I eat nearly everything. Meat is almost always edible, and if worse comes to worst, there's the pressure cooker and the ketchup bottle.
Surprisingly enough, the only animal I ever have found totally inedible - even including snakes, coons, possum, and coyote - was a young boar that must have had some sort of disease or meth habit or I don't know what. He stank up the whole house for at least a week. Otherwise, if I kill it with a gun or bow it goes onto my dinner plate.
I generally like this idea. You kill it, you eat it. If it's too rough to eat straight, a stew, a gravy works wonders. I have failed, though. Puts me back in the winter of '77. It was a rough winter, eighteen inches of ice in the river, and fifteen below temperatures. Me and Joe were out feeding the cattle late in the season. The old International Scout we were in didn't have much of a heater.
Came across an old, sick possum, fifteen yards out. I was so shaking with the cold and the hunger I missed an easy head shot with my Ruger .44 Super blackhawk at fifteen yards. Possum took off running, and I popped him in the head next shot. I put him between the bucket seats, meaning to field dress him when we got home.
Next thing there was this god-awful smell almost bad enough to make me throw up. I saw Joe rolling the window down in the cold. Served him right, I thought, if he could smell like that. Next thing, between gagging, he accused me of causing the smell.
A minute later, we both figured out there was no sense in being mad at each other. It was the possum.
Possum got throwed out. The mark of a man may be what he can eat what'll kill another man, but I couldn't go that possum.
That was a rough winter, the winter of '77. In mid-April the ice in the river broke up with chunks floating down higher than a house, and it hit fifty degrees, and there was Joe, running through the snow naked screaming, "It's spring. It's spring."
