by Edward Lang
Then I filled up my backpack with what I would need, rappelled down the side of the cliff, and set off for the woods.
As soon as I got into the forest, I started looking for a good, straight, solid, six-foot-long stick – something that would have done excellent duty as a walking stick. Took me awhile, but I found it near a fallen hardwood. The limb was pretty strong and only marginally crooked at one end. That was fine. I didn’t need it to be perfect; I only needed it to increase my reach temporarily.
I used a short length of rope to bind my knife to the end of the stick, tying it so tightly that the blade didn’t move much when I dragged it hard across the tree bark. That would do.
Then I started through the trees to the spot where I’d seen the buck. I was guessing that if one deer had come through to forage, there would be others.
Sure enough, the snow around the firs was filled with tracks of varying size – and way more of them than could have been made by one deer.
Now I had my hunting ground.
My idea was to get the deer’s leg in a snare, tighten the loop, and hoist the deer’s leg up in the air so it couldn’t get away.
Of course, I had to tighten the snare as fast as possible, before the deer could see me, get frightened, and bolt.
The only way I could see to reliably do that was to set the snare… hide in a tree so the deer couldn’t see me… and then jump out of the tree to tighten the snare.
Yeah. I know. Not my smartest plan ever.
The snow was pretty damn deep, so it would cushion my fall to a certain extent. But if I landed badly, I could wind up with a broken ankle – which would be a death sentence up here.
So – better not to land in the snow at all.
I’ll get to that in a minute. First I had to lay the trap.
I tied a slipknot at the end of a 60-foot-long piece of rope. I made damn sure it wouldn’t come loose, then threaded the other end of the rope through it. Now I had a makeshift noose. Not a hangman’s noose – just a loop I could tighten.
It would be way too hard to try to get the loop around the deer’s neck, but there was a somewhat even chance I could get it around one of his legs. All I needed to do was immobilize the animal long enough to kill it.
I chose a nearby pine with a good amount of foliage I could hide in.
Then I coiled up the non-noose end of the rope and threw it over the first limb, about ten feet up. The rope went over the limb and fell over the other side, so now I had a rope half in, half out of the tree.
Next I took the noose and spread it out so it was about three feet in diameter. I figured that was plenty of room for a buck to step into.
Technically, what I had planned wasn’t a snare. Snares were traps you set and then came back and checked later. They were passive traps, and usually meant for smaller game, like rabbits and squirrels. Too bad there weren’t any rabbits or squirrels around, so far as I could see.
What I had here was an active set-up for a much larger animal. I didn’t actually know the technical term for what I was doing, so I decided to name it a hangman’s snare.
Catchy. Would have been a great episode for the show, except PETA would have been all over my ass about it.
I didn’t think there was such a thing as PETA in a world with two moons, though.
If there was, and they came after me for trying to survive, I would know conclusively that I really had died and gone to hell.
Anyway. The whole point with the hangman’s snare was that it had a much higher percentage of it working than my crafting a bow and trying to teach myself to be a good enough shot to bring down a deer before I starved to death.
My motto has always been, If it works, it works. Fuck whether it looks pretty or not.
I tossed handfuls of snow on the rope to camouflage it and weigh it down so it wouldn’t move. The rope itself was a bright red and would have stood out like a neon sign against the white of the snow. A deer might have come over just to investigate, but I didn’t want to take my chances on only getting the dumbest sonuvabitch out here, so I made sure the red was completely covered all the way to the base of the pine tree.
The rest of the rope stood out against the bark, but I couldn’t really do anything about that.
Next I seeded the trap with a handful of berries inside the noose and a few scattered all around it. I just needed a curious doe or buck to come over to nibble… and then, gotcha!
Then I pulled out my telephone lineman’s belt I’d used the other night… put on my crampons… and started up the tree, my makeshift spear held firmly in my right hand.
Ten feet up, I grabbed the rope resting over the first limb – the part of the snare I’d thrown up into the tree earlier – and carried it along with me.
About 18 feet up, I was finally high enough up to be completely covered by foliage. At that point, I took off my climbing belt and sat on the limb. I settled my makeshift spear across two branches so it wouldn’t fall.
Then I pulled out my Nitro.
Alternately known as shock absorbers or energy absorbers, they’re designed to hook a rope to your climbing harness to slow your fall.
You’re not supposed to fall in ice climbing, obviously, but if you do, dropping 20 feet and then suddenly jerking to a halt can be wrenching. It can break your back if you’re extremely unlucky. At the very least, it makes for a shitty rest of the climb.
Ropes have a certain amount of elastic give, but not that much. The energy absorber helps slow you down so that you don’t suddenly reach the end of the rope and yank HARD.
And since I was going to be jumping out of a tree, I could use all the help I could in slowing me down.
There was only one problem: I needed to figure out how much rope to use, and how I wanted to fall.
After all, if you go bungie jumping off a hundred-foot bridge but you use 105 feet of rope, you’re going to end up with your skull cracked like an egg on the pavement.
Actually, you’d need to use way less than 100 feet of rope, since bungie jumping uses a highly elastic cord… but fuck it, I didn’t bungie jump.
