DEER HUNTERS

Ken and I were teaching in Fort Worth in the late nineteen fifties.  Ken and six of his fellow teachers hunted on 800 acres in eastern Stephens County.  My brother had beef cattle there.  The cows expected food when they heard the horn of my brother’s pickup.

One of the guys was unable to travel with the group on their first trip.  He was to arrive late in the afternoon.  Ken told him to honk his car horn when he got inside the gate and someone would come to lead him to the campsite.  He arrived, honked, and waited.  Before long, cattle began to come toward his car.  He had never been around cattle. As more and more cattle arrived, they surrounded his car.  He had no clue what was going on.  The cattle were looking at him through the windows expecting him to get out and spread range cubes on the ground.  He was frightened as the critters looked him in the eye.  He was even more dismayed when he saw Ken disembark from the passenger side of an approaching car and move between the cows.  He thought Ken would surely be trampled. Ken rescued him.  The poor fellow provided the others a good laugh.

It began to rain late one evening.  The men hurriedly moved their sleeping bags and gear into an old structure.  It was an old dynamite house used during the oil boom of the 1920’s.  It was solid and dry but small.  They were crammed close together trying to sleep.  If one turned to another side, they all had to turn.  Fortunately, the rain stopped the next morning.

On one trip, they helped my brother “work calves.”  This meant catching the calves, branding them, and castrating the male calves. Ken was the only one who had ever done this.  They thought it was fun, not work.  They built their evening campfire and began to cook food. Ken and one of the cooks prepared the “calf fries.”  (The by-product when a calf becomes a steer.)  As they were eating, one of the fellows remarked how good they were.  He asked, “What is this?”  They told him.  He immediately went into the darkness and tossed them (along with his other food) on the ground.  I am sure none of the others laughed at him.

At that time, I was teaching foods to ninth grade girls.  (No boys were in homemaking classes in those years.)  One class had a smart alec girl who blurted out anything to get attention.

There was a chart in their textbook on cuts of meat.  I more or less pointed it out to them and went on.  She and the girl next to her zeroed in on variety meats.  They started giggling.  The other girl asked if we were going to cook liver.  Before I finished saying no, the smarty girl blurted, “Can we cook mountain oysters?”  I said no, and kept going before anyone asked what she meant.

I was aware at an early age that working calves meant branding and making steers out of the bull calves.  My mother sometimes cooked the by-product and called them calf fries.  I had never heard the term mountain oysters until I heard Ken telling my brother about his friend throwing up the mountain oysters.  If the girl had asked the question one week earlier, I would have had no idea what she was talking about.