Last year I had really various hatching rates, but that was with a lot of shipped eggs. The post office can be hard on them and you’d never know it. The best hatches last year were from my own chickens and one batch that was only shipped from Oregon. This year I have my breeding birds all separated out and I’m hatching my own. I intend to sell some, but Wyandottes take so long to mature that I’m going to have to raise quite a few to adulthood in order to see if I have anything that’s worth breeding next year.

These four were all Blue Laced Red Wyandottes, and they’re very cute.

I’ll have more every Saturday until three weeks after I stop putting the eggs in the incubator. I’m collecting for Batch #5 with now.

Then on Saturday was the big Pacific Poultry Breeder’s Association show in Stockton. I’ve looked forward to this show all year. Last year was my first year attending, and it was so overwhelming. This year, I had some specific goals in mind for my shopping and I wanted to see what other people are doing with Wyandottes. Turns out, not much. There were only a few large fowl Wyandottes entered, which was disappointing. In fact, it spurred me to enter my own birds next year. I plan to start small, and will enter a show in Fresno next month, which is overwhelming in its own right.

Last year at this show, I’d put in for a raffle of some Marans hatching eggs. I was already home when I got the call that I won, and did not want to drive back up there, so I told them to reraffle them. I turned out that a lady I know won them the second time, so that was nice. So this show makes me feel lucky, and they raffle off some donated birds every year too. I bought a bunch of tickets and put them all on a trio of Blue Andalusians donated by a local breeder who has very nice birds. Then I made myself stick around for the raffle this time, and sure enough, I won them! I was very glad that I hadn’t filled up the crates I’d brought with gigantic geese.

But after the raffle, and as people were clearing out of the sales barn, I decided that I couldn’t go home with empty crates. I’d intended to buy some Pekin ducks to raise as meat birds if there were any for sale, but there weren’t. What there were, however, were some silly Runner Ducks. They were marked down and I could tell that a pair really wanted to go home with me. So they did, and they are destined to become beloved pets, not dinner. I’ll do the meat ducks a little later in the year.

I’m still working on putting better tarps over my breeding pens, which are now all full of miscellaneous critters. The ducks will eventually run loose with the rest of the flock, as this is my meat bird pen, but they’re a little shy right now. I really enjoyed the weekend spent with my hobby; they give me a lot more joy and less hassle than the hounds did, reinforcing my conviction that getting rid of them was the right thing for me to do. I miss them, but my poultry generally don’t bark, and that’s much more pleasant to live around.

A couple of friends of mine have sons his age who are big duck hunters, so they know how to handle a shotgun too. When the trap league didn’t have enough kids interested to round out a junior team of five, I asked these other two boys if they wanted to join in on the fun. They were thrilled to be asked, and very much interested in shooting with Seamus this year. I discussed this back and forth several times with the league secretary, who promised me that they’d have a spot and she would help find a fifth kid to round out the team (there was already another boy on it.)  The club associated with the league was even offering to sponsor the team. While I was at the New Year’s Eve party, I got a call from another parent who couldn’t commit her son to the team unless she had help driving him now and then, due to her work schedule. I told her that I’d help her, and just like that, we had a junior team!

Or so I thought.

On Friday, barely 24 hours before the first shoot, I got a text from the league secretary, the one who’d committed to these five kids that they could shoot this season. She said that she now had to fill one of the spots on the team with a member’s kid (we are not members at the moment, due to some shenanigans she pulled on our family a few years back) and that only two of my kids could shoot, and that I would have to pick which one couldn’t. So I called her up to try to find out what was going on.

She said that another league board member had promised another kid a spot on the team, and that the girl was dying to shoot, and she had to hold up that promise. Now, mind you, this is fully a week after she’s committed to the team we thought we had in place. She’d already promised these five kids that they could shoot together, but was willing to go back on that word.

Oh no. I don’t think so.

I promised my three boys that they could shoot, and I sure wasn’t going to kick one of them off because someone else was weaseling. So instead, I did something that she completely didn’t expect. I told her that these three boys were shooting together no matter what, and if she didn’t have room for all of them, then they were all off the team. I’d find a team for them and sponsor them myself. If I had to stand up there and shoot with them, then that’s what I would do, fronting a regular league team that just happened to have four junior members instead of a junior team. She was not prepared for that, but at that point I was done with her nonsense.

