I’ve killed dozens of them, and I’ve eaten the meat from way more than I’ve killed. These have included deer that were hit by cars and trucks, maimed by fences, killed by coyotes, and shot by other hunters. While I’ll admit that I have a slight preference for elk, deer are a close second with regard to overall tastiness and versatility. Deer meat is so lean and can be prepared in so many ways that you can eat it every day without getting sick of it, which isn’t something I’d say about raccoon or porcupine.
The amount of meat you get off a deer depends, quite obviously, on how big the deer is. They come in a variety of sizes. A mature whitetail buck from the southern mainland of Florida might top out at 125 pounds, while a mature whitetail buck from northern Alberta can easily weigh more than twice that.* Mule deer, which are native to the American West (generally beyond the hundredth meridian), do not vary in size according to latitude as much as whitetail deer do, but they still vary. A typical mature muley will weigh around two hundred pounds, but some whoppers have been reported to weigh upward of 450 pounds. Females of both species generally weigh a lot less than males—usually around one-half to two-thirds as much. Regardless of their size, deer in good condition yield roughly 40 percent of their body weight in boneless meat.
I’ve only killed one deer that was inedible, and that was hardly the deer’s fault. It was a mule deer buck, and the circumstances of its death were so bizarre that it warrants a little explanation. I was hunting the rough country of the Missouri Breaks, in an area with a lot of sinkholes. Most of these holes are found at the heads of steep canyons, where eroded sediments accumulate in thick, loose layers and are then undermined by subsurface runoff. The mouths of the holes are sometimes camouflaged by thick stands of sagebrush. Whenever I find one, I look into the hole to see if there are any old skeletons at the bottom from animals that have fallen in and died of thirst or hunger. A lot of the sinkholes are so deep you can’t even see the bottom.
One evening I shot a buck, which slid down an icy slope and dropped from view behind an intervening ridge. When I climbed over to where it had fallen I couldn’t find any trace of it. I scaled the hill back to where it had been standing and then followed the trail of smeared blood back downhill. Eventually I traced the deer to the mouth of a sinkhole that was shaped like an Erlenmeyer flask. The hole was about three feet across at the top, about six feet across at the bottom, and about eleven feet deep. I could barely make out details of the buck at the bottom of the hole, though I could see that the animal was still moving a bit. I leaned into the hole and fired a shot down at what I figured to be its rib cage. I didn’t see or hear any movement after that, but my ears were ringing horribly because the noise of the rifle blast had bounced out of the hole as if it had been touched off next to my head.
There was no way for me to go after the deer without a rope and some help, so I made my way back toward camp. In the morning my hunting buddy held my ankles while I dangled into the hole and got a lasso around one of the buck’s antlers. We dragged the deer out and saw that it was an incredibly old animal. Its muzzle was gray, its back was swayed, its muscles were thin. When we gutted it, we found that its innards had begun to sour. It had been a cold night, but no doubt the insulating effect of the hole had kept the deer from cooling. Still, we scrubbed its abdominal cavity with handfuls of snow. The meat still had a slightly rotten smell to it, but that didn’t stop me from bringing it back to the trailer park where Matt and I were living at the time. In our kitchen we started sampling pieces of that deer. Beginning with the rear hams and working toward the neck, we fried little cubes of the meat in butter in hopes that we’d find some cuts that weren’t tainted. When the smell of the cooking rot got so bad that we couldn’t stand it, we turned on a fan in the back bedroom and began tasting the pieces back there. But there was nothing we could do to salvage it. The sickness in my stomach came from my repulsion from the smell of the meat and also my repulsion over the waste. We placed the deer’s meat near a brushy creek bed across the road, not far from where we’d gathered a lot of morels the previous spring. Then we watched as magpies made quick and happy work of what we weren’t tough enough to manage ourselves.
