Tonight’s dinner- haunch of Black-Tail Deer, Yukon Gold mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy. Not a trace of gaminess and fork-tender.
We brined the haunch overnight in 1-1/2 gallons of water with 1 cup of salt and 1/4 cup of Apple Cider Vinegar. Then it went into a zip-lock bag with salt, course-ground pepper, several tablespoons of Lee & Perrin’s Worcester sauce and 1/2 cup of water. It was cooked at 135 degrees in a Sous Vide for 36 hours. I’ve never had better venison!
As we work through this and the goat I may post more game recipes if people are interested. Let me know what you think.
…but an accomplice has been ‘apprehended.’ Went out again yesterday morning and sat in the cold all day without luck. Walked the property a bit, but the deer didn’t show until almost literally the moment it was too dark to shoot them.
Deer blind… with tomatoes!
I slept in the van last night, which was OK but I woke with a blinding migraine. I don’t get them often anymore, and this one was making up for lost time. I spent the first hour I was awake praying I’d be able to move enough to open the door if I needed to puke. Realizing that I’d left my medication in my please-don’t-shoot-me-vest on the porch, I eventually staggered over that way about ten am. I don’t make my best decisions when I have a migraine, and I grabbed the Abilene as I made my way to the porch with the morning sun driving red-hot ice-picks into my brain.
Before I could even take my medication Steve popped up, pointed at his eyes and then towards the garden and held up two fingers- two deer were on the other side of the garden! I was not excited. In fact my reaction was, ‘Oh, of course they show up NOW.’ There were a few more words involved in the sentence actually, but they aren’t fit for family consumption. Again, my mental processes were not working at a hundred percent, but adrenaline is a wonderful thing. Grabbing the vest and gun I walked around the garden, my head threatening to explode and squinting in the light.
Sure enough there were two deer under the crab-apple tree about twenty yards away, a small one and a larger one. I peered at them, trying to see which, if either of them, was my target. After a minute the smaller one, a doe, looked at me with a bizarre blood-red grin. I was a bit taken aback until I realized she had a whole apple in her mouth. OK, not a psycho demon-deer. Good to know. The other one had something on his head, so I figured he must be Clyde. Bigger than I thought, but I’d only seen photos of him.
He was mostly behind the doe, but I did have a nice front-quarter shot. If I’d been at my best I’d have gone for a head-shot, but I was aware I was not so I took a shoulder-shot. The 270gr Keith bullet took him square on the joint and he almost went down, He staggered in a half circle which took him clear of the doe, and gave me a rear quartering shot. He was going down, but I wanted to speed things along before pain bled through his shock. I made a heart-shot and he dropped.
Weirdly the doe was still standing there trying to figure out what was going on. I actually walked past her to get to the downed buck and put a third bullet through his skull. Not necessary, but cartridges are cheap and I didn’t want him to suffer. The doe didn’t actually take off until after the third shot, and then only because Steve was running up.
The deer was not Clyde. Clyde is a spike, and while this fellow had the nubs there was no antler showing. Befuddled by pain I started cussing myself out for shooting the wrong deer. Steve reassured me, and I told him I had a migraine and needed my meds.
“No problem,” he said. “Get your meds and have a seat; he’ll keep.” Given that it was 33 degrees I figured he was right and went to the porch and had a seat, unloaded the gun and took my meds. Steve brought me coffee, and I sipped that to speed things along. After an hour or so I was sure I wasn’t going to puke, so Steve got his pickup truck and drove over as close as he could get, and we manhandled ‘Not-Clyde’ into the bed. I cut the scent-glands off, washed my hands with hand sanitizer and Steve gutted the deer. I helped with handling and steadying the deer.
I used two knives processing the deer- the hand-made hunter I’d just finished and an old case slip-joint with a spey-blade. The Case used to be a Trapper, but the clip-point blade had broken so I got it cheap. I took it apart, removed the broken blade, it’s spring and the center-liner and reassembled it as a single-blade knife. The hunting-knife has a honed zero-edge, the Case has a fine edge with some tooth, which works better for me for caping.
When Steve started skinning I joined in. With two of us working we finished in short order, and he laid the skin out in the sunlight. They’ll keep the hide and process it; I don’t have the knowledge or inclination to do it myself. With that done we drove around front, filled a tub with cold water to rinse our hands and knives as we worked and set to butchering. After removing the skirt-meat we separated the spine at the base of the rib-cage. He took the top, I took the bottom and in about an hour we had everything cut down into manageable portions, bagged and in the cooler.
Some lessons here- I had no business shooting that deer. I wasn’t drunk, but I was impaired; neither my vision nor my thought processes were up to snuff. I have a rule (Linda-imposed) that I don’t work in the shop when I have a migraine; the disaster-factor is not worth it, and the same goes double for hunting. It had never occurred to me that I would wake up on a hunt with a migraine and immediately need to shoot something, so I didn’t have a rule. When confronted with deer first-thing I didn’t have the sense to leave be. I have that rule now- no shooting with a migraine.