So after a little calling to some friends, we had a junior team put together again, this time under my name. One of the kids is the son of a long-time friend of Junior’s, and the other one is a friend of the first kid, who happened to shoot with Seamus last year but had walked away from that trap club due to the politics. The same politics that I was experiencing first hand, as it happens. But however we found them, within half an hour, we had another team.

I felt bad for the original two kids on the other team. It wasn’t their fault, that’s for sure, nor the fault of the one trying to squeeze in. I called the friend to whom I had promised driving help, and told her what was going on so she would be aware of it, reiterating my promise to help her transport her son if she needed it. I didn’t have the other kid’s phone number, but I did see his father at practice the next day and apologized to him personally. He understood that I had to stand up for my own kids and didn’t hold it against me. As of Saturday afternoon, those kids still didn’t have a team set up, but it was no longer my problem. My boys were taken care of, and now the woman who’d failed to uphold her own commitments could do the scrambling.

Things came to light a little more clearly on Sunday morning. I saw that the other kids had a team, and the final two members were two girls who shoot very well but are starting to become interested in other activities. They’d had to be talked into shooting. The father of our last team member let it slip that he’d talked to the father of the original girl that the secretary was trying to slip onto the team. And that they hadn’t gone begging to the league at all, but it was the other way around. The league secretary had come calling to him recruiting his daughter on Thursday evening. I see what happened there; that woman is so interested in winning that she wanted a team with a known shooter in place of an unknown. After all, who knows how well my two friends’ sons could shoot? And that’s why she was so bent out of shape when I pulled Seamus from the team. He’s a pretty good shot for his age.

That’s not supposed to be what the junior shooting events are about. Sure, winning is nice, and some other clubs have some really good junior teams. But my three boys are there to have fun, not to dominate the event. And they simply wouldn’t have fun with one of them missing, or split up into two teams. It wouldn’t be fair to them. So even though she didn’t stick to her word, I sure did, and now I’m extremely proud to be sponsoring both a junior team and a regular league team.

Junior had told me about the politics of the place, and I believed him, but I hadn’t seen them in action before.  Now it’s clear that there’s a bad apple in that barrel. They’ve lost all three of these kids for the scholastics program they are trying to start, as well as the fifth kid on our team who had already walked away from that club. If Seamus chooses to shoot for scholastics later in the year, it’ll be at the competing club. They’ve been trying to recruit him for years anyway, as his 4-H leader is a part of the coaching team. And I was pushing for us to become members of this club, but that’s completely off the table now. They may need our help, but they aren’t going to get it.

All of this nonsense and strife was vindicated when the boys shot their first league shoot on Sunday. They had an absolute ball. They may not be the best team out there yet, but they sure seem to have the biggest cheering section. You can see the light bulbs going off over their heads when they suddenly understand something and start pulverizing targets. To see them figure things out is so satisfying, and they’re having so much fun. These boys are going to be a good team, and learn a lot, and enjoy themselves, and that’s the point of the whole sport.

I take the carcasses of at least two roasted chickens, plus cleaned feet and necks if I have them, for gelatin. To that I add a couple of chunked up carrots and a couple of yellow onions with as much clean onion skin as possible. I throw in up to a whole head of garlic, and several dried chile pods – right now I have New Mexico and some homegrown tiny dried hot ones, and they both get added. I toss in some bay leaves and a handful of whole black peppercorns. Then I top off with cold water.

This isn’t a science, of course, and I use all sorts of meats. This last weekend, I made one with just the bones of a smoked turkey, with no vegetables added. It’s really strongly flavored, thanks to the smoke, and would have drowned out anything else. Duck stock is good, rabbit stock is fantastic, and ham stock is really salty so I use a lot of water and mix it with some other bones.

