Thanks
@Gunfighter14e2 .
Well, I still have not caught a deer but I have accepted the largess of others.
I have caught fish and brought them home for eating. I don't catch and release, like a tournament. I go out with the idea of relaxing but if I catch something, it needs to big enough to be legal and I will go home and eat it.
There were times with my wife's parents when we would fish a private lake to which they had access. You could catch a lot of perch and sometimes a mudcat. We would take that haul back to the house and set up a special draining table outside and clean everything we caught and the scraps went into the garden that was on the second of their two lots (bought the property in 1947.)
Bring that back home and bread with milk and some spices and corn meal and I have a burner stand and a propane tank and a cast iron pot. I would fry fish with fresh peanut oil. I would also dump in a bag of frozen french fries at the end and cook those up.
I hunt on public land. Very much a DIY guy. I wear a full frame backpack with a meat shelf that I normally keep folded up.
I have a couple of different hunting knives but mostly what I take is the Outdoor Edge Wildpak. Very lightweight and very sharp. Three knives in the kit. One with the hook for zippering the hide. A curved one for caping. And a fillet style for everything else. Sharpener. Some field dressing gloves and a rib spread. Again, this kit has the same weight as one knife.
A camp chair for sitting. Bags for meat. A pulley system I got from Harbor Freight and a gambrel. I could hang a deer if there is a tree handy. My intention is to quarter, maybe even debone and take the harvest out of there. Especially now that property I hunt on is no longer requiring a deer check station stop on certain days. This is a non-CWD zone.
If I take the deer back to the house, I have some trees. I also have the game hoist system that fits into the hitch receiver on my truck.
When I am hunting, I have a 150 quart Coleman cooler in my back seat. Actually, it stayed there the entire regular season (northern section of Texas, First Saturday of November to the first Sunday of January,)
All I need now is a deer.