Tyler and Erika take a field trip to a taxidermist’s shop, then talk with an ancestral skills expert who collects roadkilled deer for meat, hides, and bones. We’re pondering what it is that gets memorialized or honored by these practices, what it means to be a hunter or a scavenger, and the long history of humans finding ways to use the bodies of deer. Along the way: deer stories, poetry, songs, and more.

Show Notes: The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors is available through books.catapult.co/books/the-age-of-deer/.

A brief history of taxidermy, and news on how it’s changing, are at smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-taxidermy-being-revived-21st-century-180955644/.

Josh Barnwell is at bewelloutdoors.com/, and the gathering where we met is fireflygathering.org/.

The Bulletin of Primitive Technology is at primitive.org.

The poet Meesha Goldberg is at meeshagoldberg.com.

The story of Wesucechak was published in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat.

The Virginia Audio Collective is at virginiaaudio.org.