Dale’s Rocky Mountain Deer Tenderloin

An old cast iron pan sat soaking up the flames of our campfire just after sunrise. Its tattered look resembled something that had made its way from camp kitchen to camp kitchen in the Second World War. In it, a thick slab of Canadian bacon spat while its fat rendered into the pan. When enough grease had finally coated the base, in went a couple of eggs, fried and then flipped, while a bit of ash from the fire settled on top. Next to the pan on the campfire grate were two pieces of bread, a mix of lightly toasted and lightly burnt, both cooled by a slice of hard butter. The cold morning was met with the hot sandwich that was handed to me while I rubbed my tired nine year old eyes, wondering why we were out of the tent and into the cold. I’m told the fish like to eat the same time we do.

    For better or for worse, I believe I am, without question, a product of my parents. There are a lot of things I learned from my father, but I think learning to be uncomfortable is near the top of that list. I’m not sure if it was intentional or if he was just from an era where life was uncomfortable.

    We went on a lot of adventures, usually camping and fishing. These were never just trips out to your lake lot and hook-up your RV kind of adventures. Actually, we never had an RV or a lake lot, and our adventures always came with a little catch when it came to accommodations. 

    Next to my father, I slept in the box of a truck. countless tents, including winters in a canvas tent that required showering in an icy horse trailer. We’ve ridden horses through snow, rain, dusty heat, past bears, into bears, over mountains, into the wild, and out to what felt like the edge of the earth. We slept wherever was either easier, cheaper, or got us closer to the adventure than anyone else. I’ve spent so much time being uncomfortable, it’s comfortable.

    He also taught me about food. I learned to eat whatever was on offer, and I remember like it was yesterday that cold morning as a nine year old taken from his warm bed for a back bacon and butter breakfast sandwich. That moment could have been plucked from any adventure. Breakfast always came with meat (usually pork), lunch came with meat (jerky or sausage), and dinner came with meat (usually beef). 

The bacon & butter sandwiches or trail mix and beef jerky fishing lunches don’t make him a nutritionist, but if you give the guy a slab of meat, he’ll give you a Sunday dinner that would bring Julia Child to tears.

No matter the occasion, on the menu was meat and lots of it. Around twelve years old, along with a group of grown men, I found myself on a pack trip, riding horseback. We left from Ya Ha Tinda Ranch, west of Sundre, through the Rocky Mountains and over to the Lake Louise ski hill, then back. For a twelve year old, it was an eye-opening adventure. 

Some calculations were made on our chances of catching fish. Based on those odds, we then subsidized the first week's meals with frozen proteins and packed them in the wooden pack boxes in the order they would thaw, with the hopes of eating them before they went bad. 
Steaks, pork chops, and chicken with potatoes, fresh dill, and butter were all on the menu to start. No self-respecting cowboy was going to go a full three weeks on dehydrated meals alone. 

One of the loaded down horses was a stalky, barrel-shaped, jet black gelding. Due to his stature, he had the standard wooden pack boxes, and was then piled high with gear. Between the miles and the mountains, the horse was steadily shedding some weight; his pack would shift and settle and was continually readjusted during stops. When the trail of men and horses was working their way up over a ridgeline, all of that gear was slowly making its way across the back of that black barrelled horse. Soon, the rear cinch slid enough to catch him right on the rear flanks, and if you know anything about a rodeo bucking horse, this is what brings them to life. That horse jumped straight up, feet out four ways, and tore off back down the direction where we’d been riding for the past five days. A trail of previously packed goods came unraveled for a quarter mile down that trail, right alongside the day's plans.

The gear was collected, distributed amongst the rest of the team, and off to follow the horseshoe prints went my father and a friend. Sixteen hours later, in the middle of the night, the two men and three horses arrived. I’d never seen my father so exhausted. 

It was in this moment that I realized, when things go absolutely sideways, you need to take care of what's in front of you first, solve what's next on the list, and no matter how difficult it might be, you need to get the job done. I’m not sure if you can become a man at twelve, but a few weeks in the wilderness with a group of men navigating the wild – I was launched from pre-teen to at least some kid who could hold his own around adults.

