Wednesday, January 28, 2009

601 steps to butchering a moose.


Hello everyone,
Let us talk about butchering.
My childhood was a fairly normal and wonderful one consisting of southern Ontario rural and urban experiences. My family went camping, my dad and I went bird watching, we fished. Now this may seem from the info presented here that we were "Outdoorsy", and we were in a very southern Ontario way.
Our adventure's would happen as frequently as a couple of times a year. Our camping adventure's would be considered extreme by my mother, we would frequently be 20 or 30 minutes away from a Kmart. Bears were frequent (that was the uber-hip slang with which we referred to the police aka: Kris Christopherson in "Convoy"). As my brother and I aged our forays into the wilderness became so extreme that my mother (being of the gentler sex) frequently had to sit out on our adventure's, as I'm sure their very nature would make her swoon, we ventured to the wilds of Walkerton, Lucknow and Port Paisley (whose name belies the truly dangerous nature of the town). Often we would be a hour from home.
We didn't need to hunt, we had skills. The list of animals that hunted us on these adventures was numerous, there were bats (all of which were rabid), there were raccoon's (which were also rabid), there were squirrels with bad attitudes (and rabies). We were trained in all the skills necessary for survival in the wild, how to stay out of the way while the tent was being set up, how to avoid the ten foot perimeter of death that surrounded the campfire, how to select the right foods that could be cooked in a single pot on the Coleman, how to eat off of plastic plates, and most importantly, how to avoid the child molesters that lurked behind EVERY tree and in every porta-potty (I lived in fear of those who wished to cut off my pee-pee, I still fear them).
It really is amazing that any of us survived. We told the age old tales of our ancestors who had died in positions much like ours ("if the log rolls over we're all going to die). And we survived, Hell, we prevailed, we excelled, except for myself, we frequently went home without even visiting a hospital. There was nothing Mother Nature (within 5 miles of a town) could throw at us that we would not endure, except bad weather, something about spending a few hours in a tent with two bored children always seemed to trigger a unnamed medical condition in my Dad that meant we had to return home, even the sight of a oncoming storm was enough to cause such pain that we would quickly pack up and rush back to the safety of our homestead. Those who have travelled to the peaks of Kilimanjaro would do well to learn from our shared experiences. We explored the new frontier, we broke virgin ground, We were Men.
I'll continue tomorrow.
CG

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