My in-laws and their friends have been hunting all of their lives. They come from a time and a mindset where you don’t go to the butcher and pay all that money for something that you can do better yourself for next to nothing. They’re also of the opinion that cut bone tastes bitter, and the bandsaw that the butcher uses ruins a lot of meat that way. So instead of taking the easy way out, they debone, cut, and wrap every deer themselves, usually while still up at camp.

They keep a few specific tools around, like giant rolls of plastic wrap and foil, and set up the tables with plastic to keep them clean. Some years they have a great big tent set up in camp to use during the really cold times; this tent also doubles as a poker-playing room and triples as extra guest sleeping quarters if needed. But this time of year is still well warm enough to do everything outside.

They’ve got the process down. Everyone has a role and they set it up like an assembly line. Gutted and tagged deer are hung in the shade for up to a couple of days, well-wrapped to keep the flies and the meat bees from traveling into the body cavity through the nostrils or mouth. When it comes to wrapping time, the equipment is laid out and ready, and the men go and pull the bag off and lower the deer to a good working height to skin it. If someone wants the skin, they’re a little more careful, but if nobody does, it goes really quickly. I’m good at skinning but a little obsessive at getting it off whole without any holes, so I’m slower than they are.

They take the big primal cuts off the skinned deer next. The shoulders and hams are removed and carried over to the tables. The tenderloins were cut out with the gutting, and probably have already been eaten, but the backstraps come off at this time. Any meat left on the carcass is trimmed off to go with the rest of the stew meat. The head is set aside to have the tag validated, if it hasn’t been yet. If it has, they’ll take a saw to it to remove the antlers after everything else is done.

Once at the tables, there are a couple of people for each specific job. Two take the meat off the bones, in whole muscle groups. A couple more people clean the fat and membranes off the cuts, and hand it on down to whoever’s putting packages together. Some people like their steaks and chops to be already sliced when they pull a package out of the freezer and some like the piece left whole in order to cut to whatever size they need when they’re cooking. I’m in the latter group.

Then the meat is handed on down to the wrappers, in chunks of about a pound or two. It’s wrapped very tightly in lots of layers of plastic wrap, squeezing to get all of the air out. Meat can last a really long time in the freezer wrapped this way; I recently opened a package of venison that had been lost in the bottom of the freezer since 1999, and it was still good. That’s twelve years, and it didn’t even have any freezer burn. Since the fat is cut off, there’s nothing to go rancid either. After the plastic wrap, a layer of foil is wrapped around the meat too, and the name of the cut and the date are written on it in permanent marker. That’s how I knew that piece was so old.

Then about half an hour after the deer was hanging, someone’s got a cooler full of fresh venison to take home and freeze. Presto, and the only expenses were in the wrapping, and if you buy that at Costco or Smart & Final, that’s nothing to speak of either. And it will last longer in the freezer than butcher paper will, and it will taste better. And you don’t owe the butchers anything but your labor on the assembly line for the next one.

This opening weekend was extremely emotional. After an unsuccessful morning hunt we all met down at bear camp to hold a final memorial service and potluck dinner for our friend Grey Fox. He’d requested that we do it there, on opening day, but we would have picked that as appropriate anyway. Hunting was his life, and most of the people he considered his chosen family were there to pay our respects. It was a little tough getting through the first part, but after things loosened up a bit and we started swapping stories and lies, it was like he was there.

He always did love a good camp feed and we were lucky enough to get to have a campfire this early in the season. Grey Fox always loved to build a fire as big as he could and then sit out around it talking long into the night. I learned so much from him, sitting around those fires, and I hope I can remember it all. He started teaching me about picking and running hounds years ago. He knew that I’d get some one day. He did know that I got these; I just wish that he could have seen them. He’d have got a kick out of seeing me run around with a dog up on the box. He loved to train people and to train hounds, and teaching me to how train hounds would have been right up his alley.

