Sunday morning, 6 AM scattershot

This I love.

DLW gave me a great recipe for Boston Brown Bread. However, it's supposed to be baked in 6 14.5 oz cans and I didn't have any so I tried loaf pans. Not a good idea. Every loaf was perfectly done around the sides, and still doughy in the middle. So I bought a couple of cans of brown bread at the store, and I'm feasting on it. I can see how that bread would have been a real tonic in the midst of a New England winter. Lots of iron, lots of sweet, and the raisins would loosen the most hidebound Yankee. Plus, the brown bread is a perfect vehicle for butter. Yum!

I was thinking about my mom's first hunting trip because one of DH's buddies just returned from his first hunting trip. He was the first guy to get his deer, dressed it out, then called on his radio to have the other guys show up and help him pack it out. Evidently, they, "Couldn't hear" his messages, so, being the astoundingly tough little guy that he is, he loaded the carcass of the deer up on top of his back pack ("Only about 100 lbs," DH said) and carried it back to camp. It took him six hours. I am astounded at his grit! I would have built a fire, grilled the loin, and waited for the searchers to find me.

I grew up in the country where deer hunting was a given. Absenteeism at the mill always spiked during deer season. These guys were getting meat for the winter, and if the greenchain had to run slow for a couple weeks, then that was the way it was. Every year, Dad would hand a letter to the school principal, asking that his kids be excused for a week to attend their Uncle Buck's funeral. A week at deer camp was not my idea of heaven. I didn't hunt, nor did Mom, so we would spend the day freezing our buns off, huddled around the campfire, or in later years, cramped into the camper. We Read a lot and embroidered a lot of dishtowels. No mother-daughter heart to heart conversations. She had her own problems, and I spent most of my time inside my head.

But she would turn out the most astounding meals out in the boonies, even though she never knew how many to cook for. If Dad met someone out in the woods, he'd invite them in for dinner. Any total stranger with a rifle, chance met on a deer trail. I remember the night she served steaks and lobster tails to a couple of good ol' boys from Izee (a tiny ranching community in eastern Oregon) they tore into the steaks with great enthusiasm, but never did touch those big white grubs she put on their plates.

It's easy to buy a rifle in Oregon. Just go to a gun show and hand over your money. And you can buy a video tape that will tell you how to hunt deer and what to do with them when you have shot them. You get city boys with no outdoor experience and the best equipment money can buy, playing great white hunter in the outback and the accidents are legion. Dad had a friend that used to ride into the wilderness area leading a pack horse, and hunt in some pretty inaccessible country. Then one year, someone shot his pack horse, thinking it was a deer. The next year, the guy dyed sheets bright red and draped them over the horses like hunting coats. Someone shot the horse he was riding. After that, he quit hunting.

On one hunting trip, my older brothers dressed me in the brightest, most glaring reds we could find, gave me a dishpan and a spoon, and told me to climb up the ridge, beating on the pan and hollaring, driving the deer up to them. I have done stupid things in my time, but walking toward all their rifles was one of the dumbest. I survived, and they got royally chewed out for making such use of their sister. The excuse? "We thought about using one of the dogs, but we were afraid it might get shot."