So we had two different options lined up for someone to come and haul the deer away, dress it, and butcher it for meat, but they both fell through. The County Animal Services folks say it’ll be somewhere between 1-3 days before they can get someone out here to haul it away, and they’d only do that if it was easily accessible—which meant it needed to be in the driveway or out by the curb. I decided our neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate a rotting deer carcass sitting next to the sidewalk. I looked up How to Drag a Deer Out of the Woods on YouTube last night and a nice man showed me how to loop a rope around the rack and tie that to a stick, and I was able to get it moved around the house to the driveway behind our cars much quicker than I’d thought. Last night, our local fox found the corpse and started picking at it, driving Hazel into fits of panic.

It’s a rare occurrence for us to see a deer, let alone have a buck with points die in our yard, so I figured I’d take the head, cut it down, and boil the skull clean to mount it. I had about 10 free minutes between meetings this morning, so I put the axe on the bench grinder to sharpen the blade, then went out and gave the neck about five good whacks before it separated cleanly.

I was expecting Kurosawa amounts of spurting blood but overnight coagulation in the driveway meant everything was still and mostly solid. The head is now sitting under a rubbermaid bin weighted with a cinderblock behind the greenhouse. My next YouTube search is How to Clean a Deer Head, which, frankly, looks pretty gruesome. Hopefully I can get to it in the next couple of days before it really starts breaking down. Temperatures are in the low 40’s for the next couple of days, so I should be able to get a couple of hours on Saturday morning to get my hands dirty (we are currently preparing for one of our yearly Big Events this week).