Baking, Red-tailed Hawks, My Father, and More Deer

    Isn't this beautiful?

I've been baking this weekend, and I've also indulged myself by catching up with everyone's journals in between mixing, pouring,  and filling and emptying the oven.  I think I have left comments for everyone.  Everyone else in the family has kept busy with other things, so I've had a nice weekend much to myself.

I baked pumpkin cakes, persimmon bread, and various cookies.  I think I've satisfied the baking need in me for a while.  I realized yesterday that I've talked about Eler Beth's deer but didn't mention that Thomas has got two himself -- one buck and one doe.  What do we do with five deer, you ask? 

Well, we have a large upright freezer, a small chest freezer, and the refrigerator freezer.  I don't buy red meat at the store most of the year, except for ground beef.  I don't like my deer meat ground up.  It just seems like such a waste.  So when we want roast, steak, stew, ribs, or loin, I pull it out of the freezer, and it's tastier, healthier, and leaner than any beef we'd buy at the store. 

BUT, we couldn't possibly (at least I don't think we could!) go through five deer all by ourselves in a year's time.  One whole deer (the buck that Thomas got) went to a family who will appreciate it.  The man is older and doesn't hunt anymore, and he will share with his grown kids, as well.  Then we have given several roasts and steaks and ribs to Thomas' nephew and his family.  He and his wife are disabled, and they have three kids, so it's nice that we can fill their freezer as well. 

We still have muzzle loader season to get through -- it starts next weekend.  So if they get more deer, it'll start going to other family members and friends.  And yes, they are all legal.  Thomas hunts in more than one county around here, and hunters are able to get four does in most of the counties around, as well as one buck.  Eler Beth's does were taken in a nearby county, but her buck was from our own county.

Someone once asked Thomas if he didn't feel greedy when he killed so many deer.  Um. No.  There are plenty of deer that need to be taken.  In our area especially the populations are so large that oak trees are in danger of being endangered!  For some reason the deer will skip over other seedlings just to eat the oak seedlings.  Thomas doesn't hunt for trophies, he hunts for meat.  And after he's taken care of his own family's needs, he is more than generous to anyone else who wants or needs the meat.  We usually end up filling my mom and sisters' freezers as well in a good year.

My father hunted squirrel and rabbit when I was a kid, but I don't remember him doing too much deer hunting.  There is one incident that I do remember however.  He was hunting with a friend on the friend's property and got a shot at a young buck.  They had to track it, and when they came up on it there were two young men standing over it.  One young man, extremely excited about his "kill", told my friend that he'd shot it, but when he came up to it he realized it had already been shot, so he very honestly turned it over to my Dad.  My dad's shot probably would have killed it, because it hadn't run far, but the young man's shot definitely finished it off.

So my dad told the young guy to take the deer.  Then my dad's friend told him later that he was glad he'd given it to the young man because he had a wife and two babies at home, and he'd been out of work for a couple of weeks.  I don't think the guy was supposed to even be hunting on my dad's friend's property, but he didn't say anything about it.  He knew the young man and his family and didn't want to deprive him.

   We also had an unexpected recipient of deer meat today -- one of our resident red-tailed hawks!  Eler Beth is tanning four deer hides.  She has begun the scraping on one, but we have all four of them hanging outside.  Thomas has a little trailer with high rails that he can pull behind his truck if he needs too, although for most of the time that he's had it it has been parked next to our little storage shed in the back yard.  This little trailer now has four deer hides hanging over its rails.  Thomas was doing something at the kitchen sink this evening when he called to me and Eler Beth.  A big red-tailed hawk was helping himself to some of the meat still attached to one of the deer hides!  He was a beautiful bird.  I got a picture, but I don't know how well it will turn out.  I didn't have long to focus before he realized I was at the side of the house and flew off to a nearby tree.  He sat in that for a half hour before he left.  I'm sure he'll be back for more.

      Earlier this summer I saw two hawks flying over our house and one of them had a snake dangling from his talons.  They landed in a tree bordering our back yard and proceeded to have lunch.

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