Sandra didn’t want to hunt. The closest she wanted to get to wild game was the brace of quail beside her wild rice in one of those high-end Dallas restaurants.
They were house-sitting for some relatives in good deer country when her husband decided to kill a buck by himself. When Daniel offered to take her along, she smiled, declined, and poured herself another glass of deep-root red wine.
Unfortunately Daniel wasn’t a very experienced hunter. He’d taken a few deer in the past, but it was always with friends who assisted in the dirty work. But as his limited experience expanded, he began to fancy himself a Great White Hunter.
Since game was so plentiful, the first part of his plan proved reasonably easy. He waited in a tree stand until a nine-point buck walked out, and hammered him.
Then came the hard part, and the essence of this narrative I heard while at a party at their house one evening. I was positioned between the parties of unintentionally (or maybe intentionally) segregated men and women, and heard the conversation in stereo.
The following demonstrates the validity of John Gray’s ten-year-old hypothesis. Men and women are from different planets.
Daniel: I knew she wanted to help me with the buck, and I killed it so close to the house that I didn’t even field dress it.
Sandra: I was just curled up on the couch with a good cozy mystery, and he wanted me to get out in the cold to mess with that dead animal.
Daniel: He was a beautiful ten point and I knew he’d look good on the wall.
Sandra: It was a disgusting corpse. He stank. I think he peed on himself because I almost gagged when we were unloading it from the jeep.
Daniel: I tried to explain he was in rut.
Sandra: That’s men for you. Rut, toilet seats, you figure it out.
Daniel: Sandra was sure acting funny. She didn’t seem to want to help at all. She even argued it wasn’t a nine point, that one of the points was just a nub, but I explained how it’s classed as a point if you can hang a ring from it.
Sandra: I was about to offer to hang my wedding ring on one little bitty pointy-thing and go home to mama before we were finished. I swear, he was so excited about shooting that deer, and all he could talk about is how good it would look on the wall.
Daniel: You’re not going to believe this. After we drove into the barn she ran inside the house and came back out with plastic bread wrappers rubber-banded on both hands so she wouldn’t have to touch the deer.
Sandra: He wanted me to hold the deer’s legs apart while he cut its belly open.
Daniel: She mumbled some woman thing about needing stirrups on a table, but I didn’t know what that meant. We were trying to clean a deer and she kept giggling and frowning.
Sandra: The deer was already cold and stiff. I was supposed to hold his back legs apart while he worked, but we kept getting in each other’s way. Every time I let go they snapped back together.
Daniel: You know what she did then? She went back into the house and came out with a bungee cord and a pair of pantyhose. She bungee-corded one back leg to the jeep’s steering wheel and the other to the bumper. It looked like something most states consider illegal.
Sandra: He didn’t know what to do. He kept ordering me around and then when I did what he said, he’d get mad and tell me I wasn’t doing it right.
Daniel: She wasn’t doing anything right. She couldn’t hold onto a thing with those bread bags on her hands and she wasn’t dressed appropriately, either. She kept shivering there in a cotton warm-up suit with a denim shirt over her shoulders. Of course she was cold, it was twenty degrees.
Sandra: I’m surprised he didn’t complain about my necklace.
Daniel: And she was wearing this stupid dangly necklace that belonged in one of those fancy restaurants where they serve baked quail or something. It kept hanging in front of her face and she couldn’t work because it was in the way.
Sandra: The worst part was when he started taking the organs out. I’ve never seen anything like that, but I don’t think he was comfortable with it, either, because he kept making gagging noises.
Daniel: She started giggling again when I got a tickle in my throat and couldn’t get it out. Those things happen at the worst times. The she rolled her eyes and made a suggestion she should have made a lot earlier.
Sandra: I was trying not to see what he was doing, so I looked up and hanging from the rafters was a block and tackle. Then I remembered Grandad used it to hang deer in his barn so he could clean them.
Daniel: How was I supposed to know he had that stuff?
Sandra: So then he used the bungee cord and hose to raise to tie he deer onto the block and tackle, but the pantyhose broke and the deer fell and snapped off both of his antlers when he landed on his head.
Daniel: She stomped out after the buck fell. She said I was yelling at her. I was just mad about the antlers breaking off and besides, the stupid hose probably had a runner in them that weakened the whole thing. It was her fault we don’t have a ten-point mount above the fireplace.
Sandra: Was not. It was a two-point after everything broke off, so I went inside to finish my wine.
Daniel: Women just don’t know the first thing about hunting.
