The buck was on the ground before eight in the morning, a clean little eight point that had walked out of a cedar thicket like he owned the place. I shot him, watched him fold, and stood there with my heart slamming around in my chest the way it does the first time you do something right and don’t quite believe it yet. I pulled out my phone to check the time and realized my hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t read it. That should have been the first warning. When you are that excited, you are about to do something stupid to the meat.
I had watched a hundred how to process a deer videos that fall, the whole time thinking the hard part was the killing. I had practiced gutting on a foam deer. I had read the charts. I had told my buddy Dave, more than once, that I was ready. So when I got that buck hung up in my garage on a gambrel I had never used before, with a knife I had sharpened in a hurry, I told myself this was the easy part. This is where every amateur butcher in America tells himself the exact same lie.
The first thing I did wrong was the order. I started with the backstraps, because that was the part I was most excited to eat, and I wanted to get them off before anything could go wrong. What I forgot is that a warm deer right off the hide is not a steak, it is mostly mush at room temperature, and a dull knife slides through warm meat about as clean as a butter knife through a birthday cake. I sawed and twisted and by the time I got the first backstrap off, what should have been a long clean tube of meat looked like someone had dropped it down a flight of stairs. I held it up in the garage light and just stared. There were flaps hanging off it. There was a chunk of silver skin still stuck to it in a band like electrical tape. I had turned the best cut on the animal into something a dog might turn his nose up at.
Here is the thing nobody in those videos says loud enough. Cold meat is your friend. A deer that has been hung in a garage at forty degrees for a night, or at least cooled down, cuts like it wants to be cut. The knife follows the seam and the meat stays together and you can get a backstrap off in one smooth pass. A deer that is still warm, with the hide half off and your hands shaking from adrenaline, fights you the whole way. I did not know that then. I thought speed mattered more than temperature. I thought a sharp knife was enough. It is not. Cold is half the tool.
The tenderloins were worse. Those two little strips up inside the cavity along the spine, the ones every hunter whispers about like they are made of gold, I dug them out with my fingers because I could not see what I was doing and my headlamp battery was dying. I got most of one and about half of the other. The rest stayed inside the carcass because I did not know you get them from the front, inside the rib cage, before you even hang the deer, not by fishing around blind from the back after the guts are already out in a bucket. By the time I figured it out, it was too late, and the best eating on that buck was in the same garbage bag as the hide scraps.
The strangest part is that I did not even feel it happening. I was in a hurry the whole time, convinced I was doing fine, because I was moving and the meat was coming off and that felt like progress. It was only when I spread everything out on the table and actually looked that I understood how much I had thrown away. A backstrap that looks like hamburger you poked with a stick. A tenderloin that is half gone. A pile of trim so mangled it is only good for jerky, and not good jerky either, the kind you salt too heavy to hide the fact that you butchered it wrong.
What My Grandpa Said
I called my grandpa that night, because he is the only person I know who could make me feel a little better while also telling me exactly how I screwed up. He listened to the whole mess and then he said the thing I have never forgotten. He said, “Son, slow is smooth, and cold meat cuts clean. You were in a race with nobody.” He did not laugh at me, which somehow made it worse. He just told me next time to let the deer hang overnight, to sharpen the knife until it shaves hair off my arm, and to do the tenderloins first thing, before I even gut the thing, before the hang, while the cavity is still warm but the meat walks off the bone under its own weight.
“And quit aiming your excitement at the knife,” he said. “The deer is already dead. You ain’t got to fight him a second time.” That one landed. I had been so fired up about finally killing a buck that I turned the whole cleaning job into another hunt, something to rush through and win. The deer was not my enemy anymore. He was dinner. And I was treating dinner like a live animal I needed to subdue.
The Next Deer
The next season I did it different, and the difference was embarrassing in how obvious it was. I shot a doe on a cold morning when it was thirty two degrees outside, and I hung her in the garage with a tarp under her and a fan on low, and I left her there overnight. I sharpened two knives in the afternoon until I could dry shave a patch off my forearm, and I laid out a clean table with a bowl of water to keep my hands from getting slippery, and I pulled my headlamp off the charger so it would not die halfway through.
When I opened her up the next morning, I did the tenderloins first, from inside the rib cage, and they came out whole, two perfect little straps of meat that I held in my palm like they were something valuable, because they were. The backstraps came off in long smooth strips with the point of the knife doing the work, following the seam, and I barely had to yank at all. It took me most of a morning, and I was cold and my back hurt, but when I spread everything out on the table this time, it looked like meat a human being with hands had cut, not like a raccoon had gotten into a deer.
I dry aged the backstraps in the fridge for a week on a wire rack, another thing my grandpa told me, and I cooked one of them rare in nothing but butter and salt, and I sat down and ate it and did not say one word the whole time. My wife asked me if it was good and I just nodded with my mouth full, because if I had opened my mouth to talk I would have had to explain that I had eaten the best piece of meat I had ever put in my face, and I was too busy being mad at myself for all the ones I had already ruined.
What I Would Tell the Guy Doing It Right Now
If you are reading this and you have a deer on the ground or in the garage, here is the whole lesson wrapped up, and it is shorter than you think. Let it cool. Cold meat cuts clean and warm meat fights you. Sharpen your knife until it scares you a little. Take the tenderloins out first, inside the rib cage, before you hang it. Stop rushing, because slow is smooth and you are in a race with nobody. And stop treating the animal like an opponent. It is already over. The only thing left that can beat you now is your own hurry.
I ate that first mangled buck, by the way. Grandma took most of the trim, the good parts of it, and she ground it and mixed it with some pork fat and made it into a deer meat loaf that was honestly better than I deserved. But I knew what those burgers could have been. I knew I had thrown away the tenderloins and mangled the backstraps of a deer that deserved better, and there is no seasoning in the world that covers that up. Some lessons you learn, and some lessons you eat, and it turns out the second kind sticks harder.
