The Deer-Slayers??

Last Saturday, my oldest kids and I got our first taste of deer hunting.  Now I had shot, dressed and cooked wild rabbit back in SoCal, but I never had to don camouflage to do so... pretty much just watched out the backyard.  In fact, for the first 40 years of my life, I had never hunted anything.  (Fishing, yes, but never hunting.)  But in the last few years I started to awaken to just how metropolitan my existence had been, heretofore, and to how necessary it will likely become for me to become adept at procuring and processing my family's meat supply.  Hence, my interest in hunting and trapping what seemed to be the most plentiful game in North San Diego County -- rabbits.

But now, I was in Big Sky Country.  Deer country.  Elk country.

I started to think about how super-gnarly it'd be to go out an bag some animal that weighs more than I do.  So, as soon as the ink dried on my Montana driver's license, I took these two great kids (my oldest kids, in the pic) and my dear bride and signed us up for Hunter Education.  A few months later here we were, out with some local friends, on the lookout for whitetail west of Marion.  The weather was fine, and the "rut" (the mating season) was nearly at its peak, so I'd been told.  So by all accounts, it was reasonable to expect a fair amount of deer sightings... easy pickings, right?

Well, not so much.  (I know, I was probably ridiculously naive about the whole process.)  Notice something conspicuously absent from our picture?  (And no, I'm not referring to my son's hunter-orange vest.  He had it off only in transit from one hunting site to another.)  Turns out a couple of us only saw a couple of deer way off in the distance, toward the very end of the day... to far to go after, so late in the game.  So it was with no small sense of disappointment and frustration that we closed out the day empty-handed.  Since the season ends this Sunday, I was mentally preparing myself for a freezer devoid of venison this year.  I was gearing up to learn as much as I could about making next year's outing more productive.

Then, my friend Dave (who took us out last Saturday) called me today, saying he had an extra deer he was willing to give us: we just needed to come over and cut it up into pieces small enough to get home. So it turns out that we'll get the "processing" experience before the "procuring" part.  The hand of Providence can work in peculiar ways, sometimes.

More pictures to come, next time...