Homesteader Life

Venision shot on the hill, fried in butter, seasoned with sea salt and fresh ground pepper, beans and potatoes from garden…..heavenly meal, really. Dad and I got the buck cut up a few days ago, after it was aged to perfection in an old cherry tree. I wish now I’d weighed the old boy couse I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much meat off one deer. Still have the doe to do, and she’s pretty hefty too. I was thinking while eating that old buck, just how much a part of northern agrarian culture the whitetail is. I know, I know, I’m sure it is in other regions as well. But I can’t speak about those customs and people becouse I don’t live there, I’ve always lived in the northcountry. I was thinking about how these very deer I killed this year were decendents of deer that Leah’s kin shot and ate for a century here. That the first agrarian families to settle these hills relied on the whitetail same as we do, perhaps even more than we do. I’m sure they had the same intimit realationship with those animals as we do. For the past couple of hundred years, we who sustain ourselves from this hill, have watched the babies in the spring; knowing were each doe keeps her fawn and what path she’ll take if startled. We’ve all kepted track of them through the winter and done what we can to make sure their habitat remains. We’ve nurished our bodies on their flesh, hung their antlers on our walls, made hat racks and gun racks from their legs. We’ve skinned and stretched hides, made leather fit for royality and then wore it ourselves. We’ve told stories around fires, and retold them again as if it were the first time. Hunting for subsistance is part of the glue that holds rural culture together. Its still here, still part of our lives, but in a much smaller way than before. The country has been cityfied in many ways. There are lots of folks that live out here that work in town and eat food from a box, they might drive a pickup truck but they ain’t no more “country” than a man in a highrise in NYC. They might even hunt, but not like we do. They aren’t in the woods all year long, just for two weeks in November. They’ve got calls and gizmos, gps’s and “sent killer” spray. They have guns that cost more than I paid for this trailer I’m living in, worst of all, they hire out the butchering. These are folks that call hunting a “sport”, the most insulting thing you could do to our time honored way of life. A “sport”, blah….but thats what they’re turning it into. Nothing more important than football or soccer, a “sport”. Perhaps hunting and trapping is nothing more than a “sport” to those industrailized wage slaves who traded good and wholesome living for video games and SUVs. You’ll never hear me call it that nasty word, its part of who I am and part of what my people do and have done for many many years.

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