Chapter 6

My aforementioned try at gutting had let me know that acorns were a big part of the deer diet. With my major fuckup of cutting through the stomach wall I learned this little tidbit. In the fluid that gushed out I could see a few gnawed up acorns and I could certainly smell that they were a big part of the greenish crap that came out.

Killing a deer in my here and now didn't strike me as a big problem, but I was apprehensive about turning the dead carcass into something I would put into my mouth.

Heading into the wind that came every so often I was on my way with my first hunting trip. The wind wasn't really one, more of a gentle breeze, but I knew it would mean that my scent wouldn't precede me. I walked slowly, keeping my eyes open and trying to be as quiet as I could. After about a hundred yards I remembered to walk a little way and then lean against a tree to look around for a while.

Deer hunting turned out to be easier than I'd hoped. I came into sight of a big oak and leaned against a pine about eighty yards from it, and waited, and looked. I know it was blind luck, but a big doe worked her way toward the oak from the opposite direction. I didn't really see her at first but caught motion in my peripheral vision.

She was more than three hundred yards from me when I spotted her. She kept coming, a few steps at a time, grazing on grass here and browsing on some type or other of brush there, and then moving a little bit again.

Moving as slowly as possible, I brought up my rifle and waited. I went ahead and pointed it in her direction, leaning with my left arm against the tree as a sort of makeshift rest.

Of course I'd heard that animals could somehow feel you looking at them if you keep staring. I didn't believe that crap, but I didn't stare at her either. Yesterday morning had brought home the point that what I believed or didn't believe wasn't necessarily the last word on what was really what. Hell, before then I hadn't even believed in time travel.

When she was probably twenty yards from the oak, making her close to a hundred yards off, I took a shot and dropped her with the first one. Every deer hunter or prospective deer hunter has heard tall tales about deer getting up from what was surely a fatal shot and running off. Well this doe didn't. The 35 Remington knocked her down and she stayed down.

Watching her corpse from where I was for a couple of minutes to make sure she stayed put made me feel like a savvy hunter, but then I walked on over to see about what came next. Tying a short piece of nylon rope around her pasterns, I dragged her away and over to a pine about seventy yards off. It had a few low limbs that hadn't dropped off yet and after releasing her forefeet, I pulled her up by the rears for my next try at field dressing.

Sometimes I learn from my mistakes, and that stinking, acorn scented stomach fluid from the first deer I'd tried to gut was a memorable lesson. After that little fuckup some kind soul had told me about a Wyoming Knife, and I bought one, even though I never tried that trick again. I'd fetched it from my pickup's glove box this morning before I started on this little errand and damned if it didn't do a bang up job.

Cutting her throat to help her bleed out was first on my list, and then I made a tiny hole up near her anus, inserted the Wyoming Knife's little bud, and pulled, opening her abdomen and down to her sternum like she had a zipper.

The liver, heart, kidneys, and other internal organs weren't on my menu this time. I spilled her insides onto the ground, letting her bleed a while then lowered her and dragged what was left over near my trailer for the hardest part. All the way there I cussed myself for not having sense enough to buy a three-wheeler or four-wheeler. This dragging shit was for the birds.

I'd already considered the dead meat smell drawing undesirable predators and carrion eaters, that's the main reason I gutted her where I did. Thinking about it some more on the trip back, I decided there might be a use for pine firewood after all.

With the chainsaw it was easy to slice off more of the pine I'd felled and I had a stinking pine fire going in no time.

After letting her bleed out for about an hour, I put her on a small tarp and put a short chain around her head with the other end secured to a tree. Cutting off her feet, I then spent about twenty minutes slicing through the skin down her chest and up her neck, down the insides of her legs, and around her neck just up under her head.

I peeled back enough skin at the top of her neck to make a flap that I tied around a handy smooth rock with nylon rope. Moving the truck to face her body, I let out about fifteen feet of the winch line, tying the rope that was around the rock to the cable's hook. The winch did its thing and peeled her like a grape. It worked better than I'd expected when I'd been told about it and now it was all over but the singing and the slow walking.

A few snafus came along while cutting her up, but the meat saw I'd snagged during my bow and shotgun-buying spree helped a bunch. I wrapped the quarters in some visqueen and put them on the camper shell's top to cool.

It had taken damned near all day and I was tired. I would have put the meat in the fridge, but there wasn't room for it, even if I took everything else out.

That was another thing I could kick my own ass for. During my day back where I actually belonged I could have scored a chest type freezer, or two, or three, and a couple of giant refrigerators too. I'd had the room and the money, I just didn't have what it took. The sense. A chest type freezer didn't even use much electricity.

Before I went in for the night I realized this was a fuckup waiting to happen. Something would be coming for my meat before the night was over, and for the skin too, probably.

Then it hit me. There was plenty of room for all of it in the damned U-Haul. After fixing my near disaster, I piled more pine on the fire and went into the trailer to warm another steak and potato for supper. After I'd finished eating I went to bed.

Steak and eggs for me again the next morning, and despite crying over forgetting about a deep freeze or a bigger fridge, I felt great. Some of that diminished when I remembered walking right past hundreds of shovels, rakes, posthole diggers, hoes, sling blades, ditch bank blades and on and on and I hadn't even thought about getting a single fucking one.

Sooner - rather than later - I was going to fill up my gray water tank, and since the only shovel I had was an army surplus entrenching tool, there'd be hell to pay digging a hole to empty it into.

Fuck.

Well, you can't think of everything, at least I couldn't. It seemed like every time I turned around it reminded me of something else I should have grabbed, instead of chasing around buying every pair of jeans I could find and all the Ranch Style Beans in the world.

God Dammit! I hadn't thought about a washtub to wash my nasty clothes in, or one box of washing powder. I didn't buy any towels, and I only had four. I'd been oh so clever stocking up on beer and whiskey and I hadn't even remembered to buy one fucking bar of soap.

Going outside to check around the back of my U-Haul showed me that something had done a little digging and scratching around, but it didn't get anywhere. I intended to cook that deer today, or cook some of it and try to make jerky out of the rest.

And that's another thing. I had one of the best slow-cookers ever built, back at the trailer park in Lone Star. They'd said it would be fine to just leave it there and come get it when I wanted to, or park my trailer back beside it would be even better to their way of thinking.

It had been built in a welding shop, out of a hundred and fifty gallon butane tank, and it had a big firebox fabricated out of half-inch plate below the tank. It was perfect for slow-cooking any kind of meat, especially using hickory. I wondered how long they would hang onto it before they gave up on me and sold it. Shit, I paid six hundred bucks for that thing.

I opened the U-Haul's doors and was nearly knocked over by the smell of gasoline. Well, what did I expect? Two thousand gallons of gas, in big plastic tanks - it had to smell a little, didn't it? I even remembered them telling me about the vents before selling me the things.