Second Chance Buck: The Aftermath

It's been more than 48 hours since I killed my first deer ever, and I'm still buzzing. Sometimes I'm calm and I think about other things, like work. Then I see a student who's into guns or hunting, and I say, "Wanna see my buck?" and the whole spazzing thing starts over again.

This has been both a time of reflection and a time of work.

I've reflected on how lucky I was that the buck did exactly what I needed: Hold still and present a good target.

I've reflected on how grateful I am to have made a good shot that killed him in no more than 20-30 seconds - and really, isn't that the measure of what a good shot is, a quick death, not a feat accomplished over great distance? It's probably what I'm most proud of. I know it's something to be thankful for, not to take for granted.

And I've reflected on the sheer volume of congratulations that have come in from quarters I never expected - schoolmates I haven't seen in 27 years! Crazy stuff.

Then there's been the work. Read more...
Boyfriend has been doing his thing, breaking down the meat into all the parts he loves - brisket, flank, tenderloin, backstrap.

My job, aside from writing labels on the vacuum-seal bags, has been prepping the skull for a
"Euro mount," or, as my family says, "skull."

It started on Sunday when Boyfriend announced that it would be my job to skin the head. Not bad, compared with the work he was doing. So I set to work:


Here's what I learned in that process: If you spend much time worrying about someone poking your eyeballs out, stop worrying - they're very firmly attached. My mother, who's a durable soul, happened to arrive at my house in time to watch me digging the eyeballs out of the skull, and she had to avert her eyes for a good 10-15 minutes.

Once skinned, we popped the head in the stock pot for a few hours to help cook stuff out. Yeah, stuff.


Then, this morning and this evening, I picked "stuff" off and out of the skull - cartilage, meat and even brains. I've never seen cooked brains before, and I'm here to tell you, it looks like foie gras - white and creamy.

No, we didn't eat it. But my Argentinian neighbor Silvia would probably be distraught to know that we hadn't. Last time we brought game home, she wanted to know what we did with the brains. "Heart," she said, "ees for thee cats. But I love thee brains."

Silvia, I'm not there yet. Maybe someday.

Anyway, what I'm left with is this:


The skull, picked mostly clean, will now go into a bucket of water in the back yard, where we'll let bacteria finish what I started, probably for most of winter. When it appears to have been picked clean, we'll bleach it, and it'll be ready to hang over our mantle, right next to the deer Boyfriend got this summer, Spork - a harder-earned trophy than mine by a million miles.

Even the side-by-side trophy has significance: I started hunting several years after Boyfriend, so almost everything I've done for the first time is something he's done long before. But for both of us, this was the first year we killed blacktail deer. And while the trophies may pale in comparison with the whitetail that cover so much of our country, these hunts are just as hard fought, the accomplishments no less meaningful.

In just a few days, we'll be duck hunting - a pursuit that will consume much of our free time until the end of January. But we'll have plenty of venison to add to the dinnertable mix this winter, and plenty of deer-hunting memories that won't disappear with the first shotgun blast. And for that, we're grateful.

© Holly A. Heyser 2009