cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Good and the Bad [This is an entry I meant to add back on Monday of this week, but didn't get around to.] Alice is home and doing well. She will live, unless an infection sets in. Which is unlikely, since she is on antibiotics. I picked her up after work on Friday afternoon. The bills for her treatment came to over $700, which I cannot remotely afford. This right here is the point where I am realizing that I am in serious danger of total financial disaster. I'm long since tapped out. Essentially, that $700 check I had to write means that some regular monthly bill will not be paid. Which means that there will be late fees and reporting to credit agencies. Up until this point, through every financial crisis I've been through for years, I have always managed to pay every single bill on time. So my credit rating has been pretty good. This could now be the end of all that. I am going to have to work some kind of miracle in the next few days or else everything is in terrible danger of unraveling. The good news is that I got a deer on Saturday morning. I couldn't sleep the night before. In fact, I have not slept a full 8 hours since Alice got hurt. I usually wake up a bit at around 4 am in between REM cycles and then drift back to sleep. But now I can't get back to sleep after that point. I immediately start worrying about money and wondering how I am possibly going to keep all of this shit together, when everything just keeps getting worse. The dryer is broker, the handle of the toilet flush snapped off, my tractor needs parts and the grass is waist-high. No money for parts to fix any of these things. We only have about a week's worth of heating oil for the furnace and the cold weather is arriving. Everything is going to shit. Alice is badly hurt, Simon is having trouble walking again. Now not only do I not have money for gas and groceries but some bill will go unpaid and everything I've worked so hard to build is in danger of collapsing. So I woke up at about 4 am on Saturday morning and couldn't get back to sleep, which is now normal. I laid there for about an hour before giving up and getting out of bed. I showered, made a cup of coffee and ate some cereal. I dug out some mis-matched camouflage, clipped my monopod to a belt loop, slung my rifle over my shoulder and went outside into the grey, early dawn. I reached my ambush and looked up at the sky and silently begged and pleaded for a deer. I sat on the bare ground behind a screen of grasses and thorns along the remains of a barbed wire fence. A twisted branch of some shrub hung in the way of a clear shot. I snapped it almost in half to bend the top of the branch downward, eliminating the danger of my bullet glancing it and flying the wrong way. The waiting. I did not have to wait for long. Perhaps as much as 10 minutes until it was just there. That happens so often. I am staring at the same spot for a long time and then suddenly a deer is just there. Never did I see it emerge from cover. It was a lone doe of medium size. I watched it through my scope. The deer was about 120 yards distance. I waited for it to stop. The deer was almost to the other side of the clearing and was obviously not going to stop before reaching the safety of the woods. I swung slightly ahead of it at the height of the top of the lungs (hoping for a spine hit) and squeezed the trigger. Coming out of the recoil of my thirty ought six, I saw that the deer had fallen and was kicking on the ground. Without thinking I worked the bolt of my rifle and centered the crosshairs on the chest. Waiting, watching, with my finger hovering over the trigger. It was clear that the deer was not going to be able to stand up. The kicking rapidly decreased. I could see that the deer was dying as quickly as anything could so I did not fire another shot, although I kept ready to shoot again in case it suddenly managed to stand up. After about a minute, it lay still. I stood up, flipped the safety of the rifle to 'on' and walked down the hill to the deer. First I determined that it was dead. Standing clear of a potential kick from the hooves, I touched an open glassy eye with a blade of grass. There was no blink or reaction whatsoever. I knelt, removed my hat and thanked the deer and everyone else concerned. You just cannot understand the sense of relief when a deer is down and dead. Food. Whatever else might happen, we will have enough to eat. We might not have milk or cereal or coffee or bread or fresh produce. But we will have plenty of meat for awhile and the kids will not starve. 45 minutes later I had the deer gutted and ready to quarter and butcher. My shot had hit the deer in the neck, just at the base of the head. I had indeed clipped the spine (though the cord was not fully cut) and severed the carotid artery. Admittedly I had been aiming for the spine farther back, above the lungs. But on the other hand, I was taking a shot at a moving target. Ida woke up at some point and Trish told her I'd gotten a deer (I had gone inside briefly to get a bandaid after nicking my finger during the gutting process, waking up Trish in the process and informing her of the day's success.) Ida had gotten dressed and pulled on some boots and went out back to call for me. I brought her out to see the deer and she helped me to heave it on to her red wagon in order to haul the thing out of the woods. With my elbows in their present condition, still recovering from surgery on one side, I could not drag the deer in the usual manner. I had to get Trish out of bed again for help butchering. It was becoming clear that my elbows would not hold up to the strain of skinning and quartering an entire deer. I had her watch closely while I skinned and quartered one side on the front walk. There is a certain knack to this process. She picked it up pretty well and did a remarkably good job doing the other side on her own. Her removal of the backstrap lacked the smooth grace required to produce a really perfect strip of meat, but for a first effort she really did very well. Regretfully, we could not keep the hide. The temperature climbed up to the mid 70's and it was humid. Rain threatened. There was too much danger of the meat spoiling in the heat and I decided that we needed to rush as fast as possible to get the meat into the freezer. The extra time required to get the hide off in one piece was just not available. We cut the hide apart in a fast and reckless way in order to get the meat out immediately. So now we have a fridge and freezer full of meat. Packed! It is a very good feeling. 11:51 a.m. - 2009-10-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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