Estrus on my trigger finger

Just got home from deer camp 2009, lugging a 48.5 lb, non-wheeled cooler up the stairs to our house with pretty much my last strength. My guess would be I'd carried it about 100 rods over the course of my multiple-shuttle-and-subway-transfer return to Boston. This expenditure of energy didn't include the initial dragging of my own (not hard) and my dad's (moderately hard as draggings go, very hard as two guys lifting on top of SUVs go) deer. We then scun and butchered two of them, which requires a non-trivial amount of labor to get cooler worthy hunks. I learned a thing or two about flying with deer last year; it's a long story involving multiple trips through security and a fair amount of bloody water on the ground. This year I weighed it, saving me 50$ by keeping it under 50 lbs, and sealed the meat up better, avoiding bio-hazards and the stress of watching your cooler sit on end out on the tarmac waiting for one more drip to keep it off your plane. As I watched this years cooler being loaded onto the plane in Milwaukee, a fly buzzing around my blood and fat encrusted shoes, I thought, "Sherva, you've got it made."

Deer camp itself was awesome. We got four deer between Mark, deer camp mainstay Tom Stoltz, my dad and myself. My deer was a pretty small doe, no spots, totally counted as a deer. My dad got a nice eight pointer. My brother's first deer was a trophy buck, 10 points. The first deer he knew he got was a nice doe. At lunch, he mentioned seeing a big buck right away in the morning but didn't say he'd shot, too embarrassed to say he'd missed. Several hours and 6 shots later, on the way out to drag his doe back to camp, they randomly came across a huge dead buck. Mark then fessed up to shooting the deer early that morning...in the face. He'd looked for blood but only found some hair since the bullet lodged in the body cavity, leaving no outlet for the red stuff. Uncle Dale, Jon, and Eddy and crew came and visited, but we didn't see Mark much that night because he was always checking his facebuck.

In the cold, hard terms of meat ascertainment, venison $9.89 per pound.

Expenditures: 369$
One round trip flight to Minneapolis: 178$.
One out of state hunting license: 141$.
Whiskey: 30$ (debatable whether that expense would have happened sans deer camp).
Checking one blood-tight cooler: 20$ (see note about whiskey).

Muscle: "Approximately" 37.3 lbs of boned, de-fatted venison
The cooler also contained 5 lbs of chokecherry and lingonberry jellies and syrup (a number that was the result of 4 of 6 trials I did subtracting my own weight from that of our combined), two lbs wild rice (according to the packages), 2.2 lbs of frozen water bottles (looked up on internet and not converted frozen water weight to approximately account for the weight of the bottles themselves and the large plastic bag the venison was sealed in) and the cooler itself (lets just call it 2 lbs, I'm not pulling the deer meat out of there and weigh the cooler).

Maintaining a family tradition I've attended since I was 13 except for that year I was in China: 400$
You gotta have limits; if the cost of the trip would have been $31 more I would have stayed home and bought 80 lobsters or...wow, mail order Waygu beef is expensive, like $215 for four 10 oz ribeyes. Now that's a lot of money for meat. I'll get my own. Suckers.

In summary, hunting, processing, and transporting your own meat is a physically demanding yet rewarding experience. Probably a lot like childbirth.