Janelle wishes she had a photo of me straining my way up the driveway with a very large deer in the wheelbarrow. Oh, and a feed sack full of gleaned sweet corn while I was at it.
No, it is not hunting season. But as my brother's girlfriend said the other weekend when they visited, for some of us hunting season starts when the bucks start getting reckless about running across the roads in hot pursuit of sexy does. Which is right about now.
On Friday night, near midnight, Janelle and I were in our bedroom going over our lists for the coming day. This is our typical method for winding down in the summer, sorry to say. Night sounds were coming in the window: crickets and katydids serenading potential mates, a truck passing on the road, a loud "BANG" sound, the sound of the truck slowing down and seeming substantially compromised...oh...deer.
"I think that might have been the sound of a deer getting hit on the road," I said to Janelle. "I'll check it out first thing in the morning and if it looks o.k., maybe I'll skin and quarter a deer before getting to the rest of the list." She agreed that this seemed smart. In our income bracket, and with our tastes and values, you don't turn down thirty to fifty pounds of free venison unless you have a pretty good reason.
Next morning we weren't even quite out of bed yet when our neighbor called. He'd seen the deer on the road, and, knowing our typical pattern of accepting every hunk of deer meat he or anybody else ever offers us or notifies us of, he thought he'd better let us know about it before the flies found it en masse in the summer heat. Kind of him, as per usual.
So before I did much else I trudged my sleepy self down the hill with a wheelbarrow and a feed sack, us having decided some gleaned corn might make a good consolation prize if the deer proved too mangled or bruised or fouled to make use of. The first thing I noticed when the hapless deer came into view was that unless mine eyes had fooled me, it was a rather big deer. The closer I got to it with my wheelbarrow, which was feeling punier all the time, the bigger it looked. Upon close inspection, it was clearly a healthy, fat buck in his prime. His antlers, probably largish if not quite large indeed, had been broken away either by the impact or by a sharp kick by some passerby, and the skin of the head had been cut so as to remove them. After sizing up the situation for a minute or two I began the process of wrestling the critter into, or rather onto, my dinky-seeming Ace brand two-wheel wheelbarrow. By the time I finally managed it, it was an absurd sight: hooves were sticking out all over the place and the head was flopped over almost to the ground. I wasn't sure whether to feel giddy with glee or amused by my own foolishness as I struggled for each step up the lane. I decided to take a break at one point to pick some sweet corn for courage.
Once I had the monster at the woodshed where I intended to render him edible to my family, I took another break for chicken chores and breakfast...I figured it would be better to eat beforehand anyway, since the impact had apparently been centered in his guts, which were on prominent display, I regret I must say. This was not going to be pretty, nor would it smell nice. I just hoped enough meat had been preserved to make it worth the stomach churning I knew I was in for.
It was when I tried hoisting the deer by a rope that I realized just how big the dude was. I literally couldn't get his hindquarters totally out of the wheelbarrow, whereas I've managed to hoist entire deer by myself in the past. I decided that rather than raising and lowering the deer for each operation--dressing, skinning, quartering--I'd dress it in the lower position, then start skinning, removing large hunks of meat as I went and delivering them straight to the old fridge we keep in the garage for overflow purposes. This, I thought, would reduce weight as I went, allowing me to hoist it into position for each new section as I got to it. It worked pretty well at first, too, except that when it came time to lift the carcass out of the wheelbarrow and hang it free in the air, minus guts and all the major hindquarter meat, the hook I'd slung the rope through (which had served to hang entire deer in the past) simply bent open, and the whole thing ended up on the woodshed floor. Well, shoot. I guess I'll just have to do this on the ground then.
The growing heat of the morning, the correlated fragrance of the burst digestive organs, and the discomfort of the various positions I had to twist into to recover generous slabs of venison from beneath the tawny hide combined to make my butchery less than precise. That is to say I cut some corners, literally, and left some meat on the bone that I would ordinarily not want to leave. I was all too glad to make the trip to the woods with the remains of that poor, fine whitetail buck.
Today, then, I spent my whole day focused on cubing and canning the resultant meat. My closest, very grateful estimate is 48 pounds of venison, making my live weight estimate of at least 180 pounds sensible given the amount of meat I left in place. I cringe to think what that truck must look like.
At one point today Alida and I walked down to deliver some final unwanted scraps to the gut pile. She was very curious about the guts. We stopped and stared for a while at the jumbled heap of bone, hair, and soft tissue quickly becoming less recognizable as deer parts. It was positively seething with maggots, the offspring of the hordes of shiny green flies that had been so obsessed with the deer on the warm morning I cut it up. I kept up some steady self-talk to keep remembering the maggots' role in accelerating the breakdown, and actually controlling the odor remarkably well. This helped to keep my mind off my stomach. Proving once again that it's all about what you become familiar with, Alida piped up, "The little wormies are so cute!"
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