cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Doe, a Deer, a Feast of Deer Yesterday I got a deer. A doe it was. Less than an hour before dark. I am writing this while listening to 'All the Stars are Dead Now' by Current 93. Which feels altogether quite fitting. My father-in-law and I were trying to pull the starter out of Trish's car and it was not budging. So I sprayed it with some WD-40 and told him we'd better let it soak in for a bit and do it's stuff. Meanwhile, I would walk out back and shoot a deer and I'd be back in 20 minutes or so. With that, I walked inside and grabbed my thirty ought six and headed for my ambush at the crest of the hill over the meadow. I crept in silently and sat down for about 5 or 10 minutes. Not seeing anything, I slowly stood up and stayed as still as possible. About 2 minutes passed before I saw a pair of deer emerge cautiously from the woods on the left side of the meadow at the bottom of the hill. A bit of brush hid them but I knew where they'd be coming out and steadied my rifle on that spot. A doe and a buck. Doe in front. Always have to wait for the right moment. A broadside shot. There she was, stopped for just a second, standing broadside and looking around backwards. Range of about 120 yards. I lined up the crosshairs over the center of the deer's chest and then raised the rifle ever so slightly in hopes of hitting the spine and dropping it. Paydirt! The deer dropped instantly. I automatically worked the bolt of the rifle, extracting the brass casing and loading another cartridge. I saw the head move slightly on the ground and quickly sent another bullet at the deer. Always pay the insurance. I have learned that lesson well enough these last few years. When the deer goes down, keep the rifle on it. If it moves even slightly, shoot it again. You really don't want your prey pulling a Lazarus on you and bolting into the woods while you stand there slack-jawed. Good thing it was down for good there because I only had the 2 rounds with me for some reason. I flipped the safety on and laid the rifle down on the ground as I advanced down the hill towards the deer. The white of it's belly showed, which is always a good sign. Not knowing if it was really dead, I unsheathed my knife and held it ready. No need. The creature was dead as immigration reform and as it turned out the second shot was completely unnecessary. I had in fact spined her on the first shot [takes bow]. This seems to be turning into my signature shot, by the way. You spine your prey and it drops like a ton of bricks. I got that from reading Peter Capstick. The second shot had been a little too far back, which always means one hell of a mess. But I'll get to that. After making sure it was dead, the first thing I did was to kneel down and thank the deer. I cut 2 leafy sprigs from a nearby bush and put one in the deer's mouth and the other through a loop in my hat. This was a really big bloody doe. Much bigger than the spike buck that I shot last month. I went back to the house to see about enlisting my father-in-law in the dragging of the deer but he and Trish's mother had already left. It seems that they didn't understand that I was completely serious when I'd said that I'm going to shoot a deer and I'll be back in 20 minutes after the WD-40 has soaked into the bolt holes for the starter. Trish had the baby to look after and Ida is a bit small for this sort of thing so I was going to have to drag the damned thing up that big hill myself. Holy shit but that was one heavy deer. I mean, I'm not complaining. More meat is ok by me. I roped it around the middle of the back legs and hustled it up there as best I could. I'm getting better at gutting and quartering but I still fucking hate doing it. Once again, I was awake until 1 am dealing with it. I'm just so glad that we have that butcher block. It's a very big help. The whole thing was made to be even more of a pain because of that botched second shot. It was too far back and went right through the rumen while also obliterating half of a backstrap. Blasting through the rumen means that the half digested contents were all over the insides. So gutting wasn't as smooth as it might have been. Then I had to wash out the inside of the gutted deer with a hose to get the rest of the rumen contents off of the meat. Interesting thing that I learned: a wet deer hide is much, much harder to cut than an unwetted one. I knew this was true of leather but I never thought it would be true of the untanned hide of an animal that had just died in the last few hours. It gets incredibly flexible and tough. No fun at all to skin a deer like that. So now we have probably 70 pounds of venison in the fridge. It needs to age for 4 or 5 days and then we'll trim it into actual meat products. That part is not so hard. Or at least not so disgusting and physically exhausting. I think Trish will probably have to do it this time because I'll be leaving for the elk trip on Friday morning. But it's not all that hard and she should do a fine job of it. It's kind of gross to look into the fridge right now because the 2 drawers at the bottom are just full of meat. No packaging or saran wrap or whatever. Just enormous hunks of meat. It needs to be open to the air in order to age properly so there it is. I feel a little bad because there was easily another 20 pounds of meat that I could have gotten from that deer. I hate to waste it. But it got to where I couldn't stay awake any longer and butchering while I was yawning and sleepy was causing me to get sloppy with the knife and cut myself. Not wanting to take a finger off I had to stop. And it was warm enough that the meat was going to spoil by morning, so I couldn't just finish the job before work. So I just had to drag the remains of the deer all out over the back fence as a donation to the local clean up crew (crows, foxes, vultures and maybe a bear or coyote). I regret losing that 20 pounds of meat but I don't feel guilty exactly. The vultures need to eat, too. Plus there are too many damned deer for this land to support without destroying habitat for other native species, so something ecologically useful was done in killing the deer in the first place. It's a good feeling to have that much meat in the kitchen. Come what may financially, we have food for quite a while. Now if only there were enormous sacks of vegetables roaming the woods that I could drop with a shot to the seam... 9:48 a.m. - 2007-11-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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