Editor’s note: Yes, We are aware that JFK’s daughter, now US Ambassador to Japan, is named Caroline, and that the Honor Guard unit that Mike Grove commanded during the ceremonies surrounding the funeral of President Kennedy was the Headquarters Company of the First Brigade of the Third US Infantry (“The Old Guard”) and of the Caisson Detachment during the funeral itself. He is buried in Section 30, Site 897-H at Arlington National Cemetery, just down the slope from the eternal flame that honors the President. I presume this means we will be neighbors again, sooner or later. The Staff of the Daily deeply regrets the crappy editing, but I had to get on the road to greet the Shooting Party who was to arrive at Refuge Farm, early bright.)
OK, so Heckle the Cat is not a huge fan of Vienna Sausage. My bad- I did not have any cat-food in the locker, and went for the smallest can of protein in the long-term bulk reserve stock I keep in readiness for the Zombie Apocalypse or whatever is going to happen next.
I may have known it already, but it is only now creeping past thirty degrees out in the thin winter light. Nice morning, but the chores are beckoning. The Shooting Party made swift work of some of them, after a Festival of All Calibers on the instrumented range over at the Russian Dacha. I think we put a total of about a thousand rounds down-range from a dozen distinct firearms.
Good, clean, safe fun, and many tales in between hot range periods. I don’t know what the neighbors thought about the commotion. Maybe not a great deal, since we could hear the distant echo of gunshots from both sides of the farm lane.
Mattski has constructed a marvelous tree-house for Sasha, the Russian Princess. She is cuter than ever, and her English is becoming so proficient that they are going to throw her into fourth grade next year. She had been held back a year, to Second Grade, when she arrived. She has mastered the language so well that they are going to let her skip part of the third grade and get back to parity with her age group.
Remarkable little girl, Sasha is. She considers the tree house to be exactly that; a place to climb and dream. Mattski only uses it a couple times a year, come deer season.
He got his deer on the second day of the season. He was up there in his plastic chair, waiting patiently as the light came up and the sun began to flood his lower fields. The doe emerged from the woods on my side on the property, and spotted him immediately and froze. So did Mattski. Then she went on to patrol the long grass in the adjacent field, and Mattski was able to unship his rifle and take a nice clean shot.
He got her in the neck, severing the spinal cord in a swift, clean and humane kill.
We applauded his marksmanship from the firing line. He said he field-dressed the carcass and had our pal at the Croftburn Farms Market process the meat into venison steaks and chops. I am invited to try some tonight, and I am looking forward to it, though I am confronted with the Omnivore’s Dilemma.
See, I know that doe, or better said, I knew her. I last saw her in my garden last Sunday. I remember meeting her the first time two years ago, part of a family unit that included another fawn a buck and the momma doe.
They were a regular feature, crossing right to left in the morning and left to right again onto the state forest acreage in the late afternoon.
I don’t know if the buck and the other doe were harvested already, but I haven’t seen them since. I never had any particular beef with them, so to speak. Nor do I have any particular aversion to trying the venison of a living being that coexisted peacefully with me up until a week ago.
I mean, it is the height of hypocrisy to think that the meat aisle at the local Food Lion is any more or less moral than killing a deer on your own land for food. Probably a great deal less, I would think, since it comes with the intrinsic cruelty of the feed-lot and the abattoir.
That is a mark of how effete my life has been. This marks only the second time I will have partaken in dining on something I knew in life.
The first was Dollar The Cow, a venerable survivor of some 20 Norwegian winters. She was getting too old for milking, and the Thorenson family (on whose farm I was living for the summer as an “exchange” laborer in Europe) decided to convert her to entrees for meals for a few weeks.
That is pretty thin experience for a life as an omnivore, I will grant you, and not a great deal of experience in what exactly constitutes the food chain on which we presume to sit at the apex.
The deer did not have an English name, nor for that matter, a Russian one. Now it is just dinner.
I think this is intellectually as honest as it gets. I have some very good friends who are resolute in their belief that eating meat is wrong on several levels. I find them to be admirable people, and unquestionably consistent in their belief system.
I am more like Heckle the Cat, I would think, happy to get something with protein even if Vienna Sausage is not first preference. I saw Heckle do in one of the voles from the warren in the front yard two summers ago, and the swift and efficient manner of the dispatch was something that struck me as remarkable, since we are so separated in urban life from anything like real nature, red in tooth and claw.
I recall taking a picture of the doe last week.
Interesting, I guess. Something to think about, certainly.
(The doe to the right is dinner now. Photo Socotra.)
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
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