So somehow we lost most of the opening day convoy to hangovers, and on Sunday morning we were down to three rigs: Dean’s, mine, and PeeWee in his Dad’s truck. It was Grey Fox’s grandson Seth’s day for a bear. There were no clients and hardly any greenhorns, but not as many houndsmen as we usually run with either. We missed Grey Fox a lot and it was a little jarring each time we’d catch a glimpse of his truck. Maverick couldn’t be there due to work issues either.

We met where we often meet, and hit a hot strike right off the bat. Dean put his first string out and they took off up the hill. I thought it was hot enough to put my Jane in with them, but she got a little confused and came back to the truck so we scooped her back up. We have to carefully balance training with not interfering with the actual hunt, but everyone has young dogs to train this year, so it’s not like we’re the only ones.

The direction they went was a really good one, so Junior and I went on top of the ridge to listen. We found them treed up there, so Dean joined us and we all started to walk down. I had Jane on a leash because I wanted to show her what she was after, but as we got close to the hounds, she went nuts wanting to join them. I let her loose to see what she’d do. She did just what she was supposed to do, and joined in with the pack. Just before I got to the tree, slowpoke that I am, I heard the tree bark popping and knew that bear was coming down in a hurry. All of the dogs took off after it. With the bear in sight, even the young dogs get a grip on their job; two of Dean’s younger dogs were in the race now too.

We could hear that they’d treed it again, and made it around to that tree too. I could see the bear this time, and he could see us. It was a really nervous bear, and really athletic. Once it spotted the people, it started to get antsy again, climbing up and down the tree it was in. At one point that bear took an amazing sideways leap from one tree three feet laterally into another like a grey squirrel, slapping the trunk with his claws as he landed. I’ve seen them jump before but never sideways like that.

Since the bear was so nervous, we decided to try to slip a couple of guys in without the whole herd of the rest of us. Junior and Dean went in to back Seth up. They got the dogs tied back, but that bear was moving again. Fortunately, this time he moved up, but the best angle for a shot was towards the rest of us down the hill. Seth took the shot he could safely make, and connected, but the bear came out of the tree still running, and running right for us. We don’t like to keep too many guns around for safety reasons, but PeeWee and I were armed specifically for this. I had my pistol out as the guys up top were hollering at us, as the bear was coming straight for us, and PeeWee backed me up with a rifle. At that point I was extremely glad that we’d disarmed the pilgrims, as I ran in between them, towards the bear. I would not have been happy to have been shot in the back by an over-excited greenhorn.

As luck would have it, I’d forgotten to take my gun off safe, and didn’t get the best shot I could have. I did get a shot at it, although I didn’t think I’d hit it, and that turned the bear 90 degrees. PeeWee and I leapfrogged each other trying to get a clear shot at it; we knew exactly where each other were and can stay out of the other one’s field of fire. But by then the guys up the hill had turned the dogs back loose. The dogs came charging down the hill and shooting was no longer a good option. They started to blow on past the track where the bear had turned, but a whole lot of shouting on our parts got them lined out again. We could see when Pete winded the bear again, and they were off.

At that point three of the shooters were still up the hill, with two of us down below. There was a chance that the bear would run back up towards where we’d treed the first time, so I made a snap decision to go back up there while the guys dealt with it if it stayed low. I commandeered Uncle Donnie and his hoopty, and he ran me back up to the top. It turned out that we were out of it, as the bear had stayed parallel to the hillside, but every decision can’t be the right one. A wounded bear won’t always tree, and is too dangerous to leave on a mountain, so something had to be done with it. PeeWee and Dean and Junior found it below me when it did tree again, and took care of it. By the time I got back down, they were dragging it out; game over. So I was wrong, but I could have been right; it wasn’t a terribly bad choice. It could have put me and Jake, who met me on the ridge, by ourselves with a wounded bear, but I think we can handle that.

