If you have ever ate “gamey” meat and blamed it on the rut, or a critter’s diet, or adrenaline, etc. then please read this, because after over 40 years of hunting I finally think I’ve figured out an important lesson in meat care.
That lesson started many years ago when I shot my first elk, a 5×5 bull up Papoose Creek in the Madison Range. I was new to Montana and elk hunting, so when I shot the bull early in the morning I promptly gutted him, rolled him down the mountain, and propped his body cavity open with a stick to help him cool down. It was around 10 degrees out when I left him laying there in 8″ of snow and headed home. My brother and I rode in nine hours later that evening and drug the bull out behind a horse whole. The next day I took my bull in to a local meat processor. Lyle asked me about the bull and how I had treated it after the kill. Did I hang it ? How did I get it cooled? Heck, I was thinking, why the interrogation? When I cooked the burger from that bull it was tangy and almost inedible. For years I blamed the processor for switching my meat. How could such a young bull which dropped from a single shot in 10 degree weather be gamey ? Surely, I ended up with the meat from some rutty old bull. Years passed and many more elk were killed and all were delicious, including a rutting 15 year old 6×7. Then my buddy Dick and I hunted Hell’s Canyon in early October. He shot a spike bull many hours from camp on a warm afternoon. We boned out the rear quarters, immediately loaded them in packs and started our climb out. It was at least six hours before we made it back to camp. It was very cold so we unloaded the meat and left it in game bags in the bed of the truck. A couple of months later I was eating an elk burger from that spike and noticed it had a slightly tangy/gamey flavor. More than I would expect from a young bull like that. So, thinking of my young 5×5 that tasted bad, I began coming up with theories on why young bulls tasted worse than big 6×6 bulls. Maybe it was the higher testosterone? Yet everyone I queried on this was quick to tell me that their young bulls had always been delicious. Especially spikes.
Fast forward to 2016. Tami and I were antelope hunting in Eastern Montana on a fairly warm October day. We love hunting and eating antelope. In fact, antelope is probably my favorite big game meat. So after not drawing a tag for two years, we were ready to fill the freezer with some more speed goat meat. We found a small herd of antelope with two decent bucks opening day and soon were crawling into position through sagebrush and cactus. We couldn’t get closer than 420 yards, so I took the first shot. The buck spun and fell. “Hold still”, I said to Tami and we watched the herd trot off, unsure of where the shot had come from. They eventually dropped over a rise and we took off. An hour and a half later we had crawled into position and when Tami had a clean shot at 273 yards she dropped the second buck. By now I was getting nervous as we had not gutted my buck so without even walking to see hers, we took off. By the time we got to him he was starting to swell a bit, even though it was less than two hours. To shorten the story here I will let you know that my buck was almost inedible while Tami’s is amazing. Mine is tangy and gamey and hers is sweet and delicious. And I gutted mine less than two hours after killing it and it was in the 30s that night when it lay cooling on a trailer.
Years ago I was at a fishing camp up by Kalispell and having an adult beverage with another fisherman named Claude who seemed to always be there the same week we were. Claude and I became friends and I learned that he had once owned a wild game processing shop in Gardiner. So I asked him a question that had long puzzled me. Why do so many people say that antelope is no good to eat when I find it so delicious? “Two reasons,” Claude explained. “First, many antelope die horrible deaths. They come in shot up, missing legs, multiple bullet wounds. They are small targets and often require long shots and many hunters are not good shots.” “Second,” he said, “you MUST get that meat on ice or cooled as soon as possible. Especially if the herd has been running before you shoot one. Antelope meat needs to be cooled quickly”.
That all made sense to me, and now years later Claude’s words were really striking home. We had always gutted our goats right away and usually it was mid October and pretty cold at night. We had never had a bad antelope before. But now I was experiencing my first.
Later that fall I was chatting with a friend and telling him about these experiences. He told me of a hunt where they found a bull that had obviously been shot that morning and the hunter had not found it. It was bitterly cold and there was over a foot of snow on the ground. They walked around a bit to see if they could find the hunter to no avail. He told me it was around 1 PM when they gutted that bull and drug it out of the mountains behind a horse. “The whole bottom half of that elk that was laying in the snow was soured”, he told me. “totally wasted”.
It all began to come together so I stopped one day and talked with Buzz Jones at Yellowstone Meats in Bozeman and asked him about elk and cooling meat. I described my first elk and the story my friend had told me. “Let me tell you another story”, Buzz said. He had shot his first elk, a cow, on Freezeout mountain over thirty years ago. It was -30 that day and so they gutted it and tied it to the top of a Jeep and headed home. They were in a hurry to get out of that cold so they never really cooled the meat. Buzz told me that half of that cow’s meat soured. The neck and inside of the rear quarters and some of the front shoulder meat. Especially the side that lay on the truck roof. At thirty below.
I shot a cow last year in the late shoulder season. It was five degrees and snowy. I dropped her with one shot and we soon had her quartered and loaded in the truck. I headed home but had a couple of stops in town. Three hours later, when I skinned her quarter that had been laying in snow in the bed of my truck, the meat was still warm, almost hot to the touch. Imagine if it had been warmer.
I’ll wrap this up with one last story. My friend Pete Muennich who works at Stone Glacier is an avid hunter. We were talking about antelope hunting and I asked him if he liked antelope meat. “You know, I used to hate antelope”, Pete replied, “it was always gamey. Then I went with a buddy this year who brought two big coolers full of ice. We quartered and bagged our meat and had it on ice within an hour of shooting our bucks. And mine was delicious.” In the past, Pete had gutted his goat and left it in the truck until he got home, like many hunters do. If it’s cold enough, that works fine. But as Claude told me, you need to get that meat cooled ASAP!
Corey Jacobsen, creator of ELK 101, has some excellent tips for handling elk, especially in early bow season. He is quick to point out the small window you have between the kill and getting meat cooled.
I am convinced now, that much of what we call “gamey meat” is simply “mishandled meat”. How many deer have been gutted and thrown in the back of a truck, laying there over the weekend while the temps hit 50 or 60 degrees. How many deer or elk are shot and found hours later, beginning to bloat. Pressuring the body cavity with bacterial gases? How many elk or deer are shot on warm days and left with hide on, holding in the heat? How many gamey tasting animals are blamed on “the rut”, or diet, or adrenaline from running after the shot. I now quarter, skin and bag every deer and antelope and put it on ice as quickly as possible. When back-country hunting for elk, we now immediately skin the quarters and bag them and then hang them to cool before putting them on a horse or in a backpack.