The terms may change but dinner never does

Catch, cook, and clean – in my day it was called shore lunch or dinner at camp. There’s a lot of new terminology with things we just did back in the day. I’m wondering what guys my age 40 years ago thought about what we called things. I also wonder if we just called them the same thing they did.

We’ll get to this petition thingy to ban the use of dogs for hunting in the Chequamegon- Nicolet Forests in Wisconsin, but not today. That by the way is something else that’s new with the younger generation of anti-hunters. New ways of attacking, new terminology, new threats – all will require new ways of dealing with those on our parts.

This whole cycle of hunter gatherer, another new catch phrase, which in my day was called hunting, fishing, or picking berries, started out pretty good. Cycle is otherwise known as a weekend and this February weekend started out pretty good.

I dropped the first jig through the ice just before noon – an orange one. Immediately a fish picked up which surprised me and I missed the hook set. My partner pulled the first fish through the ice seconds later. He released it and we both enjoyed constant action through the ice, with his pink jig out fishing my orange jig.

Eventually Lyle pulled a keeper up from under the ice. During my hiatus from icefishing (now the catch phrase is “hard water fishing”) of a mere 43 years, it was never lost on me that fish do taste the best when caught from cold water and thrown onto the winter ice to freeze down – if you prefer, substitute hard water for ice.

You know how when you go fishing and some guy at the landing says you should have been here yesterday? Well this was the day they call “yesterday.” We caught a lot fish. We ended up keeping enough nice sized panfish for Lyle to have a fresh fish fry or catch, clean, and cook. Whatever you call it, we had steady action through the hard water all day.

The next morning I headed out for a short rabbit hunt. Early into the hunt I rolled one only to see it jump up and start running. A second shot hit it on its last hop. A short time later another rabbit jumped up and ran straight away. I rolled it and it ran about 15 yards before dying.

I had to knock around for the last one. I sat down to relax from the snow and mess from all the blow overs and blow downs. A nice sized cottontail came hopping along and stopped broadside at 20 yards. I let it lay there about a half hour, gives the fleas a chance to jump off and die in the snow if there are any. I picked it up and then walked over to where I laid the other two and picked them up. I just stood there for a minutem, soaking up holding a limit of cottontail. Forty-five years ago bagging a limit of cottontail on weekend day in February would be feat of great pride. It happened more than once, but as I’m sure a lot of our readers know, no one was carrying a camera around much less one that uploaded the picture to social media. So there are no pictures from 45 years ago of me holding a limit of rabbits. It felt good holding a limit of rabbits.

Forty-five years ago the place I lived had a rabbit dressing station on the back of the garage. Today, I just dressed the rabbits out using a field dressing method. Not much harder and in no time two of them were in the soup pot and one was parted up and readied for the sous vide at a later date.

That evening we prepared a meal of venison for dinner. And there’s a special new name for that too. To me it’s living by the ethos I was taught of eating the game you harvest, but that’s not very catchy. So I just call it cooking dinner.

Field dressing and cooking the game we harvest might be called catch, clean, and cook now. Icefishing might be called hard water fishing by the cool kids. Yet everyone recognizes how good a meal of fresh fish, a homemade rabbit soup, and a dinner of venison wellington taste.

I’ll just call this a fabulous winter weekend.

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