Roadkill and Rednecks
At least I'm well-fed
I recently leveled up on the Redneck Scale.
On Sunday evening, well after dark, my son, Daniel, sent a message to the family chat.
”Y’all want a deer?”
A local police officer, he had just started his shift when a deer with a death wish darted in front of his patrol car. It’s the second one he’s hit since October. There is no problem with the deer population, except that there are so many of them that they destroy landscaping, wreak havoc on crops, and cause roughly 20,000 traffic accidents annually in the Tar Heel State.
It was cold out, and I was in the middle of smoking a brisket. I wasn’t convinced I wanted to put in the work it would take to butcher a deer.
”Do you want the deer?” I typed back.
“I would hate for it to go to waste.”
And, of course, so would I. So I heaved myself off my cozy couch, turned down the smoker, grabbed the knife from my hunting pack, and headed out in the cold to retrieve some fresh roadkill.
We pulled up on my son’s patrol car, not 3 miles from the house. The buck, whose body was still warm, had a nice seven-point spread. I shook my head. What a shame that he made it through hunting season only to get side-swiped a few days later.
The collision wrecked the patrol car's front grill, and big tufts of deer hair were plastered to the front of the radiator.
“I wasn’t even going that fast,” he said.
But there was still a dead deer in the ditch, although other than the front legs hanging at odd angles, the carcass didn’t look all that beat up. I knew we could salvage a good portion of the meat.
So Daniel and my husband hoisted the buck into the back of my pickup. We hauled it home, strung it from the pecan tree in the backyard, and went to work by headlamp to gut, skin, and quarter it.
“You realize this is about the most redneck thing we’ve ever done?” Daniel said.
And I must admit it is, which is saying something considering a week earlier, his brother and I had paddled up Swift Creek to catch crappie using a half-rotten board as an oar. Which is very redneck.
Both of the deer’s front shoulders were a loss, but the backstraps, tenderloins, and neck were pristine. After trimming away the worst of the bruising on the hindquarters, there was still plenty of meat left for the grinder. When all was done, we packaged 9 pounds of steaks, 10 pounds of sausage, and 13 pounds of burger.
Last night, I cooked a hearty cheeseburger soup that was pretty darned delicious, although I had to push through some illogical squeamishness. Honestly, deer I’ve killed with a rifle have sat longer in the woods before field dressing than this deer sat in the ditch. But there’s a stigma about eating anything labeled “roadkill.”
Butchering this seven-pointer felt more like a chore than usual since no one had any real emotional connection to it. At the risk of sounding overly cheesy, the whole field-to-table process with an animal I’ve hunted sometimes feels almost spiritual. It wasn’t at all the same with a buck that met its demise via impact with asphalt.
But that disconnect is even worse with an animal bought at the grocery store. When we purchase protein in neat, little, shrink-wrapped packages, there’s no reverence for the animal that lost its life so we could put a meal on the dinner table.
At least with this buck, I walked away with bloody hands and a deep regret for lost life, even if the taking of that life wasn’t intentional. And every time I pull a package of meat out of the freezer, I’ll think about the animal, a real one I knew intimately when I held its heart in my hands.
I’m sincerely thankful the animal didn’t go to waste and that its death wasn’t entirely in vain.
If that means I’m a redneck, at least I’ll be a well-fed one.
Other Stuff
Here’s the recipe for my delicious (roadkill optional) cheeseburger soup.
And although I write a ton of quick-turn gear-review stuff, sometimes I write something that makes me genuinely proud. Here are a few:
Why the Winchester 94 Is (and Always Will Be) My Favorite Deer Rifle
I'm grateful the life wasn't gone in vain. I remember my family doing the same.
Reminds me of the time my wife hit a deer early one morning on her way to work. She loves preparing and eating game (once I’ve processed it into piece parts), but she grew up on Okinawa, where the fauna does not include whitetails. I asked her if it was a buck. She said “I don’t know, but it has big antenna.”