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 I am reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and feel like I am really doing something important when I harvest my own meat raised by nature herself. I’ve had a couple of old Montana guys at the rifle range ask me why I decided to hunt, and I told them I was getting in touch with my feminine side and I also wanted to prove that a girl from Little Compton, Rhode Island, could hunt. But really, I want healthy organic meats for my family, and at the store, organic meats are expensive! We are butchering our meat ourselves, so our only costs are the rifle, which will pay itself off rather quickly; ammunition; and a hunting license. I had some interesting experiences when choosing a rifle to buy. I decided on a Ruger 30-06 because that’s what the professionals at the gun store told me I should get. With that caliber you can hunt anything, and why limit yourself? But I was surprised how many people, even women, who were strangely unsupportive of this, saying I ought to have chosen a gun of a lesser caliber—the recoil was going to be too powerful. But I stuck to my guns (haha); after all, I carry around a 25-pound sack of “child” all day on my hip. Honestly, though, it doesn’t bother me at all. When I’ve fired it out in the field, I noted, surprisingly, that I neither heard nor felt anything. I really felt one with my weapon. I think that people are somehow intimidated by a woman that hunts, and this reflects on what type of gun they think we should use. I hear stories here all the time of wives who have bagged a deer before their husbands, only to have their husbands upset and jealous afterward (and these are “normal” guys behaving this way!). Although I have, for the most part, had overwhelming support. At the rifle range, the range-master spent over an hour teaching me the proper way to sight in a rifle for the first time. And my old friend Raven has been a big help. He grew up hunting in upstate New York and is an avid bowhunter. He came right over to show me how to hang, skin, and butcher my deer. When I told him I’d gotten some flack for getting such a small doe, his response was, “You can’t eat antlers,” and he made a point of complimenting me on how clean my field dressing was (learned from watching a video on the Internet, by the way). It is a Native American ritual to eat the heart of an animal immediately after you kill it; that way its spirit will enter your body. Though I didn’t eat it warm out of the body, I did prepare it for my helpers the night after the kill as a thank you. Here is the recipe [at right]. It is truly divine!  |
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