an indigenous unicolor deer (Cervus unicolor).

The deer is an endangered species. Only a few have been spotted in the wild.

Police had to check with zoologists, who also wondered why a wild sambar strayed at the foot of Mount Eight Trigrams, where a fierce battle was fought between a Japanese occupation army and a ragtag Taiwan independence force in 1895.

"Well," a university zoologist professor said, "we know wild sambars roamed at Mount Eight Trigrams at one time long ago. They were all long gone."

Investigators had to check up with the neighborhood to find if any sambar kept as a pet might have gone astray. Nobody did which was fortunate because doing so is a violation of wildlife protection laws.

No charges were pressed against Lee, of course. But he had to have his car repaired.

"It's going to cost me at least NT$100,000," Lee lamented.