Butchering in the wife’s kitchen. Living with a hunter can require some adjustments.

As I was packing the elk quarter into the house, I noticed that I had smeared some blood on the doorjamb on my last trip in. Walking across the kitchen, I noticed some blood drops on the floor.

As I lay the quarter down on the dining room table to butcher it, I looked at the pile of meat on the table, and suddenly wondered what it must be like to be married to a hunter. What must a non-hunting spouse think when we drag ourselves out of bed in the middle of the night so that we can hike for hours in freezing weather? Come home cold, wet, and exhausted, and pronounce that we had a wonderful day?

My mom grew up on a ranch and taught me how to butcher my first deer sitting at our kitchen table. All of my friends have been hunters. I have never really given any other lifestyle much of a thought.

My wife grew up in a non-hunting family. Her dad was a purist fly fisherman, so never brought a fish home, much less cleaned them in the kitchen sink. There were no deer hanging in her garage or dryer racks of jerky in the living room. No bloody jeans in the laundry.

While I am colorblind, I’m quite sure my wife can see all 20 shades of white or any other color there is and maybe a few more. She has a deep love of beautiful things.

I admire beauty also, but we may disagree occasionally on the exact definition. Usually when I am boiling a skull on the back porch for a European mount.

She does not enjoy the smell of gun cleaning solvent quite as much as I do. I’m sure that being married to me has been a big adjustment for her, and she has handled it well.

We have had to make some adjustments. I don’t clean fish in the sink. I do my own hunting laundry separately from our “good” clothes. I used to cut up my game outside, but she took pity on me in the cold weather and let me start doing it inside as long as I cleaned up after myself.

We do not slap a steak on the grill that we just cut off a deer. All game goes into the freezer until it is somehow transformed into meat, and not a deer or elk, and then it is just fine.

This fall I knew that she had embraced her life when she announced that our freezer was getting empty and I had better get my lazy self out there and get us an elk. So I did as I was told and cleaned up all the blood off the kitchen floor when I was done.

Tell us what your spouse has to put up with at shootingthebreezebme@gmail.com.