Memorial Day Weekend Mauser Challenge

On Saturday morning, blacksmith Paul Fritz and myself are starting the dry run for our new Mauser class with John Athayde as our guinea pig. Can we teach someone with no previous gunsmithing experience how to build a custom Mauser deer rifle in only two days, and then scale it up for a class of 4 students? The clock starts ticking at 9 am with a stripped action, boxes of parts and Paul's welding rig ready to go. The rifle needs to be not only working but also shooting accurately at 150 yards by Sunday evening.

I think it is fitting that we are doing this on Memorial Day weekend, since the practice of building American deer rifles out of old Mauser military actions dates back to the end of WWI, when returning American GIs brought home German Mausers they had picked up off the battlefield and stuffed into their dufflebags. Bolt action rifles were new-ish technology at the time and few hunters could afford to buy one. But if they had a battlefield pick-up, a little work and ingenuity could turn that prize into a hunting rifle.

Over time, many people came to prefer the Mauser action over commercial bolt actions. Especially in the late 20th century as more parts of new rifles were stamped out of sheet metal or molded from plastic. The smooth, strong function of the traditional Mauser dating back to 1898 is unrivaled among all but the most expensive of modern rifles. You can now buy a perfectly good, new deer rifle for less than what it costs to convert a Mauser, but will it be as smooth and satisfying as working the bolt on a vintage European Mauser? I really don't think so.

It is in that spirit that we commence this dry run. If all goes well this weekend then we will be offering the course on a limited basis to 4 students per class and everyone will go home with a custom Mauser that they have the pride of having built.

Book Announcement

Now that the contract is actually signed and done, I think that I am probably safe to announce the fact that I have signed as an author with Storey Publishing. They will be bringing my first book, 'A Locavore's Guide to Deer Hunting' to print in the near future. Its not clear yet as to exactly when the book will be launched, but I have high hopes of getting onto the fall schedule.

Actually, it might not even go to print with that title. They have the right to rename it anything they want, which is fine with me.

As we approach the launch date, I will be scheduling a series of workshops and butchering demonstrations in various cities. These will be more or less along the lines of the workshops I have recently done in support of Slow Food NYC. If anyone reading this is part of an organization with goals aligned somehow with what I'm doing, please feel free to get in touch with me about visiting your area as I approach the launch of the book. Slow Food convivia, locavore groups, etc. Shoot me an email at Jack dot Landers at gmail dot com.

Meanwhile, I've got all sorts of other cool stuff in the works that I can't wait to formally announce. This includes TV projects, new courses on advanced topics like rifle-building and hide-tanning, and a 150 acre property in the Blue Ridge Mountains where my co-instructors and I will be offering various fun weekends involving primitive skills, a 150 yard shooting range that we are hacking out of a mountain side, waterfalls, and a unique retreat that sleeps 10.

Fun stuff is in the works.

Following the Leader: How and Why to Identify Dominant Deer

With my 3 year-old son clinging to my back, I crawled slowly to the crest of a grassy hill. My 6 year old daughter crept beside me. When we approached the ruff of brush along a barbed wire fence and peered over, our stealth was rewarded. Two deer stood broadside to us as they grazed about 100 yards away.

We watched them for a few minutes. Harry whispered to me that the one nearest to the telephone pole was stopping and looking around more than the other deer. This was true. Soon the first pair was joined by three more deer. All five does grazed and all of them looked around regularly but the one that my 3 year old had pointed out was clearly more alert.

This wasn't a real hunt, since it is May as I write this and deer are not in season. But it was good practice for autumn. What my son had picked up on was deer behavior that is very much worth the attention of a meat hunter.

While moving in a group, deer tend to take their cues from one dominant animal within the group. The deer in charge decides when to run and which way to go. If you shoot a deer from among a small herd then the leader will usually make the smart decision to run away instantly at the sound of the shot and the rest of the group follows. When you are only after a single deer I suppose that it doesn't matter much. But if you want to double up and take more than one deer during the hunt then it pays to identify the leader and make that deer your first target. Assuming that you are able to drop it in its tracks, the rest of the herd will stand or mill around for 5 to 10 seconds without being sure of what to do. That is plenty of time to get steady and identify another target.