I also violated my Prime Directive for hunting- you do not shoot unless you’re sure what you are shooting at. Ever. Period. I’ve passed up a half-dozen shots over the last few years because I wasn’t absolutely certain what my target was, and today I didn’t. I was fairly sure, but I was impaired and should not have even been holding the gun. It worked out OK this time, but that was more luck than judgement.
Good lessons- the chest rig works a treat; I am old and fat with a bad lower back. Carrying a big gun like that on my hip all day for several days would have screwed up me up royally. With the chest rig it was no problem.
Second- even impaired there was no issue with shot placement. The first shot broke the joint exactly as it was supposed to, and the second shot clipped the bottom of the heart and severed the aorta. Good to know if I absolutely have to I can shoot with a migraine. I’m kinda’ proud of those shots even if I should never have put myself in a position to take them.
Third- all three shots were pass-throughs, which is fine, but I think next time I’m going to use a hollow-point. Black-tails aren’t all that big, and a hollow-point might have done enough extra damage to have dropped him clean with the first shot.
So, Clyde remains at large and with a one-deer limit someone else will have to shoot him. But for all the issues with this hunt there is one less crop-munching bastard preying on the defenseless vegitation, so that’s all to the good. But next time if I get a migraine I am down-checked until it’s gone.
The other effect of the migraine was that I felt no post-successful-hunt elation. I was just unhappy with myself for shooting while impaired and glad I didn’t screw it up. When dismantling the deer and seeing the effect of my bullets I felt the satisfaction of a job well done, but for taking my first deer in thirty years and my first ever with a handgun I was hoping for a more satisfying experience. I mean, the only thing this ‘hunt’ challenged was my patience and judgement. Well, one out of two isn’t bad. Anyway this time was more about pest-control than hunting, so it worked fine on that level.
No, there is no ‘Trophy Pic.’ I’ve never done them and saw no reason to start now. No judgement- I actually enjoy seeing other folks pictures, I just find the idea of doing one myself repellent. Just a weird quirk, I guess.
After arriving home Linda and I washed, divided and sorted the meat, bagged and labelled it and got it into the chest freezer (which is now at capacity!) There’s a three-pound roast soaking in brine, and tomorrow it will going into the Sous Vide with herbs and spices for 36 hours at 135 degrees, after which we’ll sear it under the broiler. I’ll let you know how it comes out.
Michael Tinker Pearce, 25 October 2020
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OK, full disclosure, this was not my first hunt this season. Given that it included a stupid, exhausting, ultimately futile slog through the pucker-brush that culminated in losing my new hunting knife and wrenching my back we will draw the curtains of charity across that sorry day. Call it the ‘Beta test.’
Since I had decided I would be using my U.S.Arms Abilene .44 magnum revolver as my weapon of choice for this year’s hunt I needed a good way to carry it. Large holsters tend to interfere with things like sitting in a blind and can be difficult to access while sitting I opted to construct a chest-rig; it’s handy, comfortable and doesn’t interfere with things like sitting. It also fits under an open jacket or hunting-vest, providing some protection for the gun and holster.
The chest rig is comfortable, handy, reasonably quick, keeps the gun out of the way when sitting and helps keep it from snagging on brush etc. as you pass through. I happily discovered that it’s comfortable for me to wear all day.
Given that I lost the hunting knife I had just made for myself (I virtually never have the opportunity to make any sort of knife for myself) I naturally needed another, and took some time while my back healed to build one.
My second hunting knife of the season, with a saber-ground 4-3/4″ zero-edge blade of 1084 tool steel and a stacked-leather and antler handle, sanded to 3000-grit and finished with lacquer.
With that done and my back reasonably healed I headed for the Happy Hunting Grounds. A friend of mine has 50-some acres near Pe El Washington, only a couple hours away. It is surrounded by a five-foot wire-grid fence all around and is prominently posted ‘No Hunting.’ It has a few acres of pasture, where she keeps a horse and a modest herd of goats, a stream and a bit of marsh, woods and a lot of dense brush.
It also has Blacktail deer. Rather a lot of them, and they cross the fences back and forth onto state land. There’s also a Black Bear, but he keeps to himself and they leave him alone. The plan was to build a blind overlooking the pasture and another along the top-line of the property.
The driveway traverses open fields; the HHG is up on the hillside a bit, which has been useful when the Chehalis River floods. It then crosses the Willapa Trail, an old railroad embankment turned into a trail that runs sixty miles from Chehalis to Pe El. This was also useful during the flooding, as it is just elevated enough that they could ride a horse into town when needed.
