The Hunting Myth That Killed More Frontier Men Than Bears Ever Did 

The Hunting Myth That Killed More Frontier Men Than Bears Ever Did 

There is a deer in the Wisconsin woods this November that should be dead. And it will not lie down. Its ribs are showing through a coat gone dull and patchy. Its head hangs low, ears drooping, a long rope of drool swinging from its jaw. It walks a slow, staggering circle, stepping on nothing, staring at nothing.

And it has been doing this for hours. A healthy whitetail would have blown out of that thicket at your scent a quarter mile back. This one does not even know you are standing there. Something is eating its brain from the inside, folding the soft gray tissue into a dry, hard sponge, and there is no cure, no vaccine, and no coming back from it.

They call it chronic wasting disease. The hunters just call it the zombie deer. And the name has stuck because it is exactly right. It has crept now into more than 30 states, jumping fence lines and river valleys, turning up in herd after herd after herd. Before we go on, there’s something coming for this country, and the news won’t say a word about it till it’s already on your doorstep.

 It comes down to one number, 3 days. That’s what the stores hold for you. Your grandfather’s pantry held a winter, and the difference was never money. It was knowing. 904 pages of that knowing in one book. Water, fire, curing, canning, the plants that heal and the ones that kill. silasmercer.shop, links below. All right, back to it. Every autumn more men kneel over a buck they just dropped, look at that beautiful animal steaming in the cold, and feel their stomach turn over.

Because they cannot stop wondering if the meat in front of them is going to do to their family what it did to that staggering deer. Wildlife men are out there burning carcasses in pits. Whole herds are being shot down and buried. And a lot of good hunters this year are going to walk away and leave the venison to rot in the leaves because they are too afraid to carry it home.

I understand the fear, neighbor. I truly do. But come in close to this fire. Because here is the thing almost nobody in this country will tell you. As ugly as that zombie deer is to look at, it is not the worst sickness a deer can carry home to your table. It is not even in the running for it. Because that deer and the bear denned up beside it and the rabbit sitting in the brush and the very hide off its back have all carried killers in the frontier cabins that make that staggering buck look like the least of a hunting man’s

worries. Six of them, friend. Six sicknesses that rode home quiet in the game bag and put more men under the sod across the generations than every wolf, every bear, and every hard winter on the whole frontier, all of it stacked together. And here’s the part that ought to sit you up straight. Every last one of the six is still out there tonight in the exact same woods waiting on the exact same careless man.

Nobody teaches this anymore. The knowing died with the men who needed it. Buried under a hundred years of grocery stores and ice boxes and somebody else doing the killing for us. So, tonight by this fire I am going to hand it back to you. Six killers that came home in the meat. The tale for each one so you can see it coming before it is on you.

And the plain simple thing a careful man did to hunt these woods his whole life and never once get touched. We are going to count them down. Six to one. And I am saving the worst for last because number one is still killing hunters in this country this very season. And it is the one you would never in a hundred years suspect.

Number two will make the hair stand up on your neck because it is the only sickness on God’s earth with no cure and no chance once it takes hold. Stay with me. This is worth the 20 minutes. I am Silas Mercer seventh generation on this ridge. My grandfather Eli raised me after my daddy died in the timber.

 And before he went, he made me copy every last thing he knew into a leather journal. This is me keeping that promise. Before we get into it, reach up and pull the trigger on subscribe. Not for me, neighbor. For the next buried skill we drag back into the daylight around here because you are going to want it. All right. Come here.

Let us start with the one that hid in the hides. Number six is the killer they called the wool sorter’s death. And out here on the frontier, it had a shorter name. They just called it the black sore. In the autumn of 1871, a hide buyer named Thomas Old came through a stretch of the Dakota territory buying buffalo robes off the hunters by the wagon load.

Good money in it. And Thomas had a nose for it. One of the bales he bought had come off an animal found dead on the prairie. Not shot, just dead. Bloated and stiff in the grass. The hunters had skinned it anyway. A hide is a hide. Thomas ran his bare hands over every robe in that bale, grading them. And somewhere in the handling, he had a little split in the skin of his knuckle.

The kind of crack every working man carries in the cold and never thinks twice about. Three days later, a small red bump came up on the back of that hand. It did not hurt. That was the strange thing, the thing that fooled him. It itched a little, nothing more. By the next morning, it had a blister. And by the morning after that, the center had sunk in and gone coal black.

A dead black crater ringed with hard swelling. And it still did not hurt him. Thomas showed it around the camp like a curiosity. By the end of that week, the fever had him and his chest was filling up like a well. And he was gone before the next Sunday. The doctor, when they finally fetched one, wrote down what the frontier already knew.

