The first time I butchered my own deer, it was more by necessity than choice. As a poor college kid, the $35 or $40 it took to pay a local butcher to do the job back then seemed pretty steep, and represented an awful lot of beer money.
My brother Chuck was in the same boat — maybe in even deeper water than me, because he had a wife and young kid to take care of. Dollars were even shorter in his world. So there we stood in Dad’s garage with two yearling 7-pointers hanging from the rafters and a motley array of knives, hacksaws and other sundry tools, butcher paper, and our grandma’s old hand-cranked meat grinder from Bohemia, in front of us.
Eight hours later, we had every stitch of meat off those deer, and we collapsed, exhausted, in Mom’s kitchen. Somehow we got the job done and had a half-year’s worth of random but wholesome venison cuts packaged up and ready to freeze.
These days, when people ask me if
