OPENING DAY OF SHOTGUN DEER SEASON.
We live on 35 acres of woodland, surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods owned by two different farmers, a doctor, and a buffalo rancher. All of them either lease their woods to hunters or simply let anyone who asks hunt on them. My husband and his two hunting buddies hunt on our land.
That means the woods are crawling with hunters. It often sounds like a battle is being fought out there, with all the guns going off. I don't even dare go outside unless I put on orange apparel.
So, for the next three days, I'll be cooped up in the house. But even indoors, I worry about stray bullets hitting the house. I try not to go to town during the hunting season, to avoid the risk of getting shot as I drive down the road. But I guess if there's a bullet with my name on it, it's going to find me no matter what I do.
Every hunter out there is looking for that enormous trophy buck, but my guys mostly harvest young deer, which are the best eating. People who have tried venison and say they didn't like the wild, gamey taste have probably eaten a tough, old buck.
Venison is our "beef." We make hamburger from it, grill the backstraps, dry it for jerky, make summer sausage, and enjoy venison roasts and stews throughout the year. Since the guys do their own butchering, the only cost is for the hunting permits and ammo. They fill our freezers and theirs every fall with some of the best eating you're going to find anywhere. I don't like beef, pork, or chicken grown on factory farms with the aid of antibiotics and growth hormones. Deer are naturally lean and chemical free, and it's just about the only meat I'll eat.
Where I live, these beautiful wild animals breed in such numbers that they're public nuisances. Cars hit them all the time on the highway, and people have actually died from the accidents they cause. Right here at home, they make it almost impossible to garden. This year they mowed down two rows of sweet corn in our garden; we never got a single ear. They also feasted on our tomato and pepper plants and regularly ate the brussels sprouts and young cabbage and even some of my flowers. Just like goats, they'll eat just about anything.
A young doe will usually only have one fawn her first season. But after that, twins and triplets are the norm. It's important to thin the herds of does, to keep the population manageable. If hunters didn't harvest a certain percentage of them every year, there would be so many, the herds would become diseased, not to mention the increased damage to farmers' crops and mayhem on the highways. So even though I dread it, I understand the importance of deer hunting season.
I always swear that next year, I'm taking a vacation by myself, to someplace far from deer hunting. But every year finds me manning the deer camp kitchen. Now I have to go bake my dinner rolls and prepare my green bean casserole and the backstraps (from a couple of young deer they got bow-hunting earlier this month) for grilling. We always have the traditional Opening Day feast around 11 a.m., then the guys take a short nap before going back out into the woods for round two.
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