Deer Hunting in Wisconsin
By Joe Larson
© 2013

Caution: there’s no lewd language, sex, drugs, or rock and roll here, although there is some violence and bloody gory parts.

The hoopla and build-up to hunting season starts usually some weeks before the season opens, even the summer before. Head on out to Fleet Farm or your favorite sporting goods store to pick up a gun deer license and start looking for the latest copy of the state regulations. If it’s only July or so the book might not be out. They’ll have it later for you to pick up, or you can download it from the state DNR site.

Not much changes from year to year in the rules, and when it does it’s often on the news and you hear people talking about it in the cafes and bars around town. Still, it doesn’t hurt to check the book out every year, just to see what it really says.

Rules that might change are those talking about what you can shoot and where you can shoot it. The ten-day season dates are pretty consistent: it opens at sunrise the Saturday before Thanksgiving week, and closes at sunset the Sunday after Thanksgiving. But a lot of the state is now Chronic Wasting Disease area, and a lot is Herd Control, and the rules vary. The state guys are probably busy thinking up new terms for next year that will tweak the rules in new and exciting ways.

There are dozens of deer management units in Wisconsin. They are more or less county-sized, but are only partly consistent with county boundaries. In a Herd Control area of the state you can shoot either a buck or a doe, well, “antlerless,” anyway. In other areas you can only shoot a buck. In other areas and some years, if you shot a doe first, then you could shoot a buck afterwards: that was called Earn A Buck, and it was universally despised by hunters because of the inconvenience, hassles, and the way it made it so easy to violate the rules and make horribly expensive and criminal mistakes.

In some areas you can only use a shotgun to hunt; in others you can use a rifle. The shotgun-only areas are usually where there are more people. This is for safety. Shotguns will not carry as far as rifles.

Where I hunt is currently a Herd Control area, which means I can “harvest” one buck and an antlerless deer. Or, as is more commonly said, I gets to shoot da buck and da doe, eeder way.

Hey, it’s hard enough to get a single one of these critters, even before you start worrying about horns, size, health, weapon choice, etc. And taking two of them? You mean in the same season? Get real.

There are something like 650,000 hunters every year, and about 250,000 deer taken every year. You do the math. Chances are excellent you will see lots of beautiful Wisconsin farmland and forest, maybe a handful of squirrels, geese passing overhead heading south – and boy doesn’t that sound like a better idea every year – sometimes some more exotic animals like foxes or otters or bears or neighborhood dogs. I saw a wolf once, a white wolf. We watched each other for a while. Creepiest feeling I ever had.

You might even see some deer, if you’re lucky. And if you’re lucky on top of lucky, you might be able to take a shot at one.

They’re not just standing there broadside, waiting for you to take careful aim.

Many guys hunt with friends. It pays back rich dividends in friendship, shared experiences, safety in the woods, helping build community, and all of you have a better chance to get a deer. If three guys hunt together and only one shoots a deer, they’ll usually share the meat so that nobody goes without.

So you’ve had your gun deer license sitting on top of the gun safe since July, and it’s going on November now. You’re checking over your bag of goodies, thinking about what you’ll take along on the hunt. Rope, hand warmers, snacks for lunch, warm orange hat and gloves, freshly sharpened knife for field dressing (you hope), extra ammunition you hope you don’t need, leftover Halloween candy, drinks.

Some guys are out on the firing range or on private land in the summer or in September, sighting in their guns. I use a 4x scope on my .270 pump action rilfe, and if it gets knocked against a tree it probably needs adjusting. But I’m real careful with it so that doesn’t happen. Much.

Sighting in your rile means taking some carefully aimed shots at a target about as far away as you think a deer might be. For my area, that’s anywhere from thirty to one hundred fifty yards. Then you look and see where you hit the target. Yes, it’s okay to brace everything. It’s not realistic to the actual hunting environment, but you want a steady platform to get your scope adjusted right. If you’re consistently hitting the middle, you’re good to go. If not, fix it. You don’t want to be worrying about adjustments when you’re gripped with buck fever and have a split second to aim and make a shoot/don’t shoot decision.