But I had a strong feeling the whole time that ol’ Grey Fox was right there with us, grinning from ear to ear at the whole situation. He always did handle himself really well in a rodeo like that and he would have loved seeing all of these people that he personally trained taking care of business. And the joy of hearing my own dog singing at the tree for the first time would have just tickled him to death. He knew it was in my blood, the hounds, and he told lots of people about it. Even I had no idea how deeply it was a part of me until I heard my Jane right in there with the pack. I was almost as proud of her as I was of Seamus taking his first bear last year, and I was every bit as proud of Seth for doing it this year. It was an honor to be part of fulfilling one of my friend’s last wishes, and it was just gravy to have my dog a part of it. Grey Fox was giving us a little help yesterday, I’m sure of it.

I’ve been canning fairly heavily for the last few years, enough that I don’t really have to think about some of the simpler stuff, or the stuff that I do all the time. Chicken stock is routine for me, and jams are so easy now that I’ve been canning meats. I still generally follow recipes, but I’m not too afraid to mess with them if the basics are there. I know when to break out the pressure canner and when a water bath is OK. I know what proportions of things go well together. I do still double check processing times, as I don’t want to inadvertently poison anyone.

So when we went to the mountains yesterday to get the trailer set up at camp, and I noticed that a lot of the gooseberries were ripe, I thought that this was the year that I’d finally get it together to make jelly from them. After all, I had child labor to do the picking, and we weren’t too busy doing other things. So I equipped the hooligans with bags and plastic forks to use to try to pop the thorny berries off of the bushes, and showed them how to tell a ripe one from a green one. The first clue is to look at the leavings from the squirrels. They know how to find a ripe berry.

I’ve nibbled, very carefully, on these berries all of my life. My grandfather showed me how to carefully bend the spines back and split the berry to get the good stuff out, which tastes extremely sweet. But I’d never picked enough to do anything with. This year is a bumper crop for them, so when we found a few ripe bushes, it only took us about ten minutes to get enough for a small batch of jelly. Which was nice, as it was raining by then.

When we got home, I rinsed them and popped them onto the stove with a little bit of water to mash and cook some juice out. The spines break into pretty fine pieces, so after they’d released their juices, I ran them first through the food mill and then through a jelly bag. I intended to let the juice drip out overnight but I got a little impatient.

So I got the canner ready and proceeded to make jelly. I had to eyeball the proportions, as I didn’t have enough juice for a full batch from any of my jelly recipes. I had more than half a batch worth though, and I didn’t want to waste it. So I added sugar in a 1:1 ratio to the juice and guesstimated a half a package of pectin.

From the color of the squashed berries, I didn’t think it would look all that appetizing, but the juice was bright pink. Once I got the sugar in, it became a beautiful ruby red, which I was somehow unable to capture with the camera. The jelly seemed to set OK overnight, so at lunch time I broke into one and tasted it. It doesn’t quite have the Starburst flavor of the fresh berries, but it’s really good, kind of a sweet and sour thing going on at the same time. It would make a really good sweet and sour sauce for pork, I would think. And it’s pretty, and I made it the same day that we picked these things out of the wild, and that’s cool. Two thumbs up for gooseberry jelly.

Junior has been bitten by the bow hunting bug pretty bad. I have been somewhat less so, but I’ll go out back and practice with him, and I got good enough that I’m willing to shoot at a deer if he stands still and is close enough. Junior really wants to take a deer with his bow, much more than I do. But of course, although deer season is open right now, that’s not the only legal thing to hunt with a bow. It’s also grey squirrel and mountain quail season, and there’s always a few things for which there is no specific season. You can kill ground squirrels all year long, as they’re a pest. Coyotes are also always in season, and it’s not illegal to kill a rattlesnake whenever you happen to find one.

So we went up with the camper shell on the back of the truck again. During regular season we do the camp up right but it’s nice to be mobile during archery season. It gives us the freedom to go check out different places and figure out where the deer are hanging out. We can make camp wherever we happen to stop.