It came out of the hide. That is anthrax, neighbor. It lives as a hard little spore, tougher than nearly anything else on this earth. And it can sleep in a dried hide or a patch of poison ground for years and wake up the instant it finds a cut. The animals carry it. Cattle, buffalo, deer, sheep. And an animal dead of anthrax does not look shot and does not look torn by wolves.

It looks like it simply lay down in the grass and quit. Often with dark thin blood at the nose and the mouth that will not clot the way blood should. Here is your tale and it is the oldest rule in the hide trade. You never ever skin an animal you find already dead when you cannot name what killed it. A deer down under a tree with no wound on it, blood dark and running at the muzzle.

 The body swelling fast in cool weather. You leave it lie. You do not open it. You do not save the hide. You do not lay an open hand on it. Your great-grandfather learned to walk a wide circle around a carcass that told no story and to burn it or bury it deep if it lay on his own ground. The skill is knowing that a free hide is sometimes the most expensive thing in the whole woods.

That is number six. Now, come here because number five did not come in fast and black like the last one. Number five came in slow and it came back and it came back again and it wore men down over years until they were shadows of the men they had been. They called it undulant fever. And the word undulant means it rolls in like waves off a lake.

The fever rises and breaks and you believe you’re cured and you go back out to your work and a week later it rolls in again worse than before. And it does this for months on end for years in some men. The drenching sweats at night that soak the bedding clean through. The deep ache that settles into the hips and the spine and never fully lets go.

There were frontier men marked down as lazy, as weak, as drunkards even, who were none of those things. They were carrying undulant fever and it had hollowed them out from the inside like a rotten log. We call it brucellosis today. And it lives in the deer, the elk, the feral hog, and the milk cow. A man caught it two ways out here.

 He caught it field dressing a deer or an elk bare-handed with a nick on his knuckle. Most of all when he got in among the organs and the joints where the germ loves to hide. Or he caught it from a cup of warm raw milk pulled straight from a cow that carried it. Which is the reason half the farm children of a certain era grew up sickly and no doctor could quite say why.

The tell on this one is the fever that will not commit. A hunting man who comes down weeks after a hunt with a fever that comes and goes, night sweats that ruin the sheets, and joints that ache like he has turned 80 overnight. That man handled game with an open hand or drank his milk warm from the pail. The prevention is plain as day.

 You cook the meat clean through right to the bone. No pink left in the deep of a haunch. You take special care with the guts and the joints when you open an animal up. And you do not not ever drink milk that has not been heated first. No matter how sweet the old-timers swear it tastes off the cow. That fever that rolls in like waves has stolen more good years off more good men than any bullet ever fired.

That is number five. Number four is the strangest of the whole grim list because it did not kill a man in a week like the black sore, and it did not wear him down over a season like the undulant fever. Number four planted a seed in a man and then waited. 10 years, 15, and all the while it grew. Out in the sheep country in the high plains, the men who ran dogs and the men who hunted the wolf learned a hard lesson about the guts of an animal.

There was a rancher named Whitfield, and the story goes he was a healthy man near 40 years old, a little heavy in the belly, which nobody thought a thing about. But the belly kept growing, slow and steady, past what his eating could account for, until he looked like he was carrying a full-term child. When the doctors finally opened him up, they found a sack of clear water in his liver the size of a grown man’s two fists together, and it had been growing there silent for the better part of 15 years.

It had started as a speck too small to see. That is hydatid disease, and it comes from a tiny tapeworm that lives in the gut of the wolf, the coyote, and worst of all, the working dog. Here is how a good, honest man brought it on himself without ever knowing. He would field dress his deer or his elk, and he would toss the offal, the guts and the lungs and the liver, to his dogs as a reward.

 If those guts carried the little cyst, his dogs ate them, and the worm grew up inside the dog, and the dog shed thousands of eggs too small to see on its coat, on its tongue, in the yard. And then the dog licked the man’s face. Or the man ate with hands he had petted that dog with. And he swallowed the seed. And it grew. The tale here is a cruel one because for years there is no tale at all.

It is a slow swelling in the belly or a cough that will not clear. A heaviness where no heaviness should be. In a man who runs dogs and feeds them rough. The prevention though is a thing your great-grandfather knew cold and it breaks the whole chain. You never feed your dogs the raw guts of the game you kill. You bury that awful or you burn it.

You do not let a dog that lives on raw meat lick your face or your children’s faces. And you wash your hands after you handle a wolf or a coyote you have shot. Do that and the seed can never find you. That is number four. The patient one. Now number three brings us back to something small and humble.

