Hunting Season: Days 8 and 9 (No Hunting!)

Terry and I sat around all day yesterday waiting for the snowmageddon the forecasters were harping about. Never happened. Not here anyway. We had fog. Lots of it, too. Occasionally it would lift enough so we could see more than half a mile. Sometimes it would be pea soup thick and seeing the burn barrel (25 yards away) was an invitation to eyestrain. Needless to say, with all the fog, we had no breeze of which to speak. The thermometer would hover around the freezing mark; as low as 28 and as high as 34. All day the radar showed snow and/or ice to the east of us lined up just on the other side of Route 220 between Sayre and Towanda. That's as far as it got--the middle of Bradford County about 40 miles east of the Aerie.

I had decided to sleep in and not go out hinting because of the weather forecasts. Although the temperatures were fine and there was no precip to speak of, the fog would have made it extreemly difficult to spot anything more than 30 yards away. So Terry and I sat around the house waiting for the snow. And waiting asa the Photography Club meeting in Wellsboro was cancelled and reports were coming in from eat and north of us about how bad it was and weather forecasters were wetting their panties in glee over the WEATHER!!!! And nothing continued to happen here. Finally Terry decided she had had enough and went to the Ladies Guild dinner down in Mansfield. I stayed home and monitored the weather (and watched some TV). When she got home at 9 PM the snow still hadn't arrived. (Monday night the forecasters were saying it would be snowing by 6 AM Tuesday.) And it was still not snowing when we went to bed at 10 PM.

This morning we awoke to a light dusting of fresh new snow on the deck.Perhaps as much as a quarter of an inch.

Having hung the little button buck outside for two days, I decided it was time to do some butchering today. I skinned out the deer behind the house and then quartered the carcass in front of the garage before moving inside to debone the critter. Terry assisted with the deboning and removal of fat from the meat and then with the packaging of same.

This wasn't a huge deer by any stretch of the imagination and when we got done with removing all the inedible parts, we were left with about 45 pounds of very lean filet, roasts, steaks, stew meat and chop meat.

Julie the cat helped with the clean up as she helped herself to some of the ground venison sticking to the meat grinder and various bowls I set aside to wash. She normally doesn't eat raw meat and will ignore chopped beef, but she really, really likes venison!

We had closed the garage door while we deboned the deer and were a little surprised to see it was snowing pretty good when we went in to the kitchen to process the meat. Not much in the way of accumulation...yet, but there was every indication it would continue for a good while.

Saw on the news that Syracuse and the hills on I-81 in that area were getting/had gotten hammered. There were reports of a 5 hour delay on I-81 and a foot of snow in Syracuse. Even the Bolt Hole is getting upwards to a foot of snow. We won't see anything quite that drastic here at teh Aerie, but the folks at weather.com are still speaking of 1-3 inches tonight and another 1 inch tomorrow. We shall see.