RappaccinisDaughter (sock puppet alert) imparts a valuable lesson,
Hey, Greensleeves!
Check this shit out.
So I was just out hunting last weekend, and I got a shot on a nice doe. Lucked into it, really—I was late heading out to my blind setup and the sun had already risen, but lo! she walked right out in front of me. Now, I had to take the shot freehand because my sticks were still slung over my shoulder, and fuck my life, I was doing it with iron sights. But I have a nice .50-cal inline muzzleloader, and they’ll reach out as far as 200 yards, so if I can see it in the iron sights, I can hit it. Brought it up to my shoulder, focused on the front sight, and KA-FUCKING-BOOM!
I don’t know if you’ve ever shot a muzzleloader, but they make one hell of a smoke cloud. Even if you’re not in a blind, it can really make it hard to see how the shot went down. I knew I’d hit her, but by the time I came out of recoil (I didn’t even feel it at the time, but I had a nice bruise flowering on my collarbone by the next morning) she was gone, daddy, gone. You wouldn’t believe how strong a deer really is until you experience it firsthand; they can travel up to a quarter of a mile just on the oxygen that’s already in their muscles. Amazing creatures, really. And I was going to have to track her through some pretty heavy brush.
So the first thing you have to do is, you have to let the bullet do its work. If you start trying to track them right away, they’ll keep running. So I lit up a cigarette—mmmm! tobacco!—and smoked the whole thing, just standing there. Then I put it out and put the butt back in my pack (because I’m eco-friendly like that), and went to work. Luckily, there was a light snowfall, so when I got to where she’d been standing, the tuft of tawny fur was really easy to see. So was the blood trail, which thankfully started right there.
I wound up actually finding her about 45 yards away, piled up at the base of a tree. I like to follow the old German hunting traditions, given that it’s half my heritage, so I plucked a little twig and put it in her mouth, for her symbolic “last bite.” It’s kind of bittersweet, that moment, knowing that you’ve ended the life of this beautiful creature, but when I opened her mouth I saw how ground-down her teeth were. She was in good shape, but she was pretty old. Who knows if she’d have lasted out that winter?
Then, I had to tag her and start cleaning her. Gross, but necessary. Piece of advice—you really cannot beat the “butt out” tool for getting that part of the deer out of the way. I’d heard coyotes howling all the previous evening, so I figured I wouldn’t need to bother burying the gutpile. The ‘yotes would have taken care of it by sundown.
The bitch was hauling her out. I usually have this little sled-like arrangement that I use, but I’d been in such a rush that morning I’d forgotten to bring it along. So I had to grab her by her hind legs and drag her, because I’d ALSO forgotten to bring my blaze-orange engineer tape. There’s no way I’m going to try to haul her around on my shoulders without it…that’s a great way to get shot by another hunter.
I took her back to the cabin and wondered if I should finish butchering her, but then I remembered that I was the one who brought the handle of Knob Creek, so I figured I could cozen someone into doing it for me as long as I shared. (I’m still learning the butchering part—I tend to waste meat by accident.) But I did go ahead and get the backstraps out, and by the time everyone else made it back in, I had them going in the broiler for everyone’s lunch. Hooray! The End.
TL; DR for Greensleeves: If you’re going to write 500 words that have nothing to do with anything the original blog post is about, at least try not to bore everybody to fucking tears.
I laughed.
PS The reason I don’t think this is the ORD is that the writing, stylistically as well as substantively, sounds like the voice of a man. But bell curve tails exist to add a little spice to the patterns of life.