I was driving in, going slowly on the gravel drive, I spotted a flash of movement by the trail. I immediately thought, ‘A deer!’ then mentally chastised myself for being buck-crazy. Of course it wasn’t a… oh wait, it was a deer! It was a doe, and she moved up the trail a bit from the crossing and disappeared into the bushes on the far side of the trail. Hopefully a good omen…
As I pulled in and parked Steve, the property owner’s roommate, approached and informed me he’d just walked down to the mailbox and back and had seen deer in the lower pasture, not far from where I’d seen the doe. They weren’t there by the time I drove in, so they had likely retreated into the pucker-brush.
I consulted with JoAnne, the property owner, about placing the blind overlooking the pasture and discovered something important… this wasn’t a hunt. It was a HIT. The intended victim? A spike-buck who had been raiding her Currant bushes and garden. She wants him dead, because he’s a nuisance and is “too stupid to live.” This year any blacktail buck is fair game owing to a population spike, so this young deer will soon be ‘sleeping with the fishes.’ I mean the fish in my chest-freezer.
This little cuss hangs out with his sister in the lower southwest woods; we’ll call them Bonnie and Clyde for convenience. They come up along the driveway, cross south of the house and either head across to the garden to the west or raid the apple tree by the house.
Bonnie and Clyde casing the joint, in the company of an unnamed accomplice.Photo courtesy of Steve Kummerer
Now, these deer are not shy; a few days ago Clyde was happy stripping the Currant bushes, and she had to approach within ten feet, yelling, before he sullenly deigned to move away. This punk has no respect. It is in fact common for them to come right up next to the house; the apple tree there has no apples remain below about six feet.
This being the case JoAnne suggested that rather than building a blind I could simply sit behind the tomatoes along the southern fence of the garden, and looking things over I had to agree; they make a pretty good blind, and these two delinquents will walk right past on their way to commit their nefarious deeds. She is also of the opinion that once Clyde is out of the picture his sister will realize the error of her ways and join the northern herd along the top-line and into the state property. Time will tell…
First time I’ve ever used a blind with tomatoes…
They invited me to join them for dinner, and we passed a pleasant evening on the porch and feasted on Cornish game hens, Chantrells they had harvested locally and squash from their garden, roasted with Parmesan cheese and herbs. Delicious! Eventually I retired to my van, where I was to sleep for the night. We just bought an airbed that fit nicely in the back and I brought a couple of comforters, but forgot a pillow. I learned some valuable lessons last night, chief among them being ‘Don’t fully inflate the airbed.’
I woke after a couple of hours feeling like I had been sleeping on fist-sized rocks. Lesson number two was that my pack was a lousy excuse for a pillow. Being a man of a certain age I was desperately in need of a bathroom, which meant getting up and trekking to the house. It was about 33 degrees, and with my back feeling like I’d been beaten with a board I struggled out of my warm nest into the freezing cold to take care of business. Returning I turned on the van and ran the heater until I was toasty-warm. I settled back in in a seemingly comfortable position and drifted off. Two hours later it was ‘rinse and repeat.’ Eventually I let some air out of the bed, which was better but altogether it was a miserable night.
The HHG on a cold, foggy morning. This is looking south, down the hill from the house towards the pasture.
I woke up around dawn and it was 36 degrees and foggy. JoAnne, God bless her, had coffee waiting. After some coffee and breakfast of Linda’s home-made sourdough and some artichoke/Jalapeno spread I threw on my ‘please-don’t-shoot-me-orange’ vest and had a seat behind the tomatoes. As the hours passed the fog burned off and things warmed up. Bonnie and Clyde never showed. They usually come along between ten and eleven, but not that day.
Mid-afternoon I took a break, walked down the driveway looking into their usual haunts, but no luck. I deflated the air mattress, rearranged the interior of the van, deciding I’d rather sleep in in one of the seats than try to make the mattress work.
I spent a couple more hours in the blind after, but the deer never showed. With the prospect of a storm blowing in the next day and a powerful desire to visit my wife and take a shower I headed home… knowing full-well that if the storm didn’t blow in on schedule the deer would show up while I wasn’t there.
Photo courtesy of Steve Kummerer
So of course they did.
I’ll be headed down in the morning for another go, and will be out over the weekend, properly showered and shaved and well rested.
There are bigger, more impressive bucks running the top-line, and odds are if I built a blind up there and was in it at first light I’d bag one. That’s been a thing that worked in the past and likely would work again. But they’re up there doing deer stuff; this pair is making a nuisance of themselves, eating JoAnne’s food and frankly being a bother, so unimpressive or not, Clyde it is.
Driving out I caught a glimpse of a black shape in the brush between the upper and lower pastures, which I assumed was a stump or suchlike. I looked again to make sure, and it was moving; pretty definitely the local bear. Not big as such things go, but with JoAnne’s goats running in those pastures it might be a thing to keep an eye on.
I’ll let you know how it goes, and if you’re out hunting also I wish you well.
Michael Tinker Pearce, 23 October 2020
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