Considering the agendas of certain conniving politicians that would like
nothing better than to (attempt) to take my guns away, or at very least, close all
hunting seasons, I sometimes plan in my mind what I’ll do if the day ever arrives
when the only LEGAL way for me to continue eating wild game will be to harvest
road-kill. I would become a “Road-Kill Griller” in the purest sense of the phrase,
and I’m bettin’ there are bunches more of you out there that are afraid to come
forward.
Most things would be different in the life of a road-kill griller; for starters,
the grilling utensils. Your spatula would become a flat ended shovel, preferably
the short handled kind with the “D” shaped handle, allowing you to put maximum
power behind your spatula when scraping meals from the asphalt. The fork
normally used to turn steaks on the grill would become a pitchfork or potato fork,
anything capable of holding your find while removing gravel with the
shovel/spatula. Timing for harvesting road- killed meals would be an important
issue. The five second rule would become the five day rule. You would want to
either get to a kill while it’s fresh, or wait until it became jerky or pemmican.
Cooking road-kill would be a whole new learning experience in itself and should
definitely be done outside; the hotter the fire the better to quickly burn off hair
and sterilize your meal.
Concerning recipes, you might as well plan to toss all your favorites and
start anew. I’ll list a few examples: The rare find of a chicken that could once have
become chicken tetrazzini, would now be chicken flattened by machinery. The
closest you’d ever get to potatoes au’gratin would be opossum smells rotten. The
internet fairly teems with road-kill recipes free for the reading. A few of my
favorite main dishes were skunk skillet stew, shake’n bake snake, rack of raccoon,
pavement possum and too-slow doe. Side dishes included square of hare, fork of
stork and bowl of mole.
If you were to suddenly become unemployed, I’m quite sure a good living
could be had by fixing up your old camping trailer and following the state fair or
carnival circuit peddling road-kill on a stick. It wouldn’t matter what species it
was; just cut it into chunks, skewer it with a stick, slather it in some sort of batter
and fry it up in old french-fry grease. It you didn’t tell customers what it was, I’m
sure they’d think it tasted just like chicken.
The driving habits of a true road-kill griller would be changed forever. While
we’d once have avoided hitting critters on the roadway at all costs, especially
deer, we now would strive to hit every critter possible, especially deer. No
Hunting signs would become No Gleaning signs, and turf wars might break out as
we all tried to protect our favorite back roads, swamps and river bridges where
road-kill often abounds.
Now, in the style of Jeff Foxworthy, allow me to offer some criteria to help
you decide whether or not you have the propensity to become a true road-kill
griller.
If you have taught your kids to count road-killed raccoons rather than
Volkswagen “slug-bugs” on a trip, you could easily become a road-kill griller.
If, after failing to fill your deer tag for the season, you drive your pickup off
the road, across the ditch, and through a field of standing corn attempting to run
down a deer, you probably have the makin’s of a road-kill griller.
And finally, if you smell only the savory essence of skunk skillet stew each
time a skunk sprays your favorite coon hound, you’re probably already a true
road-kill griller!
*Note* no animals were actually road-killed for the writing of this story.
Steve can be contacted by email at [email protected]
