This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of North American Whitetail magazine.
I thought the kicker on the buck’s G-2 was really cool when I pulled the trigger on my muzzleloader. It was the first thing I noticed about his rack when he burst out of the mesquite thicket to charge the doe at the feeder and the first thing I looked for when I pulled his head out of the tall grass. I didn’t think that kicker was quite so cool, though, when it popped open the door of my deepfreeze and defrosted everything inside.
It was my fault, of course. I knew good and well that the fit was too tight when I forced the freezer door closed. Thankfully, I figured out what had happened and got everything that had spoiled into the trash can before the smell ran us out of the house, but the garbage man earned his paycheck that week for sure.
To turn a sad story tragic, I had spent a solid year collecting every bit of wild game meat I could get my hands on. We had scheduled a wild game supper at church, and I was determined to make the meal a memorable one. I was excited about introducing to the uninitiated my favorite protein – venison. We would have deer chili and chicken fried deer steak, of course, but that wasn’t going to be the extent of the menu. Not by a long shot.
One of the highlights of my youth was attending the annual Christmas party and potluck dinner hosted by Oklahoma’s Wildlife Department for whom my dad worked as a fisheries’ biologist. Predictably, every employee in the department did his dead level best to one up the next guy’s dish. The more exotic the game, the better. One of the highlights of that potluck – or depending on one’s perspective, I guess, one of the lowlights – was a beaver one of the guys had trapped and barbecued. I didn’t have a beaver in my freezer, but I did have some meat people had never sampled before.
My freezer was full of elk steaks and mule deer ribs and pronghorn antelope backstrap. I had not one, but two wild turkey breasts saved, and I had the whole of the upland bird spectrum covered – pheasant and quail and dove – as well as a wide assortment of ducks. Thanks to the generosity of a hunting buddy who’d made a trip out west, I even had a black bear roast for the crockpot. And then, the piece de resistance – a western diamondback rattlesnake I’d killed in self-defense just half an hour before I shot the buck that was my freezer’s downfall. I had all of that, plus the various and sundry popsicles and frozen pizzas that populate every family’s deep freeze, and every bit of it was wasted.
It wasn’t just the meat that I lost, though. There were trophies, too. I only just managed to salvage my buck’s skull for a European mount, but there was a turkey’s tail fan and that rattlesnake’s skin that weren’t so lucky. They were both ruined beyond repair and had to be surrendered to the trash can.
After a well-deserved wallow in regret, I figured I’d better make the most of my mistake and learn some kind of lesson. What I learned was that I’d developed the bad habit of saving the choicest cuts of meat for special occasions and just plain procrastinating when it came to trophy preparation. That bad habit cost me, and though the cost was high, the lesson I learned was invaluable. Never again will I leave a backstrap in the freezer any longer than necessary. Never again will I procrastinate with my trophy preparation. From now on, I mean to pay proper respect to the game I harvest by eating every bite and mounting every trophy.
I hope you do, too.
Wright Outdoors 