I counted backwards from the loop to see how much rope to give myself.
If this all went off without a hitch, the buck would end up standing on his hind legs right next to the tree. His front legs would be about 4 feet off the ground; my limb was only 18 feet off the ground, so 18 minus 4 equaled 14 feet of rope between the buck and me.
Then it was 18 feet down to the ground.
But I didn’t want to fall all 18 feet – I wanted some margin for error – so I settled on 14 feet.
14 + 14 = 28 feet of rope total.
Now there was the question of how much rope I already had between me and the noose.
Three feet diameter times 3.14 to get the circumference, so about 9 feet for the noose… another three feet to the tree… 18 feet up the trunk…
That was 30 feet of rope total, give or take, from the ground up to my limb.
Great. (That was sarcasm, if you didn’t notice.)
I needed to wind up with 28 feet… but I already had 30 feet.
That two-foot discrepancy might be the difference between a broken ankle and walking away from this.
Or maybe not. I had over three feet built in for margin of error. And in reality, I wasn’t planning on landing on the ground so much as stopping a couple of feet above it.
I would have to chance it.
I took the rope and secured it to the shock absorber, which I then attached to my climbing harness.
The idea was that I would jump…
Which would yank the rope up…
Which would slide over the limb…
Which would tighten the noose around the deer’s leg.
As soon as that happened, the rope would start going taut, which would trigger the shock absorber and start slowing my fall.
At the same time, the massive amount of force generated by my fall would yank the deer’s leg up into the air, trapping him. Might even br
eak his leg.
That might sound cruel, but remember: I was planning on killing him so I could eat him. Cruelty is a relative thing when you’re just another animal trying to survive out in the wild.
By the time the deer was standing on his hind legs, I would be slowing down and stopping about three feet above the ground.
Theoretically.
At 6’2”, I weighed 195. The deer would hopefully weigh less than that. Which means I should be able to use my weight as a counterbalance until I could tie off the rope, grab my homemade spear, and finish the kill.
But it all depended on a lot going right.
The more I thought about the plan, the crazier it seemed. I actually started to talk myself out of it…
But then the reality of my situation kicked in.
I’d already had a wolfpack try to kill me. If I went down further into the forest, I was sure to run into another – and maybe something worse. And next time, I might not make it up a tree fast enough.
Plus, there was no guarantee I would find any food farther down in the forest.
AND I would be exposed to the elements.
Right now I had a perfect shelter, safe from wind, rain, snow, and wild animals.
I just needed food. Killing a deer was the best way to deal with that particular issue.
Plus, I’d already died once. What was one more time?
So when I weighed it all out, I decided to stick with my plan.
I settled in for a long wait.
And it was a long-ass fuckin’ wait.
I sat in the tree for almost four hours. I was getting ready to call it a day and get back up to my nice warm fire when I saw the deer.
A ten-point buck.
It slowly walked over to the berries on the snow… sniffed at them… and started eating up.
I grabbed my makeshift spear and got ready.
In my head, I was urging it onwards.
Take a step closer… closer, you bastard… Daddy’s got to eat… CLOSER…
The deer’s right foreleg finally stepped inside the snow-covered noose.
GOTCHA!
I pushed myself off the branch and fell.
The rope and noose shot up out of the snow and tightened around the buck’s leg, which jerked up into the air.
I felt my descent slow – and, as the buck got hauled up onto its hind legs, I felt my entire body jerk to a stop.
WHAM!
My spear almost flew out of my hands, but I hung onto it.
My feet were just a couple of feet away from the snow as I swayed back and forth in the air.
Holy shit, it WORKED!
The buck was struggling and kicking, but it was standing on its hind legs and wasn’t going anywhere.
30 feet of rope stretched from the buck, over the limb, and down to me – and I had an extra 30 feet of unused rope dangling from my rope harness… which I immediately threw over the lowest limb of the tree I’d just jumped out of. The slack fell limply down from the limb.
I used my spear to hook the rope and bring it back over to me, then threw it over the limb over and over again until there were seven coils around the tree limb.
That fucker wasn’t going anywhere.
Then I detached the shock absorber and dropped to the snow.
The lack of my weight – and the extra rope between me and the seven coils – gave the line a lot more slack, which meant the buck got all four of his feet down on the ground and could run.
But he wasn’t going far.
I rushed over to him.
Rather than charge me, which was probably his only option, he tried to run away – and jerked to a stop as the rope slammed taut again.
I used the spear to slash at his throat, trying to aim for the carotid artery.
I sliced him once solidly. Then I slashed him again.
It took him nearly two minutes to die. I didn’t want him to suffer, but with the flimsiness of my weapon and my overwhelming lack of experience at this, I figured it would do more harm than good to try and finish him. There are worse ways to go than to bleed out, after all.
First he keeled over in the bloodstained snow. His ribs slowly stopped moving as his breathing dwindled away to nothing.
I waited another minute to make absolutely sure he was gone.
Nothing like a kick to the head from a deer who’s still got some life in him. Good way to ruin your life.