 And I want you to remember it every single time you pick up a rabbit. Because on this frontier a rabbit killed more men than a rattlesnake ever dreamed of. There was a boy up in the Ozarks and the year was 19 and 11, so a hair past the true frontier. But the lesson is older than those hills. His name was Caleb, 12 years old, and he was the finest rabbit hunter in his whole holler.

One gray afternoon he ran down a cottontail that, looking back on it, was far too easy to catch. It sat in the brush and let him take it, sluggish and slow and not right at all. Caleb did not think a thing of it. He cleaned it that evening with his little pocketknife, and in the cleaning he opened up the pad of his thumb, just a hair, just enough to beat up red.

Inside of 3 days, that thumb had a raw ulcer on it that would not close. And the gland up under his arm swelled hard and hot as a hen’s egg. Then came the fever, a high, wild, shaking fever, and it took the boy down to the bone. Caleb lived, but he was flat in the bed the better part of 2 months.

 And there were plenty of children in those hills in those years who caught the same thing and never got back up. That is tularemia. Rabbit fever, they called it, and every trapper and farm boy who lived to be old knew its face. It rides in the wild rabbits and the hares, and it gets into a man through a cut when he skins one, or off a tick, or from eating the meat cooked rare.

 And here is the old frontier wisdom on it, the peace the city folk never had. You do not handle rabbits in the warm months. And you never, ever pick up a rabbit that was too easy to take. A wild rabbit that sits still and lets you walk up on it is not a lucky rabbit. It is a sick one. A slow rabbit is a loaded gun.

Your tail is a sore that will not heal at a cut on the hand, and a swollen, hot, painful gland in the days after handling small game. The prevention is to hunt your rabbits in the hard cold of winter when the sickness lies down. To keep your hands covered and clean when you dress them. To walk wide of any animal that behaves too gentle.

And to cook that meat gray to the very center. A rabbit is the humblest thing in these woods and it has quietly buried more hunters than the bears they write the campfire songs about. That is number three. And now I need you to come in close because number two is the one with no cure. Not then. Not now. Not with all the medicine in the world.

It is the only killer on this whole list where once it wakes up inside of man that man is already gone and just does not know it yet. There is no fighting it. There is only not getting it. In the spring of 1862 a trapper named Amos Kerr working a creek bottom in Missouri had a red fox come at him in broad daylight.

Now any man who knows the woods knows a fox is a shadow. A thing you almost never see and never ever get close to. But this one trotted right up the bank at him bold as a house dog. No fear in it at all. Amos half charmed and half startled went to shoo it off with his boot and it latched onto his hand and bit him to the bone before he could club it dead.

He cleaned the wound cursed the strange little animal and thought no more about it. It healed clean. A month and some later, Amos got a headache that would not quit. And a crawling, prickling feeling in that old healed hand. Then came the fear. A wild, rising terror in him. And the worst of it, the thing the old people dreaded most to see, was that he could no longer drink.

He would go to the water dying of thirst, and his own throat would seize and clamp against it. And the sight of the water itself would throw him into a fit. They called it hydrophobia for that reason. The fear of water. Amos Kerr raved and fought and suffered for 3 days. And then he died. And there was not one thing on this earth anyone could do for him.

And there still is not. Once it starts. That is rabies, friend. And this is the one to carve into your bones. It rides in the bite, or even the deep scratch, or the lick on broken skin of any warm-blooded animal carrying it. The fox, the coyote, the raccoon, the skunk, the bat, and yes, the wolf. And here is the tale.

 And it is the same tale as the easy rabbit. Only this time, it can kill you a hundred times worse. A wild animal that acts tame is not friendly. A fox that walks up to you in daylight, a raccoon with no fear, a coyote that comes toward a man instead of melting away. That animal is not being sweet. Something is wrong in its head.

 And if it gets its teeth in you, you may already be finished. The prevention is the hardest discipline on this whole list because it goes against the soft heart. You never ever handle or feed or reach for a wild animal that is behaving tame or bold or strange. That is not your chance to touch a wild thing.

 That is death walking up to you wearing a friendly face. You keep your distance. You keep your dogs back. And if such an animal is threatening your home, you put it down from a distance and you burn it without laying a hand on it. Any bite from an animal acting wrong in the old days was very nearly a death sentence.

 And the men who survived the frontier survived it by never ever letting that bite happen. That is number two. And it is the one that ought to scare you. And now come all the way into the fire, neighbor, because number one is the worst of the lot. And it is the one still doing its work right now, this very season, in freezers and smokehouses all across this country.

