Hi all - So things are good up in the North Woods. We hung two bucks the first weekend, courtesy of my brothers, Trevor and Brendan. The weather has been less than perfect for hunting, so we are grateful for this early success.
Last night we prepared a feast fit for gourmands. We took the deer’s inner loins and brined them briefly in beef broth; caramelized a couple onions and wilted some red peppers in a cast iron pan; seared the loins, then shredded them; coated the whole thing with espresso-rubbed Bella Vitano cheese and heated until you couldn’t tell where the melted cheese ended and the au jus began. We heaped the cheese-steak onto thick-crusted peasant bread, served it with homemade jalapeño hash browns, and finished the meal off with warm apple pie and cups of black coffee for desert.
My youngest brother, Brendan, is too young to remember the old meals in deer camp, when we ate Bush’s beans and canned hobo-bread that were heated on an old sheet-metal stove and drank water out of a steel milk can (in the morning you’d have to break a skim of ice off the top). I’m a notorious nostalgist, but I draw the line here. I’ll take the frou-frou meals 10 times out of 10.
As I write this, I’ve hunted four days straight and have yet to see a deer. Not a buck, a deer. I’m not even seeing life, for the most part. Very few squirrels. Waves of chickadees and nuthatches from time to time, a few ravens, but that’s about it. There are no beechnuts or acorns this year, and so that pulse of animal life that accompanies good mast years is as notably absent as the nuts. I spend my days walking the hills like an accursed wanderer out of a Greek myth, always one step behind that which he seeks.
When you’ve hunted for a long time, you know that you’ve just got to push through these dry spells. You’ve got to wake up the next day and do it again. And again. And again, if so required. I’m reading a book about hunting by Paul Schullery, and he speaks to this masochism by warning new hunters not to equate the word sport too directly with the word fun.
“There is much fun in sport, but there is much more as well. Sport is a difficult notion, one involving self-imposed trial, tightly defined codes, competitions both subtle and direct, and a host of subjective, emotion-based judgments that few good sportsmen have ever tried to articulate. The gleeful child thrilled to her first catch of a sunfish is having a world of fun. The hunters . . . are a grim, unlaughing crowd participating in something that only they, in a moment of fond reminiscence, might call fun . . sport in its deepest and richest form.”
I tweaked the last line of that quote in a way that would be unrecognizable to its author, but that’s pretty much how I’m feeling after four straight days of hunting ghosts.
How’s your deer season going?
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