Be The Jam

Three days in the woods and I'm exhausted, tired to my bones I am. It turns out that living in a house with a bed, running water and all the rest of it is a lot easier than living in the woods with none of the above. That's not to say that being in the woods is not without it's rewards; yesterday I set my self the task of only eating food that I foraged and set out with the intention of picking some puff balls, berries and a few roots for good measure, but then I found a small deer by the side of the road that had recently been hit by a car and killed. I'm a big fan of venison but had no idea how I would cope with trying to butcher an entire animal, would I get too squeamish? Only one way to find out and that was to put into practice some of the things I have picked up through the noble art of book learning.

The first problem was getting the poor creature off the road, according to survival books the best way of carrying animals is to lash their feet together over a pole, one then carries the pole with one end over the shoulder and the other dragging along the ground. I had some wire in my pocket so I duly lashed the legs together over a ten foot length of hazel that I cut for the purpose and set about dragging the deer into the woods. It was not long before it had slid down the pole and was being dragged in a most ungainly fashion along the ground. I was at least away from the road by this point so I could get on with the daunting task of paunching (gutting) the thing, I have never gutted anything larger than a fish before so I was a little nervous. Fortunately though I had watched a short video on you tube showing how to prepare a deer only two days earlier so I had a rough idea of what to do. It was messy, smelly and messy and not the most enjoyable thing that I have ever done, all the flies in the woods seemed to enjoy it though as they came en-masse to lend a hand. That done the deer was quickly re-attached to the carrying stick and I tied it on properly this time and I was soon walking around in circles trying to remember the way back.

Once home I hung the deer from a handy tree and lit a smoky fire to keep the flies off and set about skinning it. Interestingly skinning it was relatively straight forward, I'm sure I didn't do a very good job and it took a long time but it was soon skinned and by this time the fire had died down sufficiently to be able to cook on BBQ style, and here was me with a deer to eat. A quick flick through my favourite recipe book later and I was rolling various inch thick cuts in freshly cracked black pepper and sticking them onto an old cooling rack over the fire. The smell was fantastic but the taste was out of this world. It wasn't long though before I could eat no more meat and I moved onto a pudding of freshly picked blackberries and a couple of apples. Perfect.

obviously there was a lot of meat left over and I would have liked to have tried to smoke it as a way of preserving it but sadly I have to work at a festival this weekend so there wasn't time. So in the end I had to joint the animal, wrap it up as best I could in the cleanest piece of tarpaulin I could find and take it on the bus to Oxford to give to some friends of mine.