Another good thing that happens during sighting in is that you get reacquainted with your rifle. What are all the buttons for, and which levers open the action and which put the safety on and off. How to load the clip. And how exactly does it sound and feel when it goes off. By this time I would hope you know what to expect, but a little advance practice never hurts. Remember to hold it tight to your shoulder. Hey, these are obvious things, but if you only go hunting once a year it’s good to remind yourself of the obvious things.

Finally the day is here. You can feel the anticipation in the air around the state. Pickup trucks pop up everywhere, often driven by orange-coated guys. Friday before season opening day sees a lot of travel as hunters get to their hunting areas.

Where can you go hunt? I’m pretty lucky, I own ten acres in a fairly decent area for deer habitat, and lately it’s been me and a friend there – that’s about as many hunters as that much land can handle. But there is a lot of public land that is open for hunting. You will need to contend with other hunters there. Maybe lots of them. You never know, and you need to be extra careful about shooting safety.

If you were born before 1974 you don’t have to take the DNR Hunter Safety class to get a deer license. But it’s a good idea to take it anyway. A lot of it is obvious but again, it doesn’t hurt to reinforce the obvious. Especially when there’s a firearm involved.

Safety is always the first consideration when using a firearm. Those things are dangerous. They can kill people just as easily as a deer. Maybe easier. After you pull the trigger you have no further control over where the bullet flies, and you better know for sure where it’s going. Toward a house or a road? Bad. Toward the ground? Okay, but even then if it hits a stone or something it could ricochet and then all bets are off.

The only perfectly safe way to treat a firearm is to leave it unloaded and locked in your gun safe. But millions of people manage to make them work safely every year, and there’s no need to have a panic attack about it. You can and should take a lot of steps along the way to minimize the danger when you take it out and go hunting. It’s mostly a collection of obvious things, the obvious things it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of now and then.

Treat every firearm as if it was loaded. Never point it at anything you aren’t trying to shoot. Transport it in the case, unloaded. Mostly just good sense and a realistic balance between caution and usefulness. Stay aware of where you are and what you’re doing, and aware of how you are holding the gun and where it is pointing.

I’ve been traveling to my friend’s house a few miles from our land on Friday, settling in there for an early night and some strategy discussions, then driving the final few miles early at oh dark thirty opening morning Saturday.

The weather could be anything, and you have to be ready for it. Rain, snow, cold, warm, clouds, clear. That’s why you’re so interested in the weather forecast the week before, so you know how to dress. But whatever the weather, you will be out in it for most of the day, sitting quietly. Dress warmer than you think you need to, and you might be okay.

As for rain, well. My current perch is up a tree but otherwise out in the open. If it rains, I get wet. That’s too bad. Be sure to clean the rifle afterward and oil it up good.

A little breakfast at Norm’s house, then we’re on the road. There’s a lot of hunter traffic, not really so strange even though it’s like 5:30am on a Saturday. Trucks parked along the county roads, the occasional glimpse of orange as hunters move through the darkness out into the woods.

Sunrise is usually around 6:30am around here, and I like to be up in my tree stand by 6:00am to let the world settle down around me.

I make much more noise than a deer would while moving through the woods. Deer are prey animals, and are constantly on the alert for predators. They can hear and smell really really well, and get spooked at the tiniest things. So just accept it that if there were any deer around in the dark, they know exactly where you are and are moving quickly and quietly away from you.

Up in my tree stand in the dark. I leave my rifle in its case at the base of my tree, a rope tied to its handles. The other end of the rope is tied to my bag of ammo and lunch and water. I climb my ladder with my bag, carefully twist around at the top to sit down, and hang the bag by its straps on a hook I put into the tree years ago. Then I pull the rifle, case and all, up to me and then load and set up to be ready.