I gave him a couple of prods with my spear in some, ahem, rather tender areas. No reaction at all.
The snow all around the buck was stained crimson and half-melted from the buck’s hot blood. I walked through it until I got close enough to touch the antlers. They were exactly like a deer’s back on earth – just green.
I squatted down and looked at the dark, unseeing eye staring back up at me.
A truly magnificent animal.
Sorry, fella. I wouldn’t have done it if my life didn’t depend on it.
Then I set to the real work: field-dressing him.
Hell, to catch him, all I’d had to do was jump out of a fuckin’ tree.
I detached my knife from the spear and started.
I won’t go into the specifics (bet you with I’d done the same with the snowball toilet paper), but I got the innards out and let the blood drain off.
Field-dressing a deer is important for several reasons. One, it reduces the load as you drag him back to your truck – or, in my case, my cave. The entrails can account for as much as 25% of the weight of the deer, and lugging around a 120-pound body is a lot easier than a 160-pound one.
Second, you want the meat to cool fast to make sure bacteria don’t multiply – and a huge amount of the deer’s heat is in its innards. Once you take the guts out, the air can get inside the abdominal cavity and cool the meat from the inside.
Lastly, you want to drain as much blood as you can. I’d actually done a fair job by slashing its throat while its heart was still pumping. The key word there is while. Some old-timers I’ve hunted with will slash a deer’s throat after it’s dead, thinking that will help the blood drain. It doesn’t. If the heart’s not beating, the blood’s not going anywhere.
The one problem in cutting his throat, though, was that it was going to make the meat taste gamier. ‘Gamy,’ as in wild game animals.
For those of you who have never eaten venison, it has an earthier taste than beef or pork. Kind of a pungent tang to it. Mostly that came down to the deer’s diet – a corn-fed deer would taste milder than one who ate only acorns and wild greens. But fast field-dressing and processing of the meat helped, too. If a hunter takes too long to prep the deer after shooting it, that pungency starts to tip over into ‘tainted.’
But there was one more factor: adrenaline. When a deer is stressed, adrenaline courses through its system, which results in a stronger taste to the meat. That’s why you want to drop a deer with one shot – not just to lessen its suffering, but to make sure it doesn’t have time to dump a lot of adrenaline into its system.
Unfortunately, I’d snared the poor bastard’s leg and cut his throat. The last few minutes of his life had been a non-stop stress-fest – which meant lots and lots of adrenaline, hence more gaminess to the meat.
Oh well. When you’re starving, you tend to overlook the little things.
Once I’d gutted the deer, I had to skin him and butcher him. Hunters back home could take their kill to a processing plant to harvest the meat for them, but that wasn’t exactly an option here.
I could have dragged him back to the cave with his skin on and done the butchering there. After all, the frigid air and sliding him over the snow would have kept him naturally refrigerated. But I didn’t want to create a welcome mat of offal for wolves to come sniffing around my front door. Better to have them smell the blood and stay way out here in the woods and leave my new ‘house’ alone.
Not to mention I didn’t really care to haul back 50 or 60 pounds of bones and waste that I wasn’t going to use.
So I removed
the noose from the buck’s leg, tied it around his hindquarters, and heaved him up in the air.
Let me tell you, lifting 120 pounds into the air using a thin mountain-climbing rope is not ideal.
Once he was up, I set about separating the skin from the fat and meat underneath. That took a while. I was trying to be especially careful to keep the skin as intact as possible. Not only could I potentially cure the skin and use it – for a blanket or coverings – but also because I needed a sled to carry back my haul. I did not want to get deer blood all up in my backpack.
Once the skin was off, I removed the meat as best I could. The tenderloins, backstraps, and tip steaks came off first. Then I deboned the hind legs and pulled off the hams. (Different kind of ham from what you’re probably used to.)
Then I took off the front shoulders. Those I would grill immediately.
It was a messy affair, but in the end I had a pile of meat lying atop a more-or-less intact deer hide.
I didn’t do this sort of shit often – TV viewers have no stomach for seeing Bambi get slaughtered, and I hadn’t hunted regularly since my TV show started because I had no time. So I was proud that I’d done as well as I had, no matter how half-assed it was.
I also picked through the entrails and cut out the heart, the liver, and the kidneys. The kidneys I would have to soak before cooking – which would be interesting, considering I had nothing to soak them in – but the liver would have a ton of nutrients I needed. And the heart was actually one of the best cuts of the animal, one that many hunters ignored.
I could have gone the whole nine yards and gotten bones for roasting the marrow, and maybe taken the ribs, but I was very aware that I was risking unwanted attention of the wolfish kind. The long I stayed out here with a fresh carcass, the bigger chance I would be turned into an even fresher carcass.
So it was time to haul ass.
But first I wanted to clean up, or I would be leaving a nice trail of blood for the wolves to follow.
By this point, I was a mess. Butchering an animal ain’t tidy.
Nice thing was, though, I could clean off relatively easily. My outer layers of clothing – jacket, pants, gloves, and boots – were all waterproof, so the blood hadn’t leaked through or soaked in. To clean off, I just got down in the snow and wallowed around.