Real Men Like Knives

 

Bryon and Ben both use Ben's garage to butcher their deer, as it has more room than Bryon's own, and that's where they store all their butchering equipment; knives, cleavers, and a real old, but nice, Formica countertop their remodeling friend, Ricky Smith, gave them from a job site rather than throw it away.

The old countertop is vital. When set up on sawhorses, it provides plenty of working space (you could do two deer at once if you needed to) and its Formica covering allows them to clean it with bleach and water before storing after every butchering. A man at work needs a place to throw his elbows out and get a little blood on the floor if he needs to.

Ben's wife, Dori, would be all over them if they did this job in the kitchen (where I do mine now that I think of it). She never opens the door when they're slicing away out there in the garage. She doesn't want to look out there, I suppose. Sometimes they whistle softly to themselves and grin while they work, which can be a little unsettling to the uninitiated.

A newly acquired friend of Ben and Bryon's, a high school band director named Travis Hathcote, until recently a non-hunting, but healthy meat eater, walked in on a butchering job being done by the boys by passing into the garage from Dori's kitchen door (she told him to), and about had a "runaway". He had never seen meat being made; most people haven't. It's quite a sensory experience for a first timer.

Short of the trip down the aisle in a Southern Baptist altar call, hunting, killing, and then processing your own meat rather than having it contracted out by a chain store butcher and wrapped in plastic, is about the most honest thing most of us will ever do. It's what everybody USED to do, but in today's society it's … well, too real for a society addicted to reality shows.

Travis has gotten over the shock of his unexpected meat-show, peepshow, and taken up bowhunting deer with the Test boys. He recently earned what Bryon calls his "man badge" by helping Jim Mattocks field dress a deer. He got his hands right in there up to his elbows. Whatever the depths of his meat experience, it hasn't killed his appetite for venison. The boy can pack it away, especially when served up in the form of fajitas folded into hot tortillas with shredded cheese, sour cream, and guacamole, sautéed onions, red and green peppers, and green chilis.

Anyway, it's hard for me to believe that, technically, our deer season is still being "cleaned up". It started way back October one. The last day of bow season was January 15th. On that day, Bryon arrowed a doe that dressed out at 129 pounds.

Because he and Ben, like all good steak houses, like to age their meat, this deer was quartered and placed into a large cooler with ice and aged for nearly 10 days, the ice being changed out as it melted. The best steak houses commonly go for 14 days, by the way, the meat hanging from a hook in a refrigerated room at about 45 degrees. Same thing. Aged meat is tender meat. People just don't want to know it.

When I got to Ben's, Ben wasn't there. Bryon's son Jacob was though, and he and his dad were well into turning meat on the hoof into dinner on the table. Jacob's 10, I think, maybe 11, and although he has already helped butcher several deer, including a couple of his own, he's still learning the finer points, and when I arrived, Bryon was just beginning to show him how to butterfly backstraps, the best cuts on any four-footed animal, while Dad was working on some coarser round steaks for fajita meat.

Viewing the scene, I was immediately struck by an irony. In a few hours, some of this meat was undoubtedly going to be passed around. Just now, it was being "passed down", if you catch my drift.

Meat cooking smells different to the man, or the boy, that fixes his own.

© 2008 Conrad M. Vollertsen