Now, I do this in my five gallon pressure canner, so I’m using about four gallons of space, and at least three are of water. I do not make stock by halves, nosirreebob. I heave this contraption over to the stove where I process it on 15 psi for at least an hour, and two is better. Once it’s safe to open the canner lid, I strain the whole shebang through a colander lined with cheesecloth (which I buy by the twenty yard hank – this is a serious hobby of mine!) into my five gallon stock pot and refrigerate it. Once it’s good and cold, it’s easy to scrape the fat off the top.

I can it too, for storage, or else my freezers would be overflowing. Here, let me show you my delicious hoard:

It looks ridiculous, but this spring when I had pneumonia I had almost this much on hand, and I ran out. It was all I could eat for over a week.

When you can any meat or other low-acid, low-sugar products, you absolutely have to use a pressure canner. Water bath canning these things is just asking for a nice case of botulism. I can fit seven quart jars at a time in my big pressure canner, and they get processed for 25 minutes at 10 psi, exactly according to all of the directions I’ve ever found. Only once have I had the jars fail to seal on me, and I’m pretty sure that was because I hadn’t skimmed off enough fat, and grease got up under the seals. I just threw those jars into the fridge and ate them in the next couple of days.

I get seven quarts canned out of a batch and rarely have enough energy to can twice. So I eat the rest out of the refrigerator, making soup every day for lunch until it’s gone. It makes a satisfying gelatinous plop when it’s cold, and has a lovely mouthfeel when it heats up. It sounds like a lot of work, and it sort of is, but it’s not like I have to stand over the stove the whole time. And the end result is so good that it’s completely spoiled me for commercial stocks. Mine is much stronger, but I can always dilute it if I want. Can’t add flavor to a box of vacuum-sealed blandness.

Standard soup is a quart or two of the stock, chunks of whatever chicken or turkey I have on hand, and orzo noodles. I like to top it with fresh Parmesan and dunk crusty French bread in it too. A good summer soup is kind of minestrone-based, with tomatoes, grilled sausage, beans, corn, and whatever else I have on hand. Odds and ends of opened jars never last long either, as they get snapped up for making rice or cous cous.

The bad thing this year has been the actual hunting. I’ve never seen a year so bad, and most of the houndsmen I run with say the same thing, and they have a lot more time on the ground for comparison. So many weekends have been spent driving around looking for tracks or scents for absolutely nothing that it’s got me pretty well burnt out on the whole thing for a while. So much money and time invested, and I only got to see three bears taken. What a terrible year for training dogs this was too, as it’s really hard to teach them what to hunt if we never actually find what they’re supposed to be hunting.

I didn’t want to put my green dogs in on cold tracks for fear that they’d mess up someone’s paid-for hunt, and it’s not as good for training as hot tracks are anyway. They have a hard time figuring out what to do if the smell is too faint. So Jane got in on three hunts, and only made it to the tree on two of them. I never did manage to walk the pups in to a tree, since I was busy messing with Jane and only have so many hands. It’s next to impossible to train young dogs without a lead dog of your own, and I don’t have one.

The dogs are driving me nuts at home too, always barking, like hounds do. I’ve had a lot of animal drama going on lately with Angus killing poultry and me having to take one of the hound kennels for him. Add to that the job insecurity and the irrationality of spending one to two hundred bucks in fuel each weekend to hunt these dogs, besides the costs to feed them and keep them healthy, and it starts to overwhelm me. I’m losing sight of the joy in hunting; it’s all work and no fun any more. I’m working hard on simplifying my life to ease stress levels, and the dog pack is a huge part of my stress.

So after a great deal more thought than I spent acquiring the pack (and that was a lot,) they are now for sale. I have someone coming over tonight who likes Cara a lot and used to own her grandmother. He may take the other two as well, for another friend who’s down a few dogs. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this but rationality says that it’s the right thing to do. It’s just not the right time for me, and getting a green houndsman involved with a green pack was a poor decision. If the financial things shape up, I can get back into it at any time, but next time, I’ll buy some trained dogs to start with. Puppies are just more headache than they’re worth.

