GOTCHA!
I pushed myself off the branch and fell.
The rope and noose shot up out of the snow and tightened around the buck’s leg, which jerked up into the air.
I felt my descent slow – and, as the buck got hauled up onto its hind legs, I felt my entire body jerk to a stop.
WHAM!
My spear almost flew out of my hands, but I hung onto it.
My feet were just a couple of feet away from the snow as I swayed back and forth in the air.
Holy shit, it WORKED!
The buck was struggling and kicking, but it was standing on its hind legs and wasn’t going anywhere.
30 feet of rope stretched from the buck, over the limb, and down to me – and I had an extra 30 feet of unused rope dangling from my rope harness… which I immediately threw over the lowest limb of the tree I’d just jumped out of. The slack fell limply down from the limb.
I used my spear to hook the rope and bring it back over to me, then threw it over the limb over and over again until there were seven coils around the tree limb.
That fucker wasn’t going anywhere.
Then I detached the shock absorber and dropped to the snow.
The lack of my weight – and the extra rope between me and the seven coils – gave the line a lot more slack, which meant the buck got all four of his feet down on the ground and could run.
But he wasn’t going far.
I rushed over to him.
Rather than charge me, which was probably his only option, he tried to run away – and jerked to a stop as the rope slammed taut again.
I used the spear to slash at his throat, trying to aim for the carotid artery.
I sliced him once solidly. Then I slashed him again.
It took him nearly two minutes to die. I didn’t want him to suffer, but with the flimsiness of my weapon and my overwhelming lack of experience at this, I figured it would do more harm than good to try and finish him. There are worse ways to go than to bleed out, after all.
First he keeled over in the bloodstained snow. His ribs slowly stopped moving as his breathing dwindled away to nothing.
I waited another minute to make absolutely sure he was gone.
Nothing like a kick to the head from a deer who’s still got some life in him. Good way to ruin your life.
I gave him a couple of prods with my spear in some, ahem, rather tender areas. No reaction at all.
The snow all around the buck was stained crimson and half-melted from the buck’s hot blood. I walked through it until I got close enough to touch the antlers. They were exactly like a deer’s back on earth – just green.
I squatted down and looked at the dark, unseeing eye staring back up at me.
A truly magnificent animal.
Sorry, fella. I wouldn’t have done it if my life didn’t depend on it.
Then I set to the real work: field-dressing him.
Hell, to catch him, all I’d had to do was jump out of a fuckin’ tree.
I detached my knife from the spear and started.
I won’t go into the specifics (bet you with I’d done the same with the snowball toilet paper), but I got the innards out and let the blood drain off.
Field-dressing a deer is important for several reasons. One, it reduces the load as you drag him back to your truck – or, in my case, my cave. The entrails can account for as much as 25% of the weight of the deer, and lugging around a 120-pound body is a lot easier than a 160-pound one.
Second, you want the meat to cool fast to make sure bacteria don’t multiply – and a huge amount of the deer’s heat is in its innards. Once you take the guts out, the air can get inside the abdominal cavity and cool the meat from the inside.
Lastly, you want to drain as much blood as you can. I’d actually done a fair job by slashing its throat while its heart was still pumping. The key word there is while. Some old-timers I’ve hunted with will slash a deer’s throat after it’s dead, thinking that will help the blood drain. It doesn’t. If the heart’s not beating, the blood’s not going anywhere.
The one problem in cutting his throat, though, was that it was going to make the meat taste gamier. ‘Gamy,’ as in wild game animals.
For those of you who have never eaten venison, it has an earthier taste than beef or pork. Kind of a pungent tang to it. Mostly that came down to the deer’s diet – a corn-fed deer would taste milder than one who ate only acorns and wild greens. But fast field-dressing and processing of the meat helped, too. If a hunter takes too long to prep the deer after shooting it, that pungency starts to tip over into ‘tainted.’
But there was one more factor: adrenaline. When a deer is stressed, adrenaline courses through its system, which results in a stronger taste to the meat. That’s why you want to drop a deer with one shot – not just to lessen its suffering, but to make sure it doesn’t have time to dump a lot of adrenaline into its system.
Unfortunately, I’d snared the poor bastard’s leg and cut his throat. The last few minutes of his life had been a non-stop stress-fest – which meant lots and lots of adrenaline, hence more gaminess to the meat.
Oh well. When you’re starving, you tend to overlook the little things.
Once I’d gutted the deer, I had to skin him and butcher him. Hunters back home could take their kill to a processing plant to harvest the meat for them, but that wasn’t exactly an option here.
I could have dragged him back to the cave with his skin on and done the butchering there. After all, the frigid
