Deer season

We are dropping Bartholomew off at Ian's aunt's house before heading to Baltimore. We arrive to find his uncle, a tow-headed, bespectacled software developer, carving the fat away from a fist-sized hunk of meat. Surrounding him in glass casserole dishes and ceramic containers are piles of deer flesh from the legs and back. It smells good in the kitchen--spicy--and my brain is trying to work out why it doesn't smell more like blood. After a while, I notice there is a Yankee Candle in the middle of the kitchen table, burning furiously, causing the entire room to smell like a home-made apple pie. Ian's uncle grins at us, tells us that the deer were on his property. Then he points his knife as if aiming a gun, and says in his soft, unassuming voice, "First I shot Bambi, then I shot his mother." The deer have been feeding all year on the soy and corn of his farming neighbors, his wife tells us. The three deer he's shot that season will last them, a family of seven, all the way until the next hunting season. I saw a dead male deer with a large rack of antlers on the side of a highway once, and think to myself it is many times easier to stand among freshly butchered sides of deer than to drive by a dead, neglected animal.