For one thing, any deer in the neighborhood are probably long gone because of all my noise, no matter how quiet I’ve been. As far as they are concerned, I might as well have been setting off firecrackers and skyrockets to announce my blundering through the woods. But deer aren’t all that smart, and they will come back later if they think the coast is clear. And for another thing, it’s early and still black as night (heh) and there’s no way you could see to shoot anything anyway. So just hunker down in your stand and wait.

Spend some time meditating. Pray. Do Reiki. Whatever. When it’s about 6:15am and you can just barely start to make out a few features in the landscape, don’t be too surprised when you start hearing shots. Hopefully it’s nobody near you, because it really is still way too dark to shoot at anything. But some guys just can’t wait. I guess they’ve haven’t seen a deer for a while, but you have to wonder how they can see to hit anything that early.

When it’s lighter and you can see, be looking constantly back and forth. Silently, like a well oiled radar machine. Deer have their usual paths, but when the shooting starts they are pretty much on their alert all the time and they will go anywhere. Look behind you, look around both sides. Look where you saw that one come out a few years ago, look where you got one last year. Look where you’ve never seen one before but it’s thick trees so you never know.

This is the part where you need to be ready to spend a lot of time sitting in the tree waiting. Silently. Just assume that they can hear every noise you make, and that you cannot hear any noise they make. It’s not fair, but then you’re the one with the loaded rifle.

Some tree stands are elaborate affairs. I used to hunt with my Dad in a stand with a sun porch. It was really a four by eight foot plywood affair, a basic little house up off the ground about five feet, with windows and doors that all opened and closed, and a rough stairway up to the door. We kept a Mr Heater in there to warm things up, a couple of stools to sit on and a roof to keep off the rain. Pretty sweet, we thought we were in downtown heaven. Unfortunately, those plush digs were on a friend’s land, and the land got sold. Some other hunters are probably enjoying the sun porch now.

Deer hunting was a way for me to spend quality time with my aging father, both of us working together at something. At the time it was just another day outside, and could get to be kind of a chore, but Dad is gone now and I’m totally happy about every minute we were able to spend together.

Some guys sit on chairs on the ground, some up in trees. Some stalk “silently” through the woods looking for signs. What I’m using these days is called a ladder stand. A metal ladder goes up about fifteen feet and ends in a seat that is braced and attached to a sturdy tree trunk.

One good thing about tree stands is that deer don’t think any of their predators live in trees. Their predators are on the ground, so when they hear something they will usually not look up. That gives you a few precious seconds to aim and shoot. But they will figure out something is wrong when the loud bangs start, so you better be ready. Deer can run really fast, once they get started.

One bad thing about tree stands is that you can fall out of them. Be sure to tie yourself off, or if not, just get down out of them when you get tired. For goodness sake, a little nap on the ground level won’t hurt. A nap up in a tree could be dangerous. Mine has a metal rod around the chair to lean on, this makes it a lot safer, but you still need to be careful.

Wait doing nothing for several hours, then act on a few seconds notice? Yes, exactly. Did you drift off while sitting there? Better hope you tied yourself to the tree first. Sandwich in your gloved fist eating lunch? Right, that’s exactly when they’ll come by.

The hunting process from a stand is not very physical, but it is physically draining. You sit sometimes for hours moving as little as possible, staying as quiet as possible. If the weather is even a little cool, you will lose heat quickly and need to be dressed thickly. You can suffer from hypothermia even when it’s as warm as 50 degrees Fahrenheit or 10 Celsius for my metric friends. Those small hand warmers are my friends when it’s cold out. One in each boot, one in each glove, maybe more in my pockets. Stock up, they’re pretty cheap and usually on special at Fleet Farm before the season starts.

Spend your time watching and waiting, watching and waiting. If you’re with someone in an enclosed stand, you can talk quietly. If you’re alone, you will be spending a lot of time inside your own head. Enjoy this time. Keep your awareness open. Soar with the geese and the high altitude jets far above through the cloud-splattered sky as you hold tight to your dark blue metal rifle with brown carved wooden stock. Stare at the green pine trees and the tall brown meadow grasses until they grow faces that threaten great harm and leer at you out of their shadows and twigs.