We hadn’t seen anything at the first ridge we walked on, so we were driving over to another spot that may have been more likely. We weren’t even really paying attention to anything, talking about fishing or something, when Junior caught something out of the corner of his eye. As things do, his brain figured out just what his eyes had seen a half-beat later, and we stopped and backed the truck up to look at it.

Sure enough, there was a great big snake sunning himself on a log right next to the road. The tail was obscured from that angle and Junior does not care for snakes at all, so I went to see if it was a rattlesnake or not. Now, snakes don’t typically bother me, although I’m not terribly fond of the kinds that can kill you. So I walked down the road closer to it. I could tell before I could see the rattles that it sure was a rattler, and a big one at that. It was really dark and had that evil-looking head. It didn’t seem too annoyed by us though, so Junior had time to get his bow out and nock an arrow with a Judo tip on it.

His first shot was a little low, and stuck in the oak below the snake’s head. And the snake never even flinched. “Is it dead already,” he asked. Er, no, I didn’t think it was. Snakes don’t move all that fast before their blood has warmed up, but I would have expected at least a twitch. And now suddenly the question of just how, exactly, were we going to get that arrow back leaped into my head. Perhaps we should have thought of that earlier, I know.

He took another shot and this one hit the snake right in the head, a little towards the face, missing the brain. Ah, OK, now it was clear that it was alive. That snake went nuts, as one would expect. And as calm as I’d been up until then and as used to snakes as I am, that buzzing and leaping about sent waves of terror into my hind-brain, making me want to squeal and dance about like a little girl, and not in the cute way either.

Since this snake was now both not-dead and extremely pissed off, the arrow-retrieval conundrum had just become rather more difficult. Junior finally, after an eternity of at least two or three seconds, decided to get a really long stick and flip him into the road. He did just that, successfully, at which point I realized that he’d flipped the snake between us, and I had his bow. I can’t draw the thing and I was not at all happy about having to go around the snake to get back to the correct side. I was wishing mightily for a shovel with a really long handle. I can kill a snake with a shovel, I can.

But the snake was rather wounded, so I sneaked around him without him noticing. At that point I still didn’t know what in the hell we were going to do with the damn thing. Junior got another stick and mashed the snake’s head down with it so it couldn’t strike, and then gave me the stick to hold while he went to get a big knife. And of course, when I was holding it with one hand, it slipped off the snake. I then requested the dumb end, so he took the head end back and I smashed it down in the middle so it couldn’t coil up around his arm. And then he cut the snake’s head off with his knife, after stepping on his stick to make really sure that it wasn’t going anywhere.

I picked up the body of the snake and held it so it would bleed out, and he buried the head so some unsuspecting animal didn’t come across it and get bit by an already-dead snake. That can totally happen; the body was doing it’s best to continue to get me without being equipped with a head or teeth. If the head end could have got to us without a body, it would have.

Snakes clean the easiest when they’re still fresh, but I’d never seen it done. It’s extremely unnerving to cut something open to eviscerate it while it’s still trying to wrap itself around your arm, so I just let Junior show me how to do that for the whole length of the snake. I did really want to learn how to do this though, so once he got it open, he showed me how to skin it and I did that. I’ve never skinned anything so easy in my life, with no pesky legs or armpits to deal with. It just slips off like a sock, and the guts come out equally easily.

And there we were, with fresh dinner! Some kids drove by and saw what we had, and the girl wanted a picture of it. No problem, but I suggested to her that flip flops might not be ideal footwear in snake country. Once a mother, always a mother.

Later that night we fired up the grill for the venison I’d brought, and chunked the snake up too. I’ve only ever had it fried, but it turned out all right grilled too. It’s fitting to eat one’s first kill (of sorts) but we like snake anyway. And I don’t really see the point of killing one if you’re not going to eat it, unless it’s in a bad place for people or livestock. This one kind of was both, and so he became dinner, and he was delicious.