People will often use the word gamey when discussing deer meat, though I don’t think gaminess is in any way synonymous with rot. In the old days, hunters hung venison until it was “high,” a term that implied a fairly advanced state of decomposition. But that process was really not much different from the modern practice of aging beef: You hang it until it develops flavor and becomes tender, but you do so under controlled circumstances (in other words, not in a sinkhole with the animal’s guts still in it). I’ve heard people use the word gamey to describe meat that might otherwise be described as “off,” or “weird,” or just plain “bad”: bear meat that tastes like fish, beaver meat that tastes like perfume, turtle meat that tastes like some long-dead sea creature that was dragged up from the bottom of a hot swamp, and duck that tastes like … well, ducks.
If I had my way, we’d use the word gamey only to describe the distinctive pungent glandular taste that comes from certain deer at certain times of year. This sort of gaminess is most common among bucks. You can literally see it on them during the rut, or breeding season, when they foster on the insides of their back legs a mixture of urine along with a secretion from their subcutaneous tarsal gland. The gland is covered by a palm-sized patch of hair that looks like a cowlick with a bad case of bedhead; the oily substance the gland secretes dyes the hair the color of dark honey. It smells so bad that people will pull away and gag if you unsuspectingly put it in front of their nose. You might create a similar odor by pissing on your gym clothes and leaving them in a plastic bag out in the sun.
It would be impossible to calculate just how many millions of pounds of meat have been corrupted by hunters who get that substance all over their hands and knives while processing deer. It took me a long time to make the correlation between tarsal glands and gamey-tasting meat. Finally I read an incriminating passage about the glands in an essay written by Thomas McGuane.† I was soon a believer. When I first explained this theory to Matt, while cutting away the glands from a mule deer buck that we were about to skin and butcher, he was incredulous. Matt picked up one of the glands and put it into the pocket of his backpack. He promised to swab the gland on a beefsteak to see if the resulting taste matched the mysterious and off-putting flavor that sometimes taints his venison. As far as I know, his curiosity wasn’t so great that he actually tried it.
Not that tarsal glands are solely to blame for gamey deer meat. A similar flavor can also come from the hard and waxy fat that lies beneath the deer’s skin and sometimes between muscle groups. If this stuff isn’t trimmed away from a deer steak, you might notice that one out of every three or four bites has something gamey going on. If it isn’t trimmed away from ground meat used for sausages and burgers, you’ll find that it spreads around and affects the entire batch.
I’ve said so much here about gamey deer meat that I’ve threatened to undermine my earlier assertion that deer are one of the best-tasting things in the woods. Thinking of this, I’m reminded of that quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., about how there can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Which is to say, deer meat is usually absolutely delicious—sweet, perfectly textured, like a sublime combination of lean beef and mild lamb—and it’s painful when something like a tarsal gland or a hunk of tallow interferes with your ability to enjoy it.
*Christian Bergmann, a nineteenth-century German biologist, was one of the first guys who noticed that larger species of a genus are generally found in colder climates, and smaller species of that genus are generally found in warmer climates. This became known as Bergmann’s rule, though it was later redefined to describe how larger members of a particular species are found in colder climates, while smaller members of that species are found in warmer climates. This phenomenon has also been linked to latitude, which is obviously closely related to temperature. Heat retention and dissipation are probable explanations for why it’s better to be smaller in hot climates and larger in cold climates. For instance, a three-hundred-pound deer has less surface area per unit of mass than a one-hundred-pound deer; the larger deer is better able to retain heat generated through metabolic processes, and the smaller deer is better able to shed heat. The ways in which animals deal with heat can explain a lot about how they behave and how they’re shaped. Pigs do not have sweat glands, hence their proclivity to wallow in mud during hot weather. African elephants have large ears (heat dissipation) though woolly mammoths from the Arctic had very small ears (heat retention).
†In that same essay, “The Heart of the Game,” McGuane relates a conversation in which an anti-hunter challenges a deer hunter. It’s one of my favorite pieces of writing of all time. “Why should [deer] die for you? Would you die for deer?” the anti-hunter asks. “If it came to that,” the hunter replies.