I brought along my sketch book one year to try to capture a little of the fascinating shapes that came to me as the sun moved slowly and lowly across the sky. The process of breaking down and seeing the shapes that seemed so personal, so real, turned them into cartoons and broke up the visions.

A shot off in the distance, sometimes a series of shots, jerks you out of it. You learn to hear the differences between the different kinds of guns. If the shots are close, you perk up and get ready for a deer coming on the run past you. If there are a lot of shots, real quick, then that’s probably a miss and you might get a chance at a running deer pretty soon. The good shots, the ones that hit a deer, happen in singles, sometimes followed by a second shot a few minutes later. But you can’t keep your hair trigger reflexes on the ready all the time, and if nothing turns up you will relax back into your reverie.

When they appear sometimes it’s like magic. One minute nothing, the next second there are deer, silent but most definitely there. Like they sprang up out of the bare weeds, which they might have. If they’re running you might get a shot, although that’s a tough shot to make. Better is when they are slowly moving around, milling around, dipping down to crop some grass, then their head back up to look around.

They often travel in groups, so if you see one, wait a minute and see if there are any others behind it. But not always.

The best time to get one is early opening morning. They go on the alert right away, and get more and more skittish the longer the season goes. By the end of the ten day season most of the stupid deer are already taken, and the ones that are left are crafty old timers (with huge racks) who are psychotic and paranoid and are cowering in fear inside their impenetrable leafy fortresses of pricker bushes and tag alder swamp. You can still drive them out of there but it’s tougher. The dumb ones are out there right away, wondering what all the noise is about, and wandering into your field of fire.

Well, you know, maybe one out of three or four years they are. But anyway.

So let’s say you have Bambi in your sights, you hold the stock tight to your shoulder, brace and squeeze off a careful shot, and she falls over. Every hair on your body is going to stand on end.

What about when you shoot and Bambi takes off running? Did you hit it or not? You have to wait about five minutes, then go see. If you hit it, there ought to be blood to track. Deer can run really well after taking a serious injury: I watched one run away, apparently just fine, after I shot at it. But when I went to check, I found it dead about a hundred yards away. My shell had totally exploded its heart. Apparently that was just a temporary inconvenience for it. If you go after them too soon, they will keep thrashing themselves further back into the swamp. If you give them five minutes, they might stop and fall over for you. But you have to check.

Every hunter who gets a deer will have a story. Killing a deer is quite a rare and momentous achievement, and the experience is branded on your brain in sharp and colorful detail. It’s traditional to swap deer stories among friends. Although of course my story is more interesting than your story, I’ll patiently listen to yours before telling you mine.

But there you are, standing next to a freshly killed deer. Let’s just assume there’s blood around. Was this a buck or a doe? Even though you should have known this before you shot at it, and in my area it doesn’t matter, you could still be surprised. Small bucks with little nubbins look like does from a distance, because you can’t see the horns when they’re that small. That’s why they call them “antlerless” instead of does.

And also because when you’re done field dressing a deer there’s nothing left to identify the sex except for the skull ornaments, or lack of them. The DNR doesn’t much care what was originally inside the critter, it’s only checking on what you bring to the registration station.

Tag the deer right away. The process depends on the critter itself, but that’s one of the reasons you look over the regulations before the season. It’s all in there.

Oh but I skipped a whole lot of good stuff there, didn’t I. The process of field dressing is exciting and new every time I do it, because it doesn’t happen that often. Performing major surgery on a hundred pound animal, with a hopefully still sharp hunting knife. The drama: cutting around the bladder and anus and hoping you don’t open up any of the internal bags that contain the worst and smelliest liquids. But opening up the animal stem to stern and pulling out everything attached to the heart – which by the way is pretty much everything. Just accept the fact that whatever you’re wearing is going to get bloody, and get your elbows right down into the guts. Hey, it’s probably nice and warm in there, after all. You’re probably cold and maybe shaking from the adrenaline by now. And you want to handle a knife like that?

