READY AND WAITING

 I grew up the grandson of a small town butcher. My grandfather Wray Osterhout had a small grocery store (in the old Grange building) in Montgomery and a butcher shop in the back. By the time I was old enough to wield a knife he had closed up the shop but kept his hand in the game by butchering the local hunters' kills during deer season. I loved hanging out with "Gramp." We piled up the deer carcasses in his dirt floor garage and went to work. First we skinned out the deer on a specially designed table. Then we strung up the deer by its hind legs and sawed it in half. Once quartered we humped the quarters into the hot basement and in front of a diagram of a cow we cut it up into chops, steaks, roasts, and stew meat. The scraps were ground up in a giant hamburger grinder. Gramp never missed an opportunity to show me his stub of a severed finger from a hamburger grinder back in the day, warning "Somebody got that finger nail in their hamburger." with a wink. I would listen wide eyed, believing everything that came out of that man's mouth. That was not always to my benefit. He also encouraged me to lick a cane made of mysterious wood. "What's it taste like?" he asked. I had no clue. "Pine?" That's a bull's dick cane." he exclaimed bending over in laughter. I got a lot of that old man in me. A few years back I found a bull dick cane in a thrift store. I've yet to find the right kid to try Gramp's trick out on. Maybe Rocket Budde? If he gets much older he may not appreciate the joke and hurt me.   

     I still butcher my own deer.  Only these days I use another technique I learned from Bird and Savage. While I was not hunting in the seventies and eighties in SF and NYC, Bird and Savage were hard at it and refining their butchering skills. They hang the deer, skin it out, then take out the back strap. Once quartered it's up to the individual. I cut the whole deer into steaks and stew meat. If it's a little guy sometimes I'll smoke the hindquarters and slow cook the front shoulder. Of course none of this is relevant if you don't shoot one. So today I cleaned up my front porch, set up my chopping table and readied MO David North butcher shop in anticipation. I lost my grandfather's butcher block to a fire in SF and his grinder to Bill Kovar. Poor Bill (now dead) was guilty forty years later about losing that grinder. I'd long forgotten the heresy. But the shop has a fireplace, plenty of light and a boom box. I still have Gramp's sharpener and a few cherished knives. I'm ready for blood. Now all I have to do is shoot a deer. Stay tuned.