They key to doing this is being able to consistently identify which deer among a group is most likely the leader. Don't be fooled by size. The oldest or highest ranking deer is not necessarily the biggest one. Whatever skeletal size a deer has achieved by 6 months of age represents the lifetime maximum. The volume of muscle and fat attached to that skeleton can change, but if the deer's diet early in life was inadequate then it will be stunted for life. A deer that was born into a season of drought 5 years ago will tend to be the leader if it is in a group surrounded by yearlings that started out with all the food they could desire. Size says nothing in this respect, especially among does rather than bucks.

When a group of deer moves into a clearing, the leader is usually the first one to enter. The others wait until she expresses confidence in the situation being relatively safe. She will walk out first, look around, put her head down as if to feed for a few seconds. Then she lifts her head and looks around. When she decides that it is safe then she will start swishing her tail sideways and the other deer will follow.

In the case of the deer that my kids and I saw yesterday, we didn't see them all enter the clearing. Two were there to begin with, which narrowed it down a bit. The behavior of one deer confirmed that she was probably the leader. The deer that acts the most wary and alert is probably the one that the other deer will look to for guidance. The one that has its head up more often.

Note that the leader in this sense is not necessarily the deer that wins the most fights. Among many herd animals there are individuals who are not dominant in the pecking order per se but whose cues for where and when to go are followed most often by the rest of the herd.

Certainly before pulling the trigger on a second deer, you must be quite certain that the first one is either dead or definitely down for the count. Having two wounded deer to track at the same time, probably in different directions, would be a mess not worth risking.

Whether or not you actually want to deal with the reality of having two dead deer to work on is another matter altogether. It is twice the work and I cannot suggest that a beginner try it. Assuming that your goal is to stock the freezer with as much food as possible for the coming year then I think doubling up is worth the extra work. I have passed on opportunities to take a second deer in a single hunt and later regretted it when the rut ended and deer were harder to catch up with and I was behind in my goals for food security. This past season I finally went for it and have no regrets. It also happened that I had two students from one of my deer hunting classes who lived close by and were happy to come over and learn how to field dress and quarter. Dividing up the labor made things go a little faster.


[Photo used courtesy of The Crow Hand under Creative Commons License]

Eating Raw Marrow & A Weekend Recap

Paleo diet evangelist John Durant has a nice photo essay up on his blog right now of our deer hunting and butchering class from this past weekend. John is the guy in the red shirt whom you see here slurping the raw marrow directly from the bones (I am shamelessly grabbing his photo since it is for a link to his blog after all).

Right when I thought I'd seen everything. I feel like there was something along those lines in a short story by Jack London that I read when I was a kid, only the bones weren't exactly from a deer.

This particular group last weekend, comprised mostly of people from the NYC Paleo Diet Meetup Group, was especially thorough in their use of the deer that we worked on. As his photos show, you can always literally see the ground through the rib cage when one of my classes gets through with a deer. But these guys made a point of eating the heart, liver, marrow and anything else in sight. Eating the raw flesh carved straight off of the warm carcass on the ground seems to be turning into an unexpected class tradition.

After we'd finished quartering the deer, Fergus Clare (who was also our instructor for skinning and basic hide preparation) successfully demonstrated how to make fire by literally rubbing sticks together. Next time we really need to budget in time to cook some of the meat over the fire made from scratch. If anyone reading this has a photo that I can post of the sublime moment of flame bursting out in Fergus' hands, I would appreciate it.

Meanwhile, I am headed back to New York City tomorrow to teach another workshop benefiting Slow Food NYC on Saturday at Jimmy's 43. Details can be found here and tickets might still be available.