    Frank Dale Marshall was born in Innisfail, Alberta, in 1950. He had six brothers and three sisters. He was a carpenter who operated under the handle Dale’s Nail’s, and built our first family home. At one turning point or another, he was also a guide and outfitter, and loved the wild west so much that not only did he never leave the area, he once abandoned urban life and moved into a tent in the backcountry. Returning six years later!  

During this time, he saw firsthand how vulnerable the area known as the Eastern Slopes could be to government policy changes, destruction by users, or a lack of care and maintenance. In 1994, Dale, along with a small group of friends, collectively started FOESA (Friends Of The Eastern Slopes Association). A not for profit organization with a focus on protecting both the natural areas of the eastern slopes in Alberta and a way to enjoy them.

    Today, he is the president of this organization that has ballooned into over 2700 members and works in partnership with entities like Alberta Parks. This collaboration means FOESA has become the stewards of over a dozen campgrounds and natural areas in the Alberta outdoors.

 The decades of unwavering efforts to protect what he loves didn’t go unrecognized, and he was recently presented with Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee Medal for achieving the award's main objective to; 
Have made significant contributions to Canada or to a particular province, territory, region, or community within Canada... 
For a country boy from the prairies, I think it was just as hard for him to know what to say as it was to decide which pair of blue jeans he was going to wear to the ceremony. 

Three quarters of a century old, and he still has a presence in the same backcountry and is looking for ways to protect it. 

    When I told him I needed a recipe that most defined him and his connection to Alberta, I knew it had to be meat. However, I thought it was going to be Dale’s Rocky Mountain Pan Fried Trout; sometimes, though, you just can’t force the inevitable. It took nearly three years to get this final story, and it could not have turned out better.

    Attempt number one was at the family fishing derby, the Trout Lips Trophy Invitational that I’d squeezed in on the way to the Yukon during the research for this book. That year, there were no fish caught big enough to keep. The following Spring, we headed out to the mountains for attempt number two. Despite completely trouncing me, even landing two fish on one line at a time, the results were the same: nothing big enough for a meal. In the following years, the Trout Lips Trophy Invitational landed plenty of fish of a reasonable size, but not of a species we were legally allowed to keep.

Finally, something clicked. It needed to be more representative of the province and the man – welcome to the first family hunting expedition. The first and last time I’d been hunting was at sixteen. Today's trip would also be the first time my old man had been hunting in nearly a decade. The catch was that I’d never shot a large game before and wasn’t even sure I could. Good thing it was going to be the hunter's recipe and not mine. 

The November of this story was unseasonably warm, with limited snow and the days often above freezing. Great for not getting frostbite, but it makes it difficult to track animals without any snow. The previous day, Dale and I had been driving around looking for deer, and there, just on the edge of the treeline about a hundred yards out, was a white tail staring right back at us. This was the moment of truth: could I pull the trigger? 

Dad stopped the truck while I slid my way out of the seat and grabbed my rifle, a British 303 I inherited from my grandfather. Due to the distance, my dad recommended I use his 7mm rifle with a scope, which would be far superior to my smaller scopeless gun. The thing is, I’d been practicing with the 303 in the weeks leading up to this event, not with the 7mm – aren’t all rifles the same?

Binoculars in hand, my dad kept an eye on the deer and on me. With a sort of loud whisper, he was trying to coach me into getting close enough to get a decent shot and have the rifle positioned on a tree stump to keep it steady. We settled on a coachable location, and to the surprise of everyone, the deer still hadn’t moved. I had the gun on the stump and in position, but was having a bit of trouble with the scope and had to get my eye right into it to see the crosshairs. Finally, deer in sight, rifle cocked, and boom, I pulled the trigger.

    That rifle kicked like the barrel-shaped horse from my youth, an explosion of power released into a tiny piece of lead. The deer scrambled and took off into the trees. Then I felt it. A warm liquid was running down my nose and across my face. Ohh shit, it was blood, my blood. I thought the rifle had exploded! I pulled out my phone to check my face, and sure enough, there was a trail of blood. It appeared to be coming from my eye, but I could see, so I decided to first look for the deer, then tend to the eye.

