Priming the Freezer

My uncle always said that elk were a staple and everything else was an appetizer. I guess we liked appetizers because as a kid we would always shoot a couple of whitetail does for the freezer. We had tons of them on our family ranch and they tasted delicious.

Now, I have almost no access to whitetails and I’m not as consistent of an elk hunter as I would like to be. In Wyoming antelope are our appetizer. With drought conditions being persistent buck tags are getting harder to draw but doe tags are still plentiful.

Last year I didn’t harvest a big game animal for the first time in nearly a decade. I genuinely had a great season, helping friends and generally de prioritizing my own hunting, but it didn’t yield any meat. This year I took a different approach and went out on opening day, with an antelope doe tag in hand, determined to prime the freezer.