Keep up with Garden and Gun. Oh yes, he said, the deer are specially bred does and bucks that originate from Texas, and they get a nice rich high-protein diet and wander around in a very pretty place surrounded by very tall fences. I have a rich friend who once imported some extremely expensive and especially attractive European cows to her weekend place in Connecticut for the simple reason that they decorated the view.
At this point I was curious and rude enough to pull my iPhone from my evening bag. Their progeny and thousands of others just like them are raised in pens the babies get bottles, the adults probiotics and then released on high-fenced ranches just before hunting season. The point of all this of course is that size sells.
Which is where the fences come in. Cloning is not unheard of. It rarely ends well when a commercial enterprise or a political candidate or Pat Robertson—whoever claims to have an inside track on the wishes of our Lord. Still, folks persist. I should interject here that I am grateful for my many deer-hunting friends who manage to bag plenty of bucks the old-fashioned way. As I type, the mounted head of a wild boar is shedding all over my office mantel, upon which two stuffed birds from the great Paris taxidermy shop Deyrolle sit.
After I canceled a wedding different boyfriend, a lot less onerous , my best friend Jessica and I decided to have a black-tie ball for all the people disappointed that they were no longer invited to the Mississippi Delta for the nuptials. The location was a falling-down antebellum mansion once owned by the family of Shelby Foote, and the theme was taxidermy. If you live in the right place, this is an extraordinarily inexpensive way to decorate for a party.
All it took was a pickup and two Suburbans we filled with various trophies collected from friends and acquaintances, including a beaver munching on a log, an albino squirrel, and at least a half dozen raccoons and foxes. We suspended geese and ducks from the ballroom ceiling with fishing line and stuffed a bouquet of lilies into the mouth of a loggerhead turtle that doubled as a coffee table. The chair had been his gift to the local Elks Lodge, whose members were vocally unhappy when we came to borrow it for the night—not because they were going to miss the chair, but because it required Bonnie the bartender to leave her post for less than five minutes while she held the door open for us, but I digress.
