Not to mention I didn’t really care to haul back 50 or 60 pounds of bones and waste that I wasn’t going to use.
So I removed the noose from the buck’s leg, tied it around his hindquarters, and heaved him up in the air.
Let me tell you, lifting 120 pounds into the air using a thin mountain-climbing rope is not ideal.
Once he was up, I set about separating the skin from the fat and meat underneath. That took a while. I was trying to be especially careful to keep the skin as intact as possible. Not only could I potentially cure the skin and use it – for a blanket or coverings – but also because I needed a sled to carry back my haul. I did not want to get deer blood all up in my backpack.
Once the skin was off, I removed the meat as best I could. The tenderloins, backstraps, and tip steaks came off first. Then I deboned the hind legs and pulled off the hams. (Different kind of ham from what you’re probably used to.)
Then I took off the front shoulders. Those I would grill immediately.
It was a messy affair, but in the end I had a pile of meat lying atop a more-or-less intact deer hide.
I didn’t do this sort of shit often – TV viewers have no stomach for seeing Bambi get slaughtered, and I hadn’t hunted regularly since my TV show started because I had no time. So I was proud that I’d done as well as I had, no matter how half-assed it was.
I also picked through the entrails and cut out the heart, the liver, and the kidneys. The kidneys I would have to soak before cooking – which would be interesting, considering I had nothing to soak them in – but the liver would have a ton of nutrients I needed. And the heart was actually one of the best cuts of the animal, one that many hunters ignored.
I could have gone the whole nine yards and gotten bones for roasting the marrow, and maybe taken the ribs, but I was very aware that I was risking unwanted attention of the wolfish kind. The long I stayed out here with a fresh carcass, the bigger chance I would be turned into an even fresher carcass.
So it was time to haul ass.
But first I wanted to clean up, or I would be leaving a nice trail of blood for the wolves to follow.
By this point, I was a mess. Butchering an animal ain’t tidy.
Nice thing was, though, I could clean off relatively easily. My outer layers of clothing – jacket, pants, gloves, and boots – were all waterproof, so the blood hadn’t leaked through or soaked in. To clean off, I just got down in the snow and wallowed around.
As a kid, I used to have a dog named Grady – half boxer, the rest mutt. A shorthaired dog. Well, every time we washed him, he would immediately shake off some of the water, then start writhing around on the ground trying to get the rest off. He would rub against grass, dirt, carpet – whatever was available. If you didn’t grab him fast enough and towel him off and get him inside, he would end up dirtier after the bath than before.
So I followed ol’ Grady’s lead and rubbed all over the snow until it was stained with red. Then I walked a few feet to a new patch and did it again. By the third patch, the snow was clean when I stood up.
Better than Irish Spring soap. Clean as a whistle.
After I was done, I gathered up all my rope and supplies, cleaned them off in the snow as best I could, and repacked everything. I used a rope to tie together the sack o’ meat, then dragged it through the woods behind me. I also picked up some short tree branches I could use to fashion a roasting station, and more slender ones for spitting the meat.
Tonight I was going to feast like a king.
8
The fire was nothing more than embers by the time I got back – which was actually fantastic. You don’t want to roast meat over an open fire unless you want char on the outside and raw meat on the inside.
Still, I would need more coals than what I had, so I moved half of the embers over to the right side of the flat rock. The left half I would use to start a new fire.
There were two ways to cook the meat, given what I had. I could either roast it on spits, or I could grill it on a slab of rock. I was hungry as fuck, so I decided to go with grilling first since it would be a lot faster.
First off, I built up two walls of rocks on either side of the right batch of coals. Then I found the thinnest, flattest rock I could – basically a chunk of slate about a foot square and only a half an inch thick – and scrubbed it down with snow as best I could. Once it was clean, I placed it on top of the two walls and had a perfect grilling station just a few inches above the coals. The water from the snow evaporated within a minute as the stone heated up.
I threw down scraps of deer fat on the rock and waited for it liquify as much as possible. Not only would it add flavor and the necessary fat I would need to avoid rabbit starvation, I also wanted a coating on the rock so the meat wouldn’t stick to
