Livermore
The old wooden workbench is tucked against a wall in a garage in these grassy foothills of the Rockies where Colorado rises to meet Wyoming. Laid out neatly on the bench are knives and leather sheaths and a saw.
They’ve been there, untouched, since the first few weeks of September. Al Samuelson looks at them every day. He does not know what to do with them. He used the sharp steel blades and the jagged teeth of the saw to cut up a deer. Twenty days later, he was told the three-point buck was infected with chronic wasting disease.
A recent study by Colorado State University biologists found that the deadly disease can be transmitted between animals from saliva and blood. But scientists remain somewhat certain the ravaging disease, a relative of mad cow disease, cannot be transmitted from animals to humans.
And Samuelson is somewhat certain he’s not going to touch anything on the workbench until he gets a better answer.
The early morning sun danced through the aspen trees on that late August day. Samuelson slid in behind one of the trees near a watering hole in the mountains. He walked deeper into the forest and let his eyes scan the land for a deer, just as he has done every year since he was a boy in northern Minnesota.
The buck appeared and Samuelson, who is 76, drew the string on his bow, steadied the arrow and let it fly. It went straight and true and the deer went down. He and a friend field-dressed the animal. They did not wear gloves, a precaution recommended by the state Division of Wildlife.
At home, he and his wife, Marilyn, cut the venison into steaks and smaller pieces they would use to make pasties – venison, potatoes, carrots and onions baked inside pie crust.
“It’s a northern Minnesota thing,” said Samuelson, a tall, lean man who grew up in Hibbing, Minn., worked most of his life in the iron-ore mines that dot that land and came to Colorado in 1993. “Venison pasties are definitely a Thanksgiving tradition.”
Nearly three weeks later came the phone call from the DOW. He had dropped off the head of the deer to be tested. It was positive. His deer had chronic wasting disease. The venison had to be thrown away.
The area where he hunted, northwest of Fort Collins, has the second-highest CWD rate in the state, with 5.4 percent of deer testing positive. An area to the south around Estes Park has the same rate.
Samuelson said he didn’t give CWD much thought the day he hunted. But now he thinks about the blood that soaked his hands. And the hands of his wife and his friend. And about the knives and the saw. He had washed them thoroughly, but was that enough?
He sat in front of his computer for hours, gathering information that included a study out of England, where some 150 people have died from Creutzfeldt- Jakob Disease, a variant of mad cow. The report said the deadly prions, or proteins, that transmit that disease – a spongiform encephalopathy that is nearly identical to CWD – survived even when heated to the melting point of lead.
“That’s 621 degrees,” Samuelson said. “I looked it up.”
Yet guidelines offered by wildlife experts say only to soak any knives or saws used on a CWD-positive animal in a mixture of bleach and water.
“I don’t know what to do,” Samuelson said.
On his workbench is a set of kitchen knives that cost about $100. And his $40 bone saw and a $65 hunting knife he bought just this year. And in the middle rests a magnificent black-handled Buck-brand hunting knife with nicks and scratches and memories. Samuelson has had that knife since 1972.
On Sunday, as his mind wrestled with the questions surrounding CWD, he was asked why he doesn’t just toss the knives away and be done.
For a moment he was quiet and he looked away. Then he talked about gas stamps and sugar stamps and life on a farm in Minnesota for a boy born in 1930.
“I was raised during the Depression,” he said. “Does that tell you anything?”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