It is the killer that salt cannot touch. Smoke cannot touch it. Freezing your meat solid all winter long cannot touch it. There is exactly one thing on this earth that kills it. And most men alive today have plum forgotten what that one thing is. In the winter of 1853, a Michigan logger named Josiah Bell shot a black bear denned up in a cedar swamp.

And it was a feast for the whole camp. Bear meat, rich and dark and greasy, fried up over the coals. Josiah liked his cut with the middle still red and warm, the way a starving man does when the smell is driving him half mad. 16 men ate off that bear over the week that followed. By the time the thaw came, most of them were sick and several were dead.

 And they were ugly deaths. First, the belly, twisting and cramping like a fist. Then the fever. And a terrible deep aching in every muscle in the body. As if a man were being wrung out like a wet rag. And the swelling. The strange puffing up around the eyes that the old doctors learned to watch for. And to fear. The bear did not kill those men, friend.

Something too small for the eye to see riding in that meat killed them. And the meat was salted. And it was smoked. And it did not matter one bit. That is trichinosis. And I need you to understand why it is the king of this whole grim list. It is a worm. A tiny coiled worm no longer than a comma on this page.

And it lives balled up in the muscle of a bear, a hog, a wild boar, a cougar. And it is armored against every single thing the frontier used to keep meat through a winter. Salt does not kill it. Smoke does not kill it. Cold does not kill it. Not a barrel of brine and not 3 months of hard freeze. A man could cure that bear meat flawlessly by every rule his grandmother ever taught him.

Hang it in the smokehouse for a month of Sundays and every worm in it would still be alive in there. Coiled up. Waiting. The only thing on this earth that kills that worm is heat. Real heat held steady. Driven all the way through to the very center of the cut. Until there is no red. No pink. No cool spot left anywhere in the deep of the meat.

Cook it through and you are safe as a church pew. Leave the middle warm and rare because a man swears it tastes better that way and you are Josiah Bell and you have got a week to live. And here is why I saved it for the very last. This is the one that never went away. Right now, today in this modern country, nearly every hunter we lose to a wild game sickness we lose to this.

To bear to cougar to wild boar eaten before it was cooked the whole way through. Not to the zombie deer that fills up the headlines and empties the woods of frightened men. To a worm the size of a comma and a steak somebody pulled off the fire too soon. Your tail is deep muscle pain. A stubborn fever and that telltale puffing swelling around the eyes.

In the weeks after a meal of bear or wild pork. And your prevention is the simplest, oldest, most forgotten rule in the whole book. You cook your bear, your boar, your cougar all the way through. Every single time. No matter how good it smells red. That is number one. And of all six, it is the one most likely to reach out and touch your own family this winter.

So there they are. laid out plain. Six killers that rode home quiet in the game bag and filled the frontier graveyards past what every wolf on the continent ever managed. The black sore in the hide. The undulant fever in the blood and the milk. The patient’s seed the dogs carried. The rabbit fever in the nick of the thumb.

The bite with no cure. And the worm in the bear that salt could never ever kill. Now let us walk back out to that staggering deer in the Wisconsin woods. The one that had you so afraid at the start of all this. Here is the honest truth of it, neighbor. Plain as I can lay it down. That zombie deer is real. And it is a genuinely ugly thing to watch move through a herd.

And it has earned your caution. So give it that. In the counties where the sickness has turned up, you get your deer tested before your family eats it. The way the wildlife man asked. And it cost you next to nothing. You never ever eat an animal that was acting sick. Staggering, drooling, wasting on its feet.

 No matter how much good meat is hanging on its bones. And you handle every kill with clean hands and a little plain sense. But caution is one thing, neighbor. And terror is another. The thing that actually emptied the frontier cabins was never the deer that walked up healthy and dropped clean in the leaves. It was the shortcut.

The rare bear steak. The easy rabbit. The free hide off the animal that died for no reason a man could name. The fox that walked up wearing a friendly face. The warm cup of raw milk. Those six are the real killers. And they are patient as the grave. And they are still out there in the very same woods. Waiting on the very same careless man.

Only now, friend, you know all six of their faces. Your great great grandfather knew every one of these by heart because out here he had to. Somebody just never got the chance to hand it down to you. That is what I am here for. Tell me down below, did your people hunt? Did your grandfather have a rule about rabbits, about bear, about a deer found dead in the field, about a dog in the guts of a kill? Different families carried different pieces of this.

And the story that gets the most comments is the one I go deepest on next. Because next time I am going to show you the frontier way to know whether the water in front of you is safe to drink. The plain tell the old scouts used. The one that killed more pioneers on the trail than every arrow ever loosed. Keep the old ways, friend.

They kept us.