The Food Thread

This thread is now on a hunting derail. Several of us took our kids to deer camp for the first time last year. Mine was 10. By day three every last one of the little bastards had shot a decent (8+ points) buck. Mine shot one larger than anything I have gotten in over 15 years.

Reserve some steaks, grind and/or cube the rest and your freezer is happy and healthy. We actually paid the $150 to have it butchered and some of it made into brats and summer sausage but you can do it all yourself and basically be out the cost of the tag and the bullet. My kids gobble the stuff up.

But, yeah, high quality food is expensive. We live in a small little touristy lake community that has a grocery store that is smaller than some gas stations I have been in and it is stocked with high-end expensive stuff for the rich folk. The next closest place is another smallish local chain, which is also relatively expensive. I can't walk through either place "just to pick up a couple of things" without dropping $100. We easily burn through a couple of grand per month on food for a family of 4.

edit - Lucky for us a Meijer is being built about 10 minutes away from us at this moment.

The number of points indicates the number of pointy parts on the antlers. The more points roughly scales with the age/health/size of the deer, although smaller deer can have larger antlers depending on nutrition and genetics.

In our area, we generally expect whitetail bucks to grow as follows:

Yearling - "Button Buck", meaning a fawn buck with only small bumps on his head, no visible antlers. Or, a "spike" which means two antlers with no branches.
Second year - "Fork", indicating a four point, or maybe a six point.
Third year - 8+. Coming into his prime.

This can vary by quite a bit geographically, primarily due to food sources and climate. Harsh winters can kill off a lot of deer.

Most deer taken are in the yearling - second year range, although it is considered bad form to shoot a yearling, especially a button buck. So, shooting an 8 point generally means more meat but also that you have taken a more wary, wily animal, who was probably having a weak moment while chasing a doe, but nevertheless indicates that you are a good hunter, or really lucky.

Aside from that there are also at least two scoring systems that will assign a number of points to antlers based upon length, girth and the number of points. Books are kept on that shit and I know vaguely how it works but I've never had much interest in it.

TLDR; Points = penis size of the hunter but does are tasty too.

Out west we only count one side. A four point buck would have 4 points on each side. If the two sides were different they would call it a 3x4 or a 5x6 or whatever.

I'm not sure. I just notice it because we get east coast people asking to hunt on our place fairly often and sometimes there is some confusion.

Is dat aturdy point buck?