Oklahoma Brush

About a boy's first hunting trip

     From on top of the hill side I looked down into the valley where several doe were hunched over and nibbling at the earth. I moved my eye over the scope of my rifle and listened to my cousin’s instruction.
     “Breathe. Squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it. Take your time, they aren’t going anywhere. Do you see the one you want? Good. Now, squeeze the trigger.”
     I took several long breathes of cold air and did as I was told.
     The rifle went off and the scope jumped, I lost sight of the deer for a moment after the shot fired. I scanned the area looking for the dying animal hobbling off, but couldn’t see it. I thought I had missed the doe entirely and was confused on how I had managed that. The sight placement was right where it should have been. A second later I heard my cousin speak.
     “Hot damn! You nailed ‘er! The deer didn’t even take a step, fell dead right where you shot her! All my years of hunting, and I ain’t never seen that happen before.”
     Sure enough when I brought the scope back to where it first rested and lowered it to the ground, there was the doe laying on its side. It looked like it could have been asleep.
      We descended into the valley and stood over the dead animal. I remembered what the instructor of my hunter’s safety course said about this moment.
     “Sometimes when you shoot ‘em they don’t die right off the bat, even when they’re juss lyin there after you followed thair blood trail. You gohta be sure they’re dead. I hear stories of hunters taking pictures with thair trophies, they put thair rifles in the anlers of a big ol’ elk or something of the sort, and the damn beasts get up and run off, never to be found, with some poor SOB’s heirloom hunting rifle in thair rack.”
     “A good way to tell that the animal has been properly harvested-- Harvested. Tha’s what the NRA recommends you call it when you kill something while hunting, sounds better is all-- is tha tongue will be hanging out of the creature’s mouth.”
     There was the tongue.  
     Hanging out of the doe’s mouth.
     Blood had dripped into a small puddle underneath her head, the 30 degree air had caused the blood to already start congealing on the tip of the deer’s tongue.
     There were no antlers to place my rifle on, but my cousin still insisted than I kneel next to it for a picture. I lifted the limp head and tried to place the sagging, bloody tongue back in its mouth to give the creature some semblance of dignity. To keep it from looking like a fool.
      I think I gave a small smile next to the deer. I was glad when the picture was over. Then we drug the carcass away and my cousin handed me a knife. My dad had got his deer the day before and my cousin showed us how to cut it open and cleanout its body of organs.
     I pinched the skin above the anus and made the first incision.
     “Careful not to cut too deep, Could spoil some meat if you rupture the intestines, or stomach.” My cousin reminded me. I kept cutting up the abdomen of the doe and stopped just short of the rib cage.
     “Now you just got to get up in there and pull all that junk out. You’ll still need the knife to cut some of the connective tissues and to get into the chest cavity. There’s a membrane there that separates the heart and lungs from all of the digestive organs.”
      I put on a pair of elbow length plastic glove and sunk my arms into the body and started to tear. Pale, slippery tubes of intestines came out, along with deep red colored liver and a pinkish stomach. All sort of smaller organs were lost in the hot mush. The body steamed as I went back in for the heart and lungs.
     “Now the lungs and heart don’t just come out, you got to cut the thing out at the top. You got to saw in half the trachea or whatever the hell that tube is.”
     The pile of discarded viscera smelled like iron and old barn yard hay. There was far less blood than I thought there was going to be. My cousin and dad made fun of me for being close to throwing up. I wasn’t, but I did gag once.
     After all of its entrails had been taken out my dad and cousin each grabbed one of its hind legs and drug it up to a windmill that was out in the field pumping fresh spring water into an open air reservoir. As they pulled the dear along its head limply tumbled over long abandoned gopher holes. I walked behind them as they pulled the deer for a moment, but soon sped up my pace and walked in front of them. The sight of the lifeless head bouncing over the rough earth, with the limp tongue hanging out of its mouth was dismal.
    The truck that we drove out there was parked next to the windmill. That was where we skinned and quartered the deer. To skin it we cut a hole in the thin film of skin on its hind legs between the tendon and bone. Then I slipped metal hooks between the gaps and hoisted it up off the ground, using a rope tied to the hooks and an outcropping horizontal bar from the windmill to hold the body in the air.
     I cut the skin around the hind legs in a circle and began cutting the flesh from the body. It went slow and came off in one piece. When I got to the head my cousin handed me a hack saw and told me to cut it off.
     I did.
     Then he told me to drag the skin and head away from the windmill. He said that the coyotes will take care of it, and the rest of the organs we left behind.
     “Well that’s why she went down like that. Shot her right through the spine.” He said as he walked over to start on quartering the meat.
      Then he took the saw from me and cut the body down the middle, when he had done that he told me to hold part of the halved dear while he the sawed that piece in half as well. We put the meat into an ice chest and rinsed blood off our hands, faces, arms, and shoes using the water the windmill was pumping. Since the water came from the earth it was warmer than the air which was a welcoming change from the mid November weather of Oklahoma.
     When we got back to my family’s house my aunt looked at me and said, “So you got your first deer.”
     “Yup.” I replied
     “Did you have fun?” She asked.
     “No.” I replied.

Author's Note

I'm interested in hearing about anything that needs improvement.

Reviews

[Marie]

In the first line of the second paragraph, do you want to say "Breath?", or do you want to say "Breathe?" "Breath" works, but "Breathe" sounds better.
The description was excelent. You went through the entire process as if you had done if yourself, but perhaps you did.
Any way, it's very good and shows that you are multi-faceted. Congratulations.

[jake]

awesome, thanks for the input! i will change that.