“Do you want to help me clean it?”
It was the day after Thanksgiving. My older brother was referring to the dead deer we were dragging to the shed next to his house.
“No thanks, but I’m here for moral support.” I was wearing a nice, navy blue pea coat and wasn’t about to risk getting deer blood on it. Better I just watch from the sidelines.
Fourteen minutes earlier, Tim (the above referenced older brother) was in the living room of his home in northern Indiana, complaining he’d just spent an hour in his backyard/forest deer stand and spotted exactly zero deer. (Deers? No. Deer. For sure.) Standing with his back to the glass panels constituting the rear wall of the house, he bitched about the morning’s lack of forest creatures presenting themselves to him in his backyard kill zone. However, while he carried on, I noted three deer wandering around his backyard, fearlessly partaking in whatever greenery was available in late November.
“Um, Tim…” I pointed over his left shoulder toward the furry visitors.
“Oh, sure. Now they show up! AFTER I spend an hour freezing my ass off in the deer stand.”
“Well, can’t you just go ahead and kill one of them now?” It seemed to make sense. The dumb deer were standing right there, almost asking to be shot.
Tim paused to allow his mind to review the State of Indiana hunting manual I was sure he’d memorized. “Hmmm…I guess I can.”
After grabbing his rifle from its home by the fireplace, Tim, so as not to disturb the clueless deer, carefully opened the back door. While he assumed a rifleman’s knee, I ducked down behind a chair and covered my dog’s ears.
The shot rang out.
“Did you get one?” Having taken cover with the dog, I was not in a position to see if he’d been successful.
“I got one.” Tim stood, and with his empty hand, motioned toward the trees. “The other two ran away.”
Smart move on the part of the deer, I thought, although I was ninety-five percent sure they had no idea what had transpired. Do deer know how guns work? Doubt it.
Meanwhile, my sister-in-law, who knows how guns work, was in tears. I was told later that this was normal, that Tracey generally cried whenever Tim killed something. She was, however, in charge of the meat preparation so, clearly, she wasn’t totally against the act.
My attention turned from Tracey’s tears when I noticed the reappearance of the dead deer’s compatriots.
Tim looked out the window and sighed. “They always return to the scene of the crime. Not sure why.”
I had my own theory on this phenomenon. “Maybe they came back to look for their friend?”
My observation did nothing to alleviate Tracey’s tears, and in fact made them worse. Until that moment, apparently, she’d not considered the deer might be searching for their fallen comrade.
Tim and I ventured to the carcass, which rested only a few yards from where it got shot, a testament to Tim’s skill. We did not have to chase it and it did not suffer. Tim performed a quick inspection before grabbing a forehoof.
“You wanna grab the other one? We’ll just drag it down to the shed.”
Lucky for us, the trip was not far and sort of downhill; the most strenuous part was maneuvering the corpus around the chicken coop, which stood between us and the shed. The deer cooperated as best it could. The cooped chickens, disinterested, offered no help.
Once inside the shed, Tim decided to try something new and not hang the deer head- down. I’m not sure exactly what this would accomplish. Maybe it was deer-cleaning-opposite-day, or perhaps the inverted hanging somehow made the meat kosher. Still, I said nothing. After all, I had zero experience with this sort of thing and Tim at least acted like he knew what he was doing, even though the knife he was using to rend the fur looked like something he’d grabbed from a kitchen drawer. It was about the size of a paring knife, and it occurred to me that, in every butchering scene I’d ever watched on television, the person doing the butchering used a much larger knife. And this seems appropriate. The large knife. I mean, wouldn’t you want something big in order to cut through all that flesh and bone? I know I would, especially in a zombie apocalypse scenario. In a zombie apocalypse a big knife could serve more than one purpose.
But I digress.
Tim did most (all) of the work while I played fetch with my dog. Brody, like the chickens, found almost nothing interesting about the dead deer. Sure, he sniffed it a little, but he demurred when my brother offered him a slice of raw deer meat, preferring fetch and knowing he would have dry dog food for dinner eight hours hence.
“Can you hold her head up?”
The problem with hanging the deer that way was that its head was flopping backward, getting in the way of his work.
“Sure.” I did not find the idea of handling the deer’s floppy head at all appealing. I mean, I really was wearing a nice coat, while Tim’s looked like something you’d find in a dumpster at a wastewater treatment plant, but it was the least I could do. I’d literally done nothing to help once we got the deer into the shed, so I pulled my coat sleeve up and held the head aloft. But now the doe’s doleful eyes were staring right at me. I thought this would bother me more than it did, but in a (rare) moment of clarity I was reminded of a basic truth: Everything dies. None of us is getting out of this alive. Not the deer. Not me. Not even Brody (even though I want him to live forever.)
When Tim finished filling a cooler with deer parts, we carried it up to the deck behind his house, where he placed weights on top of it so that the meat would remain unmolested by the local racoons. As I mentioned, it was Tracey’s job to transform the spoils into steaks and sausages, something she is apparently quite good at.
For my part, in addition to the shed epiphany, I’ve taken a lesson from the experience. Here it is: should the zombie apocalypse come, I’m going to scooch to northern Indiana as quickly as possible. My brother has survival skills, and I’m sure the meat freezer is full.