Life’s Lessons Learned While Boiling Deer Skulls

Sometimes I’m guilty of beginning new adventures without thinking about where the new path might eventually lead, and thus, at some point of no return I begin to realize that the adventure that seemed to be nothing short of glorious does, indeed, have some downside.  A couple weeks ago, I wrote about taking my wife deer hunting and her first buck.  This past week I began to prep her deer skull for a european mount.  If you’ve ever taken on this task, your nostrils are quite possibly tingling at this very moment, and sometime very soon the connection will be made and the proverbial light bulb will awaken less than pleasant memories.

After successfully avoiding the dirty business for a few weeks, I decided this past weekend that something needed to be done with the decaying skull hanging from the rafters of our garden shed.  I dug out a large pot, propane burner and a couple propane bottles from the shed, rounded up a knife and a stick, took a deep breath and started frantically racking my brain for excuses to put it off for another week. Failing that, I filled the pot with water, dumped in a generous amount of Arm & Hammer Super Washing detergent, and lit the burner.  When I finally placed the skull in the water, I had finally realized that this process was taking a very similar path to my approach to diaper changing.  It begins with recognition that there is a problem, followed by long periods of ignoring the problem, followed by dropping subtle hints that someone else should check the problem, followed by a grudging realization that the job just needs to be done.

To give myself credit, I did have the good sense in knowing that this was a task best completed outdoors.  The task, although not entirely pleasant, wasn’t nearly so bad as I imagined it would be before I started.  And with that lesson learned in hindsight, I realized that I had landed on an idea for this newspaper column – always a welcome realization with a fast approaching deadline and a mind running circles and coming up with exactly nothing.  As I completed the task of prepping the skull, I came up with the following: Life’s Lessons Learned While Boiling a Deer Skull. You may search a long while before you find another list quite like it.

1.      The process is never as bad as the imagined process.  I spent most of the time leading up to boiling (it’s actually a simmer, but I’ll leave that for another column) the skull fretting over how disgusting the process was going to be. It was going to stink like nothing I’ve ever smelled before, and it would be crawling with maggots. In reality, it was mildly unpleasant at worst.

2.      Stink is relative. Really.  You think your shooting ability stinks? You should come with me sometime. I’m 2 for 27 so far this year with my shotgun. Sure, the simmering pot of deer skull didn’t smell good, but I once had to deliver packages to a water plant in Quincy, Washington as part of a seasonal job for UPS. That put stink on a whole new level.

3.       Trial by fire gets rid of a lot of nasty stuff. That’s a fact.  I can prove it if you’d like.  When I dumped that pot upon completion, it was full of nasty stuff. You can’t dispute scientific studies like this one.

4.      Not everyone understands your projects. I posted a status update to Facebook detailing my progress, and was met with quite a lot of misunderstanding.  Apparently simmering deer skulls is not something the average person does on a Saturday.

5.      Procrastination just makes it stink worse. That was the lesson taught, but as I realize how close to my deadline I am for this article, I have to wonder what kind of a student I am.

6.      Happy marriages demand that any animal skulls to be boiled are done outdoors.  This may not count as a true lesson learned as it is more of a theory I developed while completing this task outdoors while a happy wife was looking for her large boiling pot indoors.