    Heart pumping, gun in hand, and looking like I’d been shot, I was unable to find any sign of blood from the deer or evidence I’d hit it.  It seems the only thing wounded today was me. It was here that I would learn a new hunting term, getting scoped. 

 
​Getting scoped, or kissed or bitten by the scope, happens when the user of the rifle has their face too close to the scope and not enough resistance to the butt of the gun. In my case, my face should have been several inches from the scope, and my shoulder firmly placed against the gun – rookie mistake.

I arrived back at the truck thirty minutes later, where my dad, who hadn’t seen me, finally got a look at my face. First, he was filled with concern, then a touch of laughter. He said that in sixty years of hunting, he’d heard of people getting scoped, but had never actually seen it. This was the first time he’d seen this? My ego went from bruised to battered in an instant. Luckily, back at camp, everyone seemed to know someone who’d been scoped. However, that did not relieve me from being the brunt of the jokes for the week. 

The next day, there were four of us in the truck looking for deer. We’d spotted a couple on the edge of a ridge, and since my nephew and I were the youngest, Dale sent us off on foot to track them down. This turned out to be a ruse. Just over the ridge in the opposite direction, he’d spotted a larger buck on the edge of the track. Standing, rifle in hand, he dropped the buck with one shot while the rest of us, bewildered, turned around and made our way back. Here we found a man who, at seventy-five, uses a shoe horn to slide into his lacesless shoes due to the difficulty of bending over, could be found arched over with a buck knife, gutting his prize. I think he just needed to show the rest of us he could still do it.

After a class on hanging, skinning, and deboning, Dale had his deer tenderloin, and I had my story. Our group of hunters, my niece, two nephews, brother in law, and myself gathered around the warm flames of the pine wood that snapped as the sap split from the wood for a lesson on Dale’s Rocky Mountain Deer Tenderloin.

    Over the fire next to a square steel baking sheet with sliced garden potatoes, garlic and onions, sat that same cast iron pan from the back bacon sandwich I’d been fed more than three decades ago. The flames from the pine wood licked that old cast iron until heat could be seen rolling out of the pan and into the cool air. 

Resting next to it were tenderloins from deer who’d spent their days soaking up the crisp Rocky Mountain air and grazing on lush green grasses. The quality of the cut was so good and the meat so fresh that the only additions were going to be salt, pepper, and the lifetime of seasoning baked into the cast iron.

    As loins of meat met the hot pan, each side was seared, locking in the juices and sealing the flavor until each loin was medium rare. Off came the potatoes, then onto a slab of pine-scented wood went the meat, allowing it to rest just long enough for all the juices to settle. Then, with all eyes on the camp chef, we’d soon learn if his campfire cooking skills were still as good as his hunting skills. 

Out came the buck knife I’d seen my old man shave a bit of his arm hair off with earlier that day to prove its edge was razor sharp. Then, into the tenderloin as each slab was sliced with butcher precision, and the slices fell to reveal a perfect pink center.

    Staring through the smoke at the seasoned hunter, next to the seasoned pan, holding the slab of pine wood with slices of fresh white tail deer tenderloin as the warm juice escapes from the meat and onto the wood, it seems the old man and the old pan only got better with age.

Dale’s Rocky Mountain Deer Tenderloin

Tenderloin

• 2-3 lbs white tail or mule deer tenderloin
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp pepper
• Cast iron pan. The older the better 🙂
• Campfire or stove 

Potatoes

• 3lbs garden potatoes 
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 onion
• 2 tbsp Montreal Steak Spice
• ⅛ cup Oil or butter
• Baking sheet or tinfoil

    If the tenderloins are fresh, allow them to rest in the fridge overnight. Alternatively, you could use the tenderloin from an elk, cow, pig, etc. Over a fire or stove, get your pan hot enough to sear, but not to burn. Around medium-high heat. 

    Sprinkle salt and pepper on all sides of the tenderloin about five minutes before cooking. You don’t want to salt it overnight, as the salt will dry out an already lean cut of