I’m having a problem with feeling like a failure and I definitely got more attached to these little hooligans than I should have, but I do think that my life will be easier without them. The box will come out of the truck so I can use the bed, but I’ll keep all of my equipment. I liked being a houndsman, but I think I will like lowering my blood pressure just as much. I’ll miss them but my poultry and the neighbors won’t. At least I’m in good company; more than half of the houndsmen that I know have sold off all of their dogs at one point or another. Grey Fox himself used to sell dogs left and right, and completely got out of it more than once. But if I get back into it, it’ll have to be from another angle. I’m not a dog trainer, at least not at this stage.

The adrenaline rush is incredible. When you’re at a tree below a bear and the dogs are all singing their hearts out doing what they were born to do, it’s all about the moment. All of the preparation, all of the work to get to that point just drops away, and it’s just the team and the bear. This is when you forget about the dogs being nuisances in the kennel at home, and you don’t care that you’re exhausted and still have to pack everything back up and out of the canyon. Everything that’s always churning in the back of your mind is absolutely drowned out and for once everyone there, dogs, people, and bear, are all focused on the same experience.

People who haven’t done this may not get it. It seems really strange from the outside, even to some other hunters. We kill ourselves all year getting our dogs trained and ourselves in shape and enough money together to get to do this. It’s a ton of work in the off-season, but at that particular moment at that tree, that’s when it’s worth it. I can explain it all I want, but until you’ve been right there, you’re not going to get it. Some people still don’t, but some do.

I had the privilege of passing this experience on to a friend this weekend. Junior is in Colorado, but I always go up even when he’s gone, just like I used to do before we met. And this time I wanted to show my friend Shelley how cool this whole thing was. I’ve talked it up since I met her, and she was really excited to go.

I warned her that we might not even see anything. Bear hunting is really variable, and we can go weeks without treeing a bear. Even getting in on a race would be interesting, and getting to a tree would just be gravy, so that’s what I hoped for. And it turned out that we couldn’t have picked a better weekend to do this.

It had snowed on Thursday night but not too much, which makes for really nice hunting. The snow on the ground shows the tracks really well and keeps the scent longer, and the dogs don’t get overheated later in the day like they can in the early season. So as we do, we split up into several groups to start a bear for the client. We were following Maverick doing a little dog training when Dean called and said that he had something going up high. So we threw the rig dogs back into the boxes and hightailed up up the mountain into the deeper snow.

It took us a while to pinpoint the dogs, but once we did, it was clear that they had that bear in sight. They make a whole different noise when they’re just chasing one from when they’re looking at him. I happened to catch a track across the road out of the corner of my eye, and we got out to have a little show and tell. That track happened to be a big bear, and fresh, and with dog tracks right with it, so it was the one we were after. Dean had seen it earlier too, and knew we were after a good one.

Eventually we narrowed down the best place to walk down to the tree. We had our choice of one side of a creek or the other, but the road around to get to the other was miles and miles away. But we got there, and the men went down with Shelley, Seamus, and I just a touch behind. We were fortunate enough to get down to the tree without any problems. Maverick handed me some dogs as soon as I got there, so I didn’t get any pictures. But Shelley got to see the whole thing. The client used a bow and stuck the bear with his first shot, at which time it came barreling down that tree. Dean and Maverick backed the client up with pistols, as the last thing we need is a wounded bear around. Bears are incredibly tough, and it kept going down into the creek with several bullets and an arrow wound in him.

That creek was as far down the mountain as we’d already come but much steeper. My knee is giving me fits, so I didn’t think it would be a good idea to go down any farther only to have to struggle my way back up. Seamus wanted to go and he’s getting pretty trustworthy about handling himself, so when the rest of the men went down, I checked with Crawler and  sent him down with them. Shelley and I packed out some extra equipment for the guys and slowly followed our backtrail back to the trucks, about a mile and completely uphill.

At that point the challenge was to find a good place for the guys to get the bear out. This creek wasn’t really accessible by any roads; we couldn’t winch it out with mule tape like we can if it’s fairly close. And it was a big bear, the biggest one of the year, so dragging out whole by sheer manpower wasn’t an option either. After some driving back and forth to evaluate both sides of the creek, the guys decided just to skin it out and pack the head, hide, and meat out separately. Fortunately, Dusty showed up with the cavalry; he had the squirrel hunters in his truck, a group of young and strong men that have recently started hunting with us. He sent them down with extra packs to help with the muscle.