So take it easy, relax. Get some help from your friends if you need it. Norm and I help each other field dress. It’s always good to have another person to help wrangle a heavy deer.

Drag the deer out of the woods, manhandle it into the back of your truck. Yes, it’s still bleeding and you’re getting it all over your boots. But having a helper makes it a much easier job. Take it, visible in the back of your vehicle, to the nearest registration station and fill out the forms that tell the DNR you got one, what kind and what day and what time. They put a metal tag on it and you’re done. How do you find the nearest registration station? You should have asked around head of time. Or look for the orange signs in the gas stations or sport shops.

After all that if you want, go back to your tree stand and continue freezing – I mean, continue hunting. You still have a tag, after all. You get two when you start. One is for the Herd Control area and you can tag it on anything if you’re in the right area. The other one is your buck license, which is good anywhere in Wisconsin, but you can only shoot a buck. Ready for more? Is it still early in the season, and you want more meat? And you’re not frostbitten yet? Okay, back at it, and best of luck to you. But now you have to look for horns, and be sure about it. Hmm, you know bucks are usually bigger than does and have more meat, so it might be worth it to you.

Or you can pack up the old kit bag and head for home and a nice warm shower. Hang the deer in the garage for a while to let it continue to cool down and lose any remaining blood, then launch into the butchering process.

Here’s the short version of how we butcher up our deer. We learned the general process from an old friend of ours who was a butcher by trade, but it’s not actually that technical.

Start with the deer hanging in the garage, dripping its last bits of blood onto newspapers on the floor. Head up or head down, doesn’t really matter, just makes a difference in how you approach the steps. We usually do it head up, because for us it’s easier to wrangle Bambi into position.

First thing to do is skin and quarter it.

Start by taking a hacksaw to the four legs. Cut them off just above the knees. There’s no meat to speak of down there, and it’s all for the discard pile. Did you lay in a lot of garbage bags for this process? You better have: the extra strength ones that can hold a lot of weight.

Skinning requires a sharp knife. You can read all about this on the Internet, of course. I cut around the top of the neck, just below where the rope is holding the carcass up. Then cut a line down the front of the neck, down to the open chest cavity, then cut lines out the four legs.

Now grab onto the edge of the skin, using the knife to cut to free the skin from the meat. Pull a little, cut a little, pull a little, cut a little. Pull hard, cut cautiously. Continue for some time. The skin and fur is rather firmly attached, and will take some effort to get off. It usually takes me a good half hour or so to skin a deer. Stop and warm up your hands if it’s cold. It’s usually cold.

You can save the hide and do things to it to turn it into leather if you want. You can find places that are collecting the hides, and some of them actually might pay you a couple of dollars for each one. The outside is thick with deer hair, but the inside is raw sticky skin. Not something you’d want to wrap around yourself, not in that condition.

But now your deer is hanging there naked from the neck down. Did I mention there are gory parts? Keep any sensitive little children away from most of the skinning and quartering process. Maybe it’s better they don’t really know where their food comes from, not until they grow up a little more.

Quartering the deer is next. Even though that’s a misnomer. You will end up with more than four sections, for one thing, and the “quarters” themselves are not the same sizes at all.

The first cuts of meat I take out are the back straps. Some call those the tenderloins, although the real tenderloins are inside the chest cavity next to the backbone. The back straps are arm-sized muscles on either side of the backbone on the top outside. They are great cuts of tender meat, so treat them with care.

Get them in the sink in the house to get washed up right and let Mary start working on them right away. They might be dinner.

After that you can separate the front quarters out. They are usually held only be tendons and muscles so you can knife your way through them to get them off. Again, as you take them off put them into a tub or clean bag, into the house and sink to get washed up.

