Do we have enough?

 

The thought hit me on the flight home last Friday from a weeklong work trip in Las Vegas.  The next two days would be the last of the recently extended Mississippi deer season, which meant that time was ticking to fill the freezer.

 

In a typical year, our family consumes two deer in the form of tenderloins, roasts, steaks, burger, smoked sausage and breakfast sausage.  I don’t want to take more than we will eat, and I’ve tried very hard to stick to that rule since moving to the farm.

 

Reading Jim Harrison’s book, “The Search for the Genuine,” last year further convinced me of this belief.  I highly recommend the book for the numerous pearls of wisdom it offers for both the hunter and non-hunter alike.  Harrison was a treasure.

 

For the hunter and fisherman, Harrison offers an excellent rule of thumb for game harvest: “Go to your freezer. How much and what kind of fish and game do you have left in there from last summer and fall getting freezer burn?”

 

After taking stock of the contents of your freezer, Harrison says “write it down and subtract it as a penance from your bag limit this coming summer and fall.”

He goes on to say that “the bird carcasses and fish filets you take to the dump during spring cleaning represent an unnatural act against the natural world.”

 

I couldn’t agree more.  I despise the wasteful practice of letting game spoil without eating it.  In Harrison’s words, “If you’re not going to prepare the game properly and eat it, don’t shoot it.”

 

For me, it stopped being about numbers a long time ago.  In the maturation of a hunter, a numbers focus comes in stage two — the “limiting-out” stage — of the five stages of hunter development.

 

I’m with Harrison in his belief that “if you insist on going for numbers, stick to the skeet range or commercial trout, or play the state lottery….”  He had a few more salty things to say, but I’ll let you discover that in the book.

 

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that hunters should only take two deer.  I have friends who shoot the state limit each year (3 antlered buck deer and 5 antlerless deer, although some exceptions apply based on unit) and they and their families consume it all.

 

My point it simple–eat all that you take and don’t let it go to waste.  So, where did that leave me at the end of the day Friday?  To hunt or not to hunt, that was the question.  A quick peek in the freezer gave me my answer.

 

We could use a little more burger, but the freezer was almost full, and one more deer would be more than we needed.  I reasoned that two minds are better than one, so I decided to pose the question to my son Dan.  He agreed, and we decided that, at least for us, the 2024-25 deer season had ended.

 

With my dilemma resolved, I spent a little time Sunday afternoon pulling game camera batteries to recharge them.  That evening, the final day of season having drawn to a close, I sat reviewing several days of photos I missed while traveling.

 

While doing the same Monday and Tuesday night, I was thrilled to see several nice bucks made it through the season.  I smiled even bigger when I saw another old friend on camera.

 

We’ve had pictures of “Spotty” the piebald doe for six years now, and I was elated to see that she had survived another season.  I’m not naive enough to think that she is “my” deer or that she will not get shot if she roams into another area.  Honestly, I just love watching her.

 

The first year that I saw her in person, I started reading up on the history and lore of piebald deer.  Native American tribes considered a piebald deer sacred.

 

The deer were a sign of coming change and, for some tribes, the representation of a spirit transitioning between the physical and spirit worlds.  Many tribes even held that a piebald was magical and that killing such a deer would result in bad luck.

 

Perhaps this body of indigenous belief and reverence is why we still have piebald deer today.  It’s certainly why we still have one roaming the farm.  Hopefully, she will be with us for many years to come as for me, she only adds to the magic and magnetism of this place.

 

A hunter who’s excited about the deer that lived.  What does that say about me?  Ultimately, I think it goes back to taking only what we need and no more, but I also think it’s more than that.

 

Yes, I appreciate the fact that she’s a rare genetic anomaly, but for me, she’s much more than a deer with a recessive trait that results in a lack of pigmentation.  Seeing her walk out of the woods in the last light of day is an otherworldly experience.  It feels spiritual. It feels mysterious.

 

Barry Lopez wrote that indigenous people “tend to value more highly the importance of intimacy with a place…they’re more attentive, more patient, less willing to say what they know, to collapse mystery into language.”

 

If nothing else, I’ve certainly grown intimate with this place in my time here.  The piebald is an integral part of that, of this place, and as such, an integral part of me, at least for the time that we each have here.

 

Until next time, here’s to the mysteries that defy language, to taking only what we need, and here’s to seeing you out there in our great outdoors.