Seamus was rather pleased to get to do all of that without a parent around. He and Crawler started a fire down there so the boys could work on the bear without getting too cold; it was 27 degrees all day.  And he came up out of that canyon packing someone else’s rifle and a great big grin; it’s good for a kid to be treated like a man once in a while. Shelley seemed to really get a kick out of the whole thing too, and I think I may have gotten her as hooked as quickly as I was. I’ll lay odds that she gets a bear tag next year. Once my dogs are trained, I’ll sure do my best to get her a bear of her own, but getting to be in on the biggest and prettiest one of the year was a special treat. I’m thrilled that I got to share it, with each of them getting something different out of the whole experience.

Senior and Bill told us the lake had been restocked with trout that week, so fishing seemed like the thing to do. Pat and his two boys and Grey Fox’s grandson were hanging with us. So we scraped together enough tackle, never a problem when my father-in-law is around, and headed off to the lake.

My father-in-law is a fantastic teacher, and he loves to help kids. Fortunately, I’m such a beginner at fishing that I qualify for the help too. He got the four of us set up on the bank while he, Bill, Pat, and Junior supervised. It wasn’t long before the fish were hitting the baits and we were reeling them in. Hatchery fish are apparently really easy to catch, as they’re used to being fed, but that didn’t hurt our fun. I’ve had such a fishing curse for so long that it was a real relief to be able to actually land one.

The looks on the kids’ faces when they’d catch one was great. I was torn between wanting to fish and wanting to take pictures, so I did a little of both. Once I’d caught my limit, I could focus on the kids and try to get some action shots. They had such a good time, and Senior did too helping them. They kept all of the dads busy taking hooks out of fish; as soon as one kid would get his line cast back out, another kid would have one on the bank and another kid would need fresh bait. A few hours went by in a flash.

Senior and Junior set up an assembly line when we got back to camp. Almost all of us had limited out, so they had a lot of fish to clean. Senior filleted them all while Junior cleaned the bones off of the fillets and I washed them. We ended up with a lot of fish, and shared ours with Fran and Todd down at the other camp. Bill and Senior have been fishing all season and are pretty tired of trout, so they were happy to send theirs off for other people to eat too.

All in all, it was just a lot of low-stress fun. We got back to the hunting on Sunday, but the change was pleasant. I’d like to do it again, but maybe before hunting season opens. There’s a lot going on this time of year.

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Cara’s a little braver, but she’s always had the better nose when it comes to the house cat. Foxy is nervous around a dead bear, but she relaxes after a little and will at least go up and smell it. They’re good with the other dogs, even with strange ones stuffed into their box. They tie out at camp just fine, and ride around without complaining most of the day. For the most part, when I need them to be quiet in the box so we can listen, they are. And when I let them out for a break, they spin around like wild things, do their business, and then come back when I call them. When I let them out to play with their siblings, Jake’s three pups, it gets a little wild but it’s fun to watch. Next year will be some more intensive training, as they’ll be old enough to run with the pack. We’ll have a better idea of what they are next year. Pup training is a long process, and they don’t all make hunters. Two years is a big chunk of time to invest in what may be nothing, and that’s why a lot of guys won’t even mess with pups, but will buy started young dogs.

I sure didn’t think I’d get to have a dog in the races this year. But then Jane came along. And I didn’t know what she’d do either, but I thought I’d try her. We’re not even sure how old she is, and I didn’t think she’d ever been hunted, from the way she looked and acted. The first time we threw her up on the box to rig, on opening day, she seemed to be excited but really nervous. She figured out how to ride up there pretty quickly, but I don’t have a lot of slack in my dog chains, so she couldn’t get in too much trouble anyway. When Dean’s dogs struck that day, I had to encourage her to bark along, but she did it without much heart. She didn’t know what was going on, was just following the pack. That’s OK, it was a good start for a stray dog.

