August 25 2007

Well gang, with Labor Day coming up, and pre-season football being played, you can’t blame people for starting to think about cooler weather, no matter how hot it is now.
And with cooler weather comes deer season.
One of our members took a look at a freezer filled with last year’s venison, invited some of our best cooks to come over to his place, to have a big cook-out with a shooting competition thrown in. There would be beer, of course.
His wife Mona had painted the targets to look like does, with large circles for a heart and lung shot, and a smaller circle for a neck shot. The neck shot was worth two points and the heart/lung shot was only worth one point. And she done herself proud. From the firing line one hundred yards away, it looked like eight does were walking along the back side of the pasture.
Along side of each cardboard deer was a stake with the number of the shooting point on it.
On point eight was a young fella that had just gotten his drinking papers, being twenty one and all like that, and was having a great time drinking beer and shooting with the big boys.
The beer wasn’t affecting his shooting much, and when he shot the third shot of his first group of three shots, he could have sworn that his target fell down. But he blinked his eyes and looked again, and it was still there.
Had one of the old boys slipped something in his beer? Some of them were pretty ornery.
When it came time for the judges to score the targets, the kid followed them out to point eight. On his arrival, he found that there was a dead doe lying in front of his target, and as luck would have it, one of the judges was a game warden.
The game warden examined the two tightly grouped holes in the neck of the target and the one hole in the neck of the doe. "Looks like you just bagged yourself an illegal doe, son."
The kid shuffled his feet a little, "Yes sir" he said.
"I’m a game warden, son. You know we’re going to have to do this by the book don’t you?"
"Yes sir" said the kid.
"You got a combo hunting and fishing license kid?"
Again, "Yes sir.
"Well, all this venison we’re eating today was killed back around last December some time, so fill out a tag for a deer killed on this ranch, and mark it December of last year, and tag that deer."
The kid’s face brightened a little, "Yes sir." He said.
The warden stared at the kid. "This is gonna cost you a little something, you know."
"Uh, what sir?"
The warden reached into his back pocket and pulled out a half gallon Zip Loc bag. "This is for the heart and the liver," he said. "They’re mine."
"Yes sir." Said the kid.
Later that evening, folks complimented the host on his freezing technique. One person said that if he didn’t know better, he would have thought that some of the venison tasted fresh enough to have been shot that very afternoon.
"Yes sir." Said the kid.
Everybody laughed.

Till next week
Helga Biermeister
Secretary