[Photo used courtesy of John Durant]

Hunt Your Own Hunt: The Idiocy of Snobbery Among Hunters

I do not personally consider hunting to be a sport in the sense which the word 'sport' is now most commonly used. It is far more serious than a game of basketball. Hunting is not a contest among human beings any more than growing vegetables is. There is some small percentage of gardeners who will get really into growing massive pumpkins or other vegetables that they take around to county fairs in order to compete against other gardeners, but those are the exception. So it is with hunting. Some people are obsessed with chasing after huge bucks and scoring them against one another (and I'm ok with that), but that is not the goal of most hunters who are out there pulling the trigger.

The hunt is a very personal thing. It is you, the hunter, trying to outwit your prey and bring home food to eat. The tools and techniques that you use are between you and the deer and have nothing to do with any other hunter. So why is it that we must have these constant expressions of snobbery regarding hunting weapons?

It goes like this: Hunters who use very modern, AR-style deer rifles are looked down on by hunters who prefer a bolt or lever action. People who like single-shot rifles, such as the Ruger #1, like to get uppity about it and insist that anyone who needs more than one shot has no business hunting.*

Then you've got the archery crowd with its own silly layers of snottiness. Many archers in general are fond of dismissing anyone who hunts with a firearm as 'cheating,' as if this was a contest in which it was even possible to cheat. Lots of archers hunt with a modern compound bow that uses some very clever physics to propel arrows at higher velocities than one would otherwise be capable of. But then there are archers who use a more traditionally styled recurve bow. They like to accuse the compound bow hunters of hardly counting as archers at all.

But wait, it gets worse. Within the recurve subset there are some who use recurve bows made of modern materials. They are looked down on by the people who use recurve bows made of wood.

Hold on a minute there: are you using store-bought arrows or are you fletching your own? Using modern steel points or knapping your own out of obsidian? Hey -- that isn't a proper folsom arrowhead that you chipped out of flint. That's a new-fangled clovis point! You damned slob of an excuse for a hunter.

This is about as far as it goes among actual hunters, but I've seen it get even more ridiculous when non-hunters jump into the fray. Many is the time that I have been told that hunting with anything but a knife is 'cheating.' One otherwise intelligent woman whom I met insisted that it is 'wrong' to hunt with any weapon at all, since the deer has no weapons. In her book, the only way to hunt for food is by choking the deer to death or poking out its eyes or something. I don't imagine that she would last too long in the wild.

All of this is completely idiotic. Each of these methods (bare hands aside) is a perfectly reasonable way for someone to choose to hunt for food. I've got nothing against either recurve fans or the hunters who came back from 3 tours of duty in Iraq and find that their handling of an AR-type weapon is now more instinctive than a bolt action will ever be.

The deer has no idea what the difference is between an AR-10 and a spear. I can assure you that while that deer is laying on the ground and bleeding to death through a hole in its lungs created by one projectile or another, the finer points of your arguments for the purity of one tool versus another are completely lost on it.

Hunt your own hunt. This isn't a contest. It is no more possible to 'cheat' among hunters than it is among gardeners. If I like to grow organic tomatoes in my backyard, that doesn't make it any of my business whether you buy a bag of fertilizer for yours. And if I go around accusing you of being a cheat for growing tomatoes with fertilizer then that wouldn't prove that I'm a better gardener than you are. It would prove that I'm an asshole.

My advice to new hunters is to please not fall into this trap. Its ok to take pride in your choice to bow-hunt or use a flintlock or whatever you are going to hunt with. But your pride should be rooted in your ability to bring home food that was killed cleanly and safely with as little suffering to the deer as possible. You don't need to carve out some special status by turning up your nose at people who hunt with something more technologically advanced. There are more than enough deer to go around for all of us. Hunt your own hunt.

_____________________
*Many of these people are braggarts who are never going to tell you about the animal that they lost because they couldn't get a quick enough follow-up shot. They can claim 100% success when they are boasting on the internet because the rest of the forum users weren't there to see the failures. Always take the 'I-only-need-to-carry-one-cartridge-into-the-field' guys (and they are inevitably men - female hunters seem to know better) with a grain of salt.

[Photo used courtesy of Nedrai under Creative Commons license]