Then take your hacksaw from where you stashed it after you cut off the legs and make a cut straight up the deer through the pelvic bone, from the bottom to up to the base of the backbone. I have friends who use a Saw-Zall on their deer and they have no trouble cutting through anything with it. You probably need to use the hacksaw to get the two hind quarters off. The hinds are much bigger and heavier than the fronts, so be ready for when they finally break off.

If they fall down on the ground on the newspapers in the dirt and blood and sand, they will instantly pick up a fine layer of grit. The outsides are very sticky to dirt and slippery to your hands, which is not at all fair. But that’s the way it is, and you can still wash it all off in the sink.

Some people discard the ribs, some save them for barbecuing. The grilling process melts all the fat and tallow off, so I hear.

Cut off the ribs and do whatever you want with them, and you are left with the hairy head and neck still hanging. The neck has lots of hamburger meat on it, and you can cut it off where it hangs, or cut it away from the head and do it inside.

After all this time out in the cold you’re probably just barely feeling your fingers so I recommend doing it inside. You can warm up and everything can get a good cleaning in the sink.

Cleaning, with water of course. And a cup of hot coffee to warm your insides. You’re working with knives here, so stay sober and alert.

From here on methods differ widely. We take each hunk or quarter and wash it well, then cut all the meat off the bone. Any fat left on the deer is discarded; some deer have a thick layer of hard tallow, some don’t. My politically disastrous friend has been known to use the term “whisky pig doe” once or twice.

As you’re washing and working on the meat, you will find damaged spots. You just shot this poor animal a little while ago, after all. That’s bound to leave a mark. Just cut all of that out and toss it. If you don’t like the way something looks or smells, toss it.

Clean off all the tiny bitsy scraps of fat, and peel off as much of the silverskin as you can reach. This takes a while. Invite friends over, offer them freshly cleaned venison to take home for their work. That’s how we got into this, after all, and it’s a fun time with friends working together.

As you’re working on a honking big bone full of meat, you’ll see bigger hunks of meat that present themselves to you. Those can be steaks or roasts, depending on the particular cut. The little bits of meat that look good but are too small go into the hamburger pile. You’ll end up with probably as much hamburger meat as steaks.

When you’re all done and your extra strength garbage bags are straining at their limits with clean white bones and tallow, package up all the steaks in white freezer wrap and write the contents and year on it. Into the freezer and take a break. The hamburger pile, once cleaned, will make its way into a grinder and into hamburger.

We take the hamburger to a pro to get turned into sausage and hamburger and hot sticks. Yum. But there are lots of recipes, and you can do a lot of this yourself. Some years I borrow a Cabela’s meat grinder from Norm and make our own hamburger. It’s not hard to do. But the store makes better summer sausage than I can.

Some last few comments about venison. I hunt for venison, and don’t really care about the size of the horns, or even if there are horns at all. My favorite food is venison tenderloin shish-ka-bob, and there’s really only the one way to get to eat that: shoot a deer yourself.

The flavor of the venison is affected of course by what the deer ate throughout its life. Corn fed is nice. But it is even more strongly affected by how the meat is treated after killing the animal. You need to field dress it and get everything you can out of there, and get the meat cooling down as quickly as you can. Prop a stick inside the ribs to keep the chest open. Wash it out with a couple buckets of water, or rub it down snow, depending on what you have available. You can hang the deer up to let it bleed out, but most of the blood comes out right away when you field dress it. Hanging it up gets it out of the way and lets it cool, depending on the weather. Keep the meat as clean as you can. I like to get it butchered up and in the freezer quickly. If it’s a cold late November day there shouldn’t be a problem getting it cool. But sometimes it’s up in the 60s during hunting season and in that case you need to get at it right away. One cold year real life got in the way and a deer hung for almost a week in our garage before we could get at it. It was still okay. But you wouldn’t leave meat lying around, even in a cold garage, that long. So don’t treat your deer that way either.

