With Isabelle sitting on a bucket below his stand, Jay shot this nine-point buck about an hour and a half ago. The buck was not in the right place for Isabelle to take the shot.
I saw lots of gray and red squirrels, a screeching hawk and heard a Very Large Owl.
Isabelle wanted this shot. The deer was difficult to get in the truck with three of us working at it. Jay thinks it weighs about 180 pounds gutted.
The Saturday my brother died, Jay went out hunting in the morning and got four geese with one shot.
No, not the dance; I am referring to the 19 minute hunt Jay took less than an hour ago which resulted in him bringing home another 10+ pound hen turkey and busting up the rest of the flock for the morning’s hunt.
The evidence:
As you see, Hawthorne was quite taken with her.
Here is the goose girl’s goose:
And another:
It is not just her. It is familial.
I saw three big bucks while I was hunting during gun season. I got nary a shot.
A large 8-point snuck down out of a backyard, into a drive, as I was in a high tree stand 100 feet away with a natural buckthorn orchard between us.
One came down a steep bank into stream ravine following a doe and crossed the streambed onto a small honeysuckle filled flat. I was over 100 yards away up on the bank and back by a shed. If I had immediately pulled my gun up I might have been able to get a shot off. But I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
I watched the pair–the buck actually, for the doe just melded into the brush. I was able to pick out the buck’s antlers intermittently for about five minutes. They were never in a hurry. I think they just crossed on their own and were not caught up in early stages of the drive that was underway.
Twenty minutes later, the man hunting from a stand on the other side of the stream ravine from me fired twice. I thought for sure those two deer were the object of his shooting. Turns out they were not–there had been 5-7 other deer pushed by the drive. But those two ran out in the general confusion.
Five to seven minutes after Bob in the tree shot, I saw another buck down on that flat piece of overgrown flat. He was just moseying along in that thick huneysuckle. He stood in it. I could see his tail, his legs, his antlers, his head. All behind thick stuff. I could not take a shot that I thought had a good chance of hitting him. While I was watching him, gun at the ready, Daren came up from behind, finishing the drive, wondering what I was watching.
He came over and said, “Well, there’s no deer there now”. Bob had shot a spike horn buck. We walked around and over, and I asked Daren if maybe we should push that small piece of brushy ground down by the stream since I thought the buck was still there.
That did not happen. Daren laughingly told me to go after it myself as he went to get his truck.
So I put three shell in the gun and walked down, picked up the fresh trail, the fresh scat, followed it around and about until suddenly, at the very tip of the area, something large jumped into the stream and crossed ahead of me up a very steep bank.
That buck had bedded down in all that brush.
Ah well.
Saturday, while I was downtown doing errands waiting for Isaac to finish retaking two SAT exams, Jay was out in the cold hunting. When he gave up he decided to take Isabelle down to ride Cherry.
As she was saddling the horse up, Jay glanced out the shed window and saw two deer out in the field where Isabelle would be riding.
So he walked back to the house for his truck, gun and the walkie-talkies. Then he snuck down south into A’s property , where we have permission to hunt, into the woods and around the deer to the southwest.
He then told Isabelle to ride Cherry out into the field, keeping to the north edge, and try to push the deer towards him.
She did so and discovered the entire back of the field was filled with deer; 12-15 of them. The deer fanned out and ran in the general direction of Jay’s hiding place.
He saw them coming, and when they got near started yelling, trying to get the nearest ones to stop, to no avail. Finally he took a running shot at a nice doe.
They used Cherry to drag the carcass to the truck.
The Food and Cooking of Sweden by Anna Mosesson has provided me with the recipes and ideas for curing salmon into gravlax, and now in process, curing venison. It is a wonderful book to look at, and I have realized we eat sort of “Scandinavianish” this time of year. Meat, potatoes, greens.
So this is how to cure a hind leg muscle from a deer:
Prepare your cure: equal parts salt and sugar, some freshly ground pepper, fresh thyme (the deer are stealing it from the garden now anyway).
Prepare the muscle by removing the fell, connective tissue, etc. There is always somebody around here who wants to help with this job.
On aluminum foil, put down a layer of cure and spice, the meat, and then use the rest of the cure to cover the meat. Enclose meat in the foil and place in a nonreactive container in the fridge or cold porch. Mine went into a glass casserole dish. Quite a bit of liquid will be pulled from the meat over the next two days.
Turn it over every 12 hours if you remember.
