Pemmican: History, Uses and How-To

Recipes

Earlier this year we collaborated with Marcelle Phene to experiment in the making of traditional pemmican. If there is such a thing as “super foods,” pemmican must be counted amont them. But where did this food come from, and how was it traditionally made? Read on to learn more.

White-Tailed Deer Tree Stand Safety

Homesteading

Fall Prevention and Tree Stand Safety

Tree Stand Safety – Background

Hunting is obviously not one of our three lines of business, Sawyers, Sugarers, or Soapers, but it is part of what I refer to as Primal Woods Life, and it is About Us! Indigenous peoples have not been particular about food, other than to ensurethat it was safe and nutritious, so they ate what the land had to offer; plants and animals. In the midwest, White-Tailed Deer are a part of the fat of the land, and so they are a part of how we now sustain ourselves. If you want to know more about White-tailed Deer and their conservation, check out the post I wrote, Top 7 Messages from The Land Ethic Reclaimed. Hunting safely is about your Health, and it is about your Community, including your family and friends. I argue that you cannot afford to get hurt, and your friends, family and community cannot afford for you to get hurt.

Tree Stand Safety at Primal Woods

Part and parcel of hunting white-tailed deer in this part of the country, are tree stands. Now I religiously wear my safety harness in all ladder stands that I hunt from, regardless of height, which ranges from 12-15 feet. I don’t care who you are, a fall from that height can hurt you, badly. However, the safety harness only protects you once you are in the stand, not when climbing to, or descending from the stand. We inherited a high “hang-on” stand from a tresspasser a few years ago, and this stand requires some additional safety considerations. The seat of the stand is about 25 feet above the ground, and access is not via a typical ladder, but rather by use of a “climbing stick,” which is strapped to the tree.

Yup, that qualifies as a long drop

This tree stand requires 16 feet of climbing stick, and another 8 feet or so of “tree steps,” which are screwed into the tree.

An example of a “tree step”

Tree Stand Safety – Fall Prevention

Now, let in be said, I’m not a big fan of heights. And I am certainly not interested in falling from 20 or 25 feet while trying to access this tree stand, or worse yet, while climbing down from this tree stand in complete darkness and the dead of winter. So, today I installed the Gorilla Gear Fall Defense G-Tac Fall Defense Line Tree Rope. That’s a mouthful. It is the larger rope on the right side of the climbing stick in the photo. This piece of safety equipment uses a curious knot, called a “Prusik Knot,” which you can slip up or down as you climb or descend, but which pulls tight and arrests your fall if the knot is put under tension by the force of your fall.

Prusik Knot in the Gorilla Gear Fall Defense Line

A carabiner attaches your safety harness to the Prusik knot when climbing or descending. The green and white in the larger black rope is reflective.

The other rope in the picture, on the left, is what I call a haul rope. Again, this is tied off up at the stand, but is equipped with carabiners at the ground-end to allow the hunter to leave his gear on the ground, attached to the haul rope; freeing his hands for climbing. Then, once the hunter is safely situated in the stand, with safety harness attached, the gear is hauled up. So both ropes, for fall prevention and for hauling gear up to the stand, are important from a safety perspective.

Ok, all for now. I just wanted to get out a quick note, asking you to care for yourselves, and by association, your family and friends. Take safety seriously.

All the best, and kind regards,

John

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/by John Newell

Improving White-tailed Deer Utilization – Part 1

Homesteading

The first White-tailed Deer of the season, image from Instagram

I killed two white-tailed deer this year, field dressed and hung each to age a bit, and then took them to my processor to be made into cuts (steaks, chops, roasts, etc.), ground venison, and sausages. I also helped my friend Jacob to get his deer processed, and it was during an exchange between us and the processor, that the processor mentioned that the amount of meat typically returned to his customers, as a fraction of hanging weight, is approximately 35%. When recently picking up the meat from a 1/2 steer (grass fed) that Geri and I had purchased, that processor told me that the yield for beef is typically 70% of hanging weight; of course they have been bred to maximize meat production. Still, I found the 35% yield from white-tails to be too low, unacceptably low in fact; if I am going to take the life of an animal I want to use as much of the animal as is possible. With that in mind, I established the following goal in the 2016 Year in Review post:

Homestead BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) 2017 – Butcher, process and preserve at least one deer, on the homestead; improve utilization from 35% of hanging weight to >=60%

Lessons from A Beginner in the Field

Homesteading

Or the woods, as the case may be. It was an interesting sit between two big beech trees yesterday. First, well before light still, I heard a branch come crashing down, I think it landed less than 10 feet behind me and a bit to my left. (Later investigation showed it to be less than 6 feet, the branch 4 inches in diameter.) I instinctively moved, quickly, to the right around the trunk of the tree my back was against. Scary. Widow-maker. Lesson Learned: In your scouting for a location from which to hunt, check for widow-makers, be that a ground or tree stand location. The chances of being hit are small, the consequences large.

I was sitting with my back against the tree to the left

Then, after first light, I heard what sounded like baseballs dropping through the canopy, dropping through the leaves and branches, and hitting the ground with heavy, distinctive thuds. “That would hurt,” I said to myself! I actually thought seriously about getting one of those hard hat shells that goes under a baseball cap, and Geri mentioned the same when I told her the story later. I thought this was interesting because I did not hear any of it before sunrise, then, I heard maybe 10 or 20 fall over the course of 30 minutes or so, then nothing. It had rained an inch the day before and into early hours, and an inch and a half the day before that. There was a lot of water in the canopy, and under the trees it seemed like it was still raining as I sat. At the time I believed that they might be black walnuts, that was all I could think of that made any sense, and I saw a relatively dark trunk (compared to the dominant sugar maples and beeches) maybe 20-25 yards in front of me; they are called black walnut trees for a reason. I also looked this over during my “later investigation,” and sho’ nuf, there was a big black walnut tree and walnuts littering the forest floor. Lesson Learned: Do not set your dumb ass under mature black walnut trees in the fall!

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