Sacred Trust: February 2016

Chapter 4

Hank Algren

Henry James Heronymous Algren pushed back from his Mac where he had been working on a flyer for the latest in a long line of right wing Republican candidates for State and Federal Office.

It was time to feed the deer.

Henry, or “Hank” as he was better known had three great loves, Politics - the conservative kind, served up steaming hot with lots of red meat; his deer; and fishing.

He’d grown up on a farm that use to boast one of the largest milking herds in the area. His was the 6th generation on the farm but his grandfather had jumped at the chance to sell off the herd during the whole herd buyout program of 1985. For a while it looked like the farm was just going to close up - maybe even fall into the hands of the developers who had identified Plymouth State College as a “comer” - but Hank was a resourceful fellow and he convinced his grandfather to let him buy a small herd of European Red Deer, an ungulate in the Elk family, and before long they had a thriving herd offering everything from breed stock, meat, sausages, pemican, smoked meat and jerky.

Blue Ice Flow Mindscape
Open Edition Fine Art Prints Cards

While local beef farmers were getting fifty cents a pound on the hoof for beef critters, Hank was selling his red deer to Whole Foods (those commie symps) and Trader Joe’s (better, but still lefties) - among others - for $30 a pound. Henry thought this was pretty great, even if he did have to dance with the “berets and Che’s” crowd” But when he landed an asian distributor who had sources for selling powered antler to Japanese men who couldn’t “get it up” he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. He’d keep the lefties all in Brie for the next 50 years if they continued to bring him customers like this.

With all this business, he had thought about giving up his small business as the local Apple repair center but decided to hold onto it just for the perks of first release software and discounted hardware.

The other thing about being a Deer farm was that they had also become something of a celebrity resource within the community. Where back in the dairy days no one seemed to pay much attention to them, now people talked about them as if they had some magical power. They were the “awesome deer farm” and cars driving by the farm now seemed to be noticeably less crazy as neighbors slowed down hoping to catch a glimpse of the deer in the pasture.

Deer Secrets
Fine Art Prints
Cards

Raising deer wasn’t easy by any means, these were, after all, some big and fast critters, and despite his take no prisoners brand of politics and his truly conservative outlook on life he was a soft-touch when it came to these beautiful animals and found it difficult when it came time to butcher them. He compromised by hiring a friend who handled the bulk of the slaughtering and cutting and he picked out a few of the big bucks - especially two he named Mirabeau and Robespierre - that he kept as pets. He rarely “harvested” the females because they were the brood stock of the farm and the rest never had more than a number attached to their ears to prevent him from getting too attached.

Hank donned his Red Sox cap and stuffed his feet into a tall pair of rubber boots, that he had owned since Ronald Reagan had been President, and ambled out the door. As he made his way he grabbed a five-gallon pail and scooped a few quarts of grain into the bucket. The deer were manageable but they were still essentially wild - with the notable exception of Mirabeau and Robespierre who actually followed along behind him and poked him with their noses to get one of the apple slices that he kept in his coat pocket. But the rest of them were still shy, even with Hank, but a bucket of grain shaken in just the right way could entice even the shyest deer.

Normally Hank fed the deer with hay from one of those big white hay pillows you see these days, but tonight he would use traditional baled hay and he’d need to put out a few extra bales of hay for the deer because he was going to spend the weekend fishing on Lake Umbagog.

He’d been going up to the Thirteen Mile Woods since he was eight years old when his uncle use to take he and his kid brother up to a hunting camp in the town of Errol. It was really just a little shack off a dirt road with gravity fed water and an outhouse, but it was always an adventure, an adventure that had turned Hank into an ardent conservationist. He never used the word environmentalist because even though it was pretty much the same thing he didn’t want to be lumped in with Democrats and Rinos (Republicans in Name Only) who ate weeds and seeds and never saw a business that they didn’t want to regulate to death.

The Dreams of Deer No 2
Fine Art Open Edition Prints
Cards

Hank loved the woods and the lakes and rivers. He was as excited as anyone else by the return of nesting pairs of Bald Eagles to the Umbagog area and - just by imagining it - he could almost feel the thrill that went up his spine every time he saw an Osprey tuck its wings in and dive for the water to come up with a trout or largemouth bass that had made the mistake of surfacing at the wrong moment. It was a magnificent sight. The Osprey - nearly bone white from a distance rode the air like a bolt of lightning, flashing down from the sky. It dove straight into the water, along the way achieving speeds of nearly 60 miles an hour as it hurtled from the sky. . . and it rarely came up short. The sight of the large raptor taking to the sky with a large fish flailing in its talons was a thing of wonder.

It was the birds, more specifically the big birds of prey , the Raptors, that had first turned him against the proposal to bring high tension powerlines down from the megadams of Quebec in Canada. They had only just gotten a new foothold in the region and already man was creating an existential threat to them. But since the day he first put that “No Granite Skyway” bumper strip on his old truck he had learned more and more about this proposed project by Northstar, and the more he learned the more determined he had become that it was a threat to a way of life that he was already seriously worried about.

It was a bit disconcerting nonetheless.

A lot of assumptions that he had built his life on were being called into question.

Well, he’d have some time to think about it over the next few days. Thinking-time was one thing that was in abundant supply on a solo trip to Umbagog.