We turned her out that first weekend too, to see what she’d do, and if she even could follow the pack. Now, she was starving to death when I got her and I may have overcompensated a little in the feeding department, so she’s a touch chubby. And my one-mile walks are nothing to get a hound in shape, so I didn’t really expect her to be able to keep up with the pack, but I’d be happy if she at least went in the same direction, and she did. She didn’t keep up with them, as I’d expected, and I didn’t know what we’d find when we went back to get her. But we followed her tracking signal right back to where we’d turned out, and there she was, following a Jeep down the road. It’s good if they go back to where they started instead of wandering off into who-knows-where. It’s easier to pick them back up that way.

So we’ve started throwing her in to the the really hot races. She made it to one of the trees at Seth’s bear, and it was really something hearing her bawling so hard. She has a really distinct bawl mouth, almost a scream, and I hadn’t heard it before, as she doesn’t make a peep in the kennel at home. It sent shivers down my spine, hearing my own dog at the tree. I couldn’t go to that particular tree, as that bear was nervous and we didn’t want too many people there, but Junior said she was looking at it and going nuts, just like she’s supposed to do.

We’ve been rigging her like she’s a strike dog too, not expecting anything to come of that. But since we don’t have a strike dog, there’s room on the rail and we might as well see what she can do. And on Saturday morning, she surprised us again. We were running with Maverick, and his dogs hit a really hot one. We rolled up behind him a few minutes later, and Jane lost her mind up there on the box. She wasn’t just booger barking because the other dogs were excited; she was really getting after it. I thought she was just going along with it until Maverick looked up at her and pointed out that she was winding the bear too. Now, that’s a really good thing. This bear was probably so close to us that he could see us, so she got a good dose of what a good, fresh bear track smells like, and she wanted some of it.

So when we turned dogs out, we dumped her in with the pack. I got her in fourth or fifth, not so far behind that she’d have to play catch-up. This was a short, fast race too, and I could hear her every once in a while. She doesn’t seem to bark much while she’s running, which is a pretty neutral thing. They treed in a hurry, and we got there and were tying dogs back before she showed up. I think she was in the area, but a tree can be a little overwhelming for a young dog. Once she was finally there though, and got a glimpse of that bear in the tree, she came uncorked again. She bayed just as hard as any of the rest of the dogs in the pack, and didn’t act at all gun shy when it was taken.

We always let the dogs get their piece of the bear as soon as we know it’s dead. Last time, she hadn’t been at the final tree, so this was her first opportunity to get that old bear right away. I didn’t know if she’d be timid about that either, but she wasn’t. She dove right in there with the rest of the dogs and made sure that thing was dead.

She’s done really well for a stray dog. The other houndsmen seem to like her and she hasn’t shown any traits yet that will automatically disqualify her. If she were fighting at the tree, for example, I’d have to get rid of her right away. We can’t have one of those in the pack; it teaches it to the others and then there’s chaos. She does seem to have the hunting instinct; if she didn’t, there wouldn’t be much point to keeping her either. You can’t teach that to a dog.

It’s been amazing, getting to run my own dog. I didn’t expect to do it this year, but here I am. Sure, I’m still dog training more than hunting, but it’s at a higher level than I thought I’d get to do. The whole process is teaching me so much. I always had a hard time picking most of the other dogs apart by sound, except for a couple with distinct voices, but my own dog is clear as a bell to me. And it was always hard to tell which dog was which by sight; they’re all mostly the same color and when they’re all running around together, you have to really look at them to tell who’s who. But my dog jumps out at me like she’s been colored with a highlighter pen; it’s that obvious. I can tell my pups apart from the other pups at a glance too, even though Foxy looks an awful lot like her brothers Ace and Bo.

But the biggest surprise for me, in this dog running business, has been the pride. It’s undeserved; I haven’t taught this dog to want to chase bears, that’s all her. But I’ve worked with her and given her a chance to do what she was born to do, and every time I see another light bulb go on in her head, I get a grin that will split my face. I’m proud of her; she’s learning much faster than I even expected, and doing much better than I had any right to even hope for. This is a dog training season for me, not a hunting season, and I had no idea that I would have so much more fun with this than I ever have before. It’ll get frustrating, that’s for sure,  but for now I’m on a high that I didn’t know existed. I owe that to Grey Fox poking me into doing this, and to Maverick for getting me started, and to Jane for being a good dog.

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.

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.

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.