The Village Meat Shop in Canning is renowned for its smoked pepperoni; I’ve had people tell me it’s the best you can find in the province.  Oscar Huntley and his son Andrew make the pepperoni in their smokehouse in Scots Bay, using a recipe originated by the former owner of the shop.

Andrew Huntley, who runs the shop with his father, tells me that in a way, their pepperoni is unique.  It’s made the old-fashioned way using wood-fired smoking, which gives the pepperoni a unique flavour.  “We use maple wood for all our smoking,” Andrew says, “and this adds to the flavour.  It’s preservative free as well.”

How popular is the pepperoni?

Huntley says he and his father often prepare on average some 800 pounds of pepperoni a week in their smokehouse.  This past Christmas, however, they turned out a record 1,400 pounds in one week just to meet the holiday demand for pepperoni.

The Huntleys do custom smoking for their customers as well, usually hams and bacon.  Recently, Andrew says, they’ve been experimenting with the preparation of deli meats, Montreal smoked beef and such.

To prepare their pepperoni the Huntleys begin by mixing pork and beef (the ratio is about 70 pounds of pork to 30 pounds of beef) and putting it through a grinder.  After spices and water are added the mixture is ground again; then it goes into sausage casing and from there into the smokehouse where it will take several hours to cure.

Okay, the pepperoni is great.  I’ve been told they have great store made sausage too but if you like a meat that’s really different, the Huntleys occasionally bring in ground bison – or as some of us call it, bison burgers.   As far as I know, this is the only place in the Valley where you can buy ground up bison and if you like a wild game taste in your burgers this is worth a try.

Following the credo that “everything’s got be used,” Andrew Huntley said he was delighted when he found a use for all the bones he had been throwing out from their butcher shop.  “I came across smoked dog bones at a local store and decided we could do it too,” he said.  “At times we smoke up to 200 pounds of bones in a week and it’s popular with local dog owners.”

I can attest to that. My bird dog, Jake, loves them.  He’s a kennel dog that rarely gets in the house; but in case you’re wondering if life in a kennel is hard on a dog in the winter, Jake has an electric “Hound Heater” in his insulated house, which is inside my shed, so he’s more than comfortable in the coldest of weather.

However, life in the offseason can be boring for Jake and other hunting dogs and this is where the smoked bones come in.  Having bones to gnaw at during long winter days in the kennel keeps Jake from being bored.  If the way he reacts when I give him a smoked bone is any indication, I’d say the smoking process must give the bones a flavour dogs really like.

No question the Huntley’s pepperoni is unbeatable but that sideline of theirs – smoked dog bones – is unbeatable as well.  Just ask my bird dog.

Over 30,000 Nova Scotians hunt deer annually; arguably, all of those hunters would’ve liked to have been in Bob Cote’s blind the day a magnificent buck deer approached it.

Cote had built a ground blind just off the side of a well used deer trail and was in it about 15 minutes when the buck walked up.  Cote saw right away it was a splendid deer and he shot it …. with his digital Nikon SLR …. capturing an image that might be the culmination of 10 years of wildlife photography.

As Cotes tells it, this was quite an adventure.  The deer got close and stopped, perhaps instinctively realising something was awry.  Before it was aware Cote was in the blind, he was able to take close up photographs, one of them the beautiful head on shot accompanying this column.

It was a feisty animal, Cotes says, and it wasn’t the typical situation where a deer realises humans are nearby and take off in a panic.  “I took nearly 40 photos before he actually pinpointed me,” Cote says.  “Then he stomped the ground and charged towards me.  After he got within 30 feet or so he stopped and stomped the ground again.  At that point he turned, jumped over a huge brush pile and was gone.”

The image of that belligerent buck deer, noble and so full of life, has been captured forever; and when I look at this wonderful photograph, I realise its image wouldn’t be preserved today if someone had been in the blind with a rifle instead of a camera.  It would then have become a meat animal, its head mounted, a few hunter-with-dead-deer photographs snapped, shown around, and eventually forgotten.

Sad isn’t it, that it’s much easier to go out and kill a deer than capture its image with a camera.  But that’s the way it is.

As for Bob Cote, he tells me he’s been capturing wildlife and outdoor scenery with a camera for some 10 years, preserving images he’s proud to have displayed at various venues in the Annapolis Valley.  “I found this was my destiny, photographing wildlife,” he says.  “I started out photographing anything that caught my eye but soon found taking pictures of people wasn’t for me.  I like shooting pictures of animals, flowers and beautiful scenery.”

In his early days Cote learned how to run newspaper presses at The Advertiser in Kentville and at its sister paper in Port Hawkesbury.  He returned to Kentville circa 1980 and worked at a local feed mill for 21 years until it closed.  It was around this period that he began to dabble with photography, a hobby he later turned into a full time occupation.  Today he carries his camera almost everywhere he goes.  “You never know when that special shot will appear,” he says.

A variety of Bob Cote’s photographs can be viewed at www.bobcotesgallery.ca.

“You’ll never guess in a hundred years what I found in the crops of those ducks,” said a friend when we were on the telephone planning the next day’s hunt. “It’s unusual.”

The ducks were mallards and blacks bagged that afternoon on the Minas Basin mudflats.  I figured the ducks likely were feeding on nearby dykeland fields so my first guess was soybeans.  “Wrong,” said the friend.

I think I surprised the friend with my next guess since I hit it right on.  “Acorns,” I said.

I guessed acorns because of the mallards.  Locally, people were feeding large flocks of mallards, in back yards in places only a few kilometres from salt water, and there had to be oak trees around their lawns.  Mallard feed heavily on acorns and in some of the hunting hotspots across their range, flooded oak stands are prime areas.  Acorns, in other words, are a preferred mallard food wherever the nut is available, so my guess was logical.

But logical or not, there were no acorns in the mallard crops.  To my surprise, the black ducks had been feeding on acorns, so we had a mystery on our hands.  Unlike the half tame mallards, black ducks usually aren’t backyard feeders; so where were those Minas Basin black ducks finding acorns to feed on?

After talking it over, we figured we had an answer.  Lately, the tides in Minas Basin were higher than average.  In one area where we hunt, where the friend bagged the ducks eating acorns, there are rows of oak trees strung out along the tide’s edge.  When they run high, tidal waters sweep over places where the acorns fall.  On occasion we had spotted duck up on the grassy areas around the oak trees.

So, mystery solved.  Except it wasn’t much of a mystery at all.  Like mallards, black ducks also feed on acorns.  The difference is that for the most part, black ducks have to get their acorns in the wilds.  There are exceptions, but usually you won’t find black ducks swarming the lawns and backyards where people feed mallards.

In some areas, acorns are also a food favoured by pheasants.  I was astonished the first time I found acorns in a pheasant’s crop.  These were monster size acorns, so large I didn’t think pheasants could eat them.