10/29/07 - Pittsburgh Trip #2, Budville

Okay, my father goes by the nickname of "Bud." What better name for his seemingly remote (it's really only about 8 miles from Pittsburgh International Airport) 12 acres than Budville? I don't remember when the name Budville started, but it's been around for a while, and the possibly self-sufficient property continues to live up to its name.


Bud in Budville
I won't go into a bunch of details now, but I stayed there for two nights on my recent trip, and they're worth talking about. I first arrived at Budville (this time) around 2PM on Wednesday, 10/17. Then two major stories began. I'll skip the most offending details, but you should skip this post if you don't like deer hunting or "home remedies." To clarify home remedies think a swollen (severely) finger.

Oh yeah, the biggest part of Budville is Bud and what he does. You've been warned...


The dock on Budville pond.
When I arrived on Wednesday afternoon, my dad showed me his swollen finger on his right-hand. It looked like a small sledge-hammer as the just the tip was swollen. He asked my advice, and I said it looked severe enough that he should see a doctor. He thought that a doctor would probably just prescribe antibiotics, so he didn't do anything immediate about the infection. This story will now be interrupted by the second one...

My dad wanted me to show him how to burn his photos to a CD on his PC. Probably around 4:30PM, he asked me if was okay if he sat above the house until dark to do some deer hunting. I said yes, and took a nap while he headed outside. After a while, I woke up and went to look at the pictures on his PC. I found his pictures fairly organized, and the ones on his computer should fit on a standard CD. By then, it was on the darkside of dusk outside.

That's when I heard a very loud shot, and shook my head as if this didn't just happen. Sure enough, he had shot a deer with his muzzle-loader in near-darkness. He saw the deer run and jump the fence into a neighbor's yard. It quickly became very dark, almost pitch-black.

My dad called a different neighbor to bring up her brighter flashlights and help find the deer - if it stopped. I was outside by this point and all I could see were two flashlights seemingly moving randomly through the front neighbor's yard. Before finding the deer, my dad came back and put a pistol on his belt in case it was still alive.

After some looking, they did find the deer, deceased, in some brush in the neighbor's front yard. My dad came back to get his backhoe to haul the deer, because he said, "his days of dragging deer were through..." By this time, I was discussing what had just happened with the neighbor who had brought up the brighter flashlights. We both watched as the backhoe's headlights split the night and went into the other neighbor's front yard to retrieve the deer. In the meantime, the neighbor's wife came home to my dad driving his backhoe through her yard to pick up the dead deer. My dad did stop to tell her what he was doing...


Bud retrieving the deer.
My dad retrieved the deer and proceeded to clean it. I have a lot of pictures and video of this, but will spare you the details... The cleaned deer was now hanging from a tree behind my dad's house. I ended up eating a semi-cold plate of leftover lasagna around 9:15PM. I went to sleep soon after.

Back to the first story. My father had run a hair dryer on his swollen finger "as long as he could stand it." He then put a homemade dressing on it, with masking tape on the outer layer. That was well before he shot the deer...

So, he cleaned the deer with his swollen finger and homemade dressing. The final step of cleaning the deer is to squirt it out with a hose, and his dressing got wet and fell off at this time. Shortly after I went to sleep, he was able to "drain" his wound. He told me all the details. Because I was in bed, there are no photos.


Changing leaves. Budville can be so peaceful...
The next morning, we took the deer for processing. He spoke to the neighbor in whose yard the deer ended up. The neighbor responded with,"You might be a redneck if you shoot a deer in your own yard, it dies in your neighbor's front yard, you retrieve it with your backhoe, and the neighbor doesn't care."

I had flown in a little earlier and that was my first night at Budville...