A Post With Dead Animal Pictures

Not interested in a blog post which features dead animal pictures? Maybe don't read this post, mm-kay. Not that the pictures below are particularly horrifying or gory, but I'll understand if dead animal pictures aren't really your style. Heck, they're not exactly my style either, yet here they are, nonetheless.

This is the story of how Andy's six point buck turned into a rather hefty eight point buck yesterday afternoon. (No, not by magic.) A couple days back, Andy predicted that if Obama won the election that he would shot the biggest buck ever on Wednesday. This evoked a "Uh-huh, sure," from me, but after a pretty incredible election night which reaffirmed my faith in Minnesota, I started to wonder if he might be right.

It should be noted that both Andy and I are getting over mild colds. In fact, I did not step outside of the cabin once on Tuesday and instead spent most of the day on the couch watching Judd Apatow movies while suffering my way through the sneezing, constantly blowing your nose stage of a cold and waiting for election results to come in. After staying up to listen to Romney's concession speech, I fell into a Nyquil induced slumber and woke up with a start on Wednesday morning, anxious to hear how the two proposed amendments to the Minnesota constitution had fared.

After making some victory waffles, I decided I should probably get some fresh air, so I decided to go for a hike with Andy. We tromped around in the woods near the cabin for about an hour and a half, casually looking for deer. We were nearly back to the truck and I was starting to feel a little eleven o'clockish, so I was less than thrilled when Andy announced a "short little detour" down a swampy section of powerline.

We'd walked maybe 30 seconds down the powerline when I saw rather large buck ambling around about 100 yards from Andy.

"Andy," I hissed. "That has a huge rack."

Andy had to slosh about a bit to find a place where he could rest his rifle and I stood stock still in the swamp for about five minutes until Andy could shoot.

Here's a tip for you. If you have a head cold, dragging a 200+ pound deer several hundred yards through a swamp, may not be the best activity for you. I'd always heard Andy complain about dragging out deer, but knowing that dragging out a deer is hard and actually experiencing dragging a deer out of the woods are two very different things. By the time the picture below was taken, I was pretty sure I was dying.

Happily, when we got to the truck (an hour and a half later . . . .ooooo, so very hungry and thirsty by then), a guy from the local electric co-op stopped and helped us get the deer into the back of the pick-up. Still, my fine motor skills were pretty fried for the rest of the day. I was dropping all sorts of things in the kitchen yesterday night! 

Suddenly we have a much bigger butchering job on our hands. Luckily the new meat grinder shipped out today and I was able to pick up some pork shoulder locally because we have a lot (a lot!) of sausage making ahead of us. It's safe to say that deer season is officially over at Of Woods and Words and that we will not be going hungry this winter. (We are sharing all this venison.)

My friend Sarah and I were laughing yesterday night about how much my life has changed in the last four years or so. If you'd told me that one day I'd be helping hunt deer and be concerned about Boone and Crockett scores, I would have laughed in your face. Yet here we are, and you know, here really isn't a bad place to be.