The Great Hunter is off on the first of his annual jaunts to kill a Bambi and stock our larders for another year. He admitted the shine has somewhat gone off hunting trips though. Other than spending time with his son, hunting trips are a whole lot of work. He’s been hunting with his son for many years and before that, before we began dating, he had several annual hunting trips planned each year with a good friend. It’s just a fall ritual.

He and his son stay in a ramshackle farmhouse owned by his son’s father-in-law. It has electricity but no running water, which means only an outhouse in the back. Almost everything they need must be brought from home besides some basic kitchen supplies. The place stays empty most of the year. People don’t go down there to stay in the farmhouse, they go down there to have access to the land to hunt and ride four-wheelers.

Before he left, he said getting a deer (the whole point of it?) made the hunting trip even harder. Fewer and fewer places process deer, so killing a deer involves gutting it (eew), hauling it out of the woods, taking it to a deer station to be checked in, and then another separate trip to a processing plant. And there are less and less of those which means a hunter may have to drive farther. Several weeks later, there’s a second trip to the processing plant to retrieve your meat.

The Great Hunter knows I am not a big fan of deer meat.  I’m a city girl, and I don’t remember my dad going hunting, although I have a photo of him with a string of ducks. He must have hunted squirrels at some point because I remember Mom cooking them once. She didn’t tell us what they were until after we had eaten—it tastes like chicken, lol. (I really don’t remember what it tastes like.)

I have no experience in preparing wild game. The first time I tried to cook deer meat I almost gagged at the smell. It is so much more pungent than hamburger. Even though it was ground up, I knew if the boys smelled it while it was cooking, there was no way they would eat it. The Great Hunter now has it processed with one-fourth hamburger which I use instead of ground beef in most recipes.

Back at the hunting mansion, the Great Hunter and the others are up before the sun, traipsing through the woods to their assigned hunting blinds. I know the Great Hunter has a camouflage tent that he set up earlier and he sits in waiting for the big buck to come by and offer himself as a sacrifice to the human. And they sit and wait and wait. That sure isn’t my idea of fun. Not only would I not like to get up that early, I don’t want to go out in the cold, and, there’s no way I could sit for hours looking at nothing. I’d have to read or do something or I’d go crazy. Then I’d probably miss whatever shot I might have had. Needless to say, Bambi is safe from me.