When you butcher it up, get as much of the tallow and fat and silverskin out of there as you can. All of that stuff adds to the wild or gamey flavor. A nicely cleaned and well taken care of cut of venison is worlds better and a totally different kind of meat than venison that has not been cared for. Venison is a great and very very lean red meat, with a flavor that beats most of the expensive beef steaks I’ve ever had.

And finally, everyone has their deer story, right? You should have known this was coming: here’s mine from the 2012 season.

It was still kind of early Saturday morning opening day, maybe about 8:00am, when a doe stepped out from behind a small stand of trees. Absolutely stealthy and quiet, of course, but she was cropping grass and didn’t seem to be nervous at all. Slowly, slowly she worked her way along a trail through an open meadow directly towards me up in my tree. I let her get to about seventy-five yards away. Too much closer and she’d hear me and get spooked and run away. I carefully lined her up in the scope, kind of a head-on shot so no room for error on either side, and pulled the trigger.

Big boom, of course. All the birds flew away, the forest instantly went silent, and the doe looked up and around, and ran back behind the small stand of trees.

Rats. Did I hit her or not? As per the standard procedure, I waited about five minutes before doing anything. Then I waited another five minutes. I was about to climb down to go looking when, against all odds, she stepped back out from behind the trees, apparently uninjured. That was odd, why didn’t she run away as far and as fast as she could? But never mind that for now, for now just take the gift handed to you and try again.

This time she was moving across my field of vision, although still about seventy-five yards away. It was a much nicer broadside shot. I lined up the front center of her chest in the scope and squeezed off another shot. This time I saw the front of her chest explode outward and she fell to the ground. My rifle appeared to be shooting slightly to the left of where I was aiming. Note to self: check out the alignment of the scope before next season.

In the meantime the deer had disappeared in the tall grass. Just fallen? Shot dead? Okay, repeat the system: wait five minutes to let my heart settle down and the adrenaline levels to drop. Then unload and lower the rifle to the ground on the rope, and follow it down.

Hike over to around where the deer was, and there’s no deer. Wait, look around some more: it was a good shot and I saw her fall over with a gout of blood out her front. Couldn’t have gotten far.

The view from the ground is sometimes confusingly different from the view from above. She was laying a couple dozen steps away, in a large pool of blood. The shell had blown out the front of her chest all right, and appeared to kill her instantly. Good clean shot.

Wait another minute and text to Norm to let him know I had one down here, again letting my heartbeat settle. Offer a little prayer to thank the deer for the sacrifice of their life. Then out with the knife.

Wriggle around to take off my license from my back, tear off the tag, and correctly and legally tag the deer. Slit the tag to show the date and time of kill. Strip for bloody action, leaving the lower liner orange coat and hat on.

Drag the deer around to get at its belly with my knife and stop short. Whoa.

There’s something unexpected there, something that has no business belonging on a doe. Check the head again and look closer. Sure enough, it has two small nubbins where the antlers would come in. Congratulations, it’s a buck. Antlerless, to be sure.

Okay, flip it back over and get on with the field dressing.

In the process of cleaning out its insides I found what probably caused its strange behavior. The poor thing had an old internal wound and part of its lower intestine was gaping open. The edges of the wound were damaged and black, maybe from weeks ago. There was only the one bullet hole that I put there, toward the front of its chest. No stray arrow points floating around in there, so it may not even have been from bow season. You never know. It may have been out of its mind with the internal damage – there’s no way to know if it was painful for the deer, but it couldn’t have been pleasant.

It could have been a suicide: maybe it knew I could put it out of its misery. I was glad to do my part, anyway.

When we cut it up into quarters I found some of the meat around the old wound had gone bad, but only a small section around the base of its spine and the very top of one hind quarter. We cut off everything that looked at all bad or black or bruised, and processed the rest as usual.

You can tell when meat has gone bad by looking at it and smelling it. Most of this deer looked fine and is tasting just delicious.

This has been an attempt to describe what deer hunting in Wisconsin is like for me. Thanks for reading. We will now return to your regularly scheduled life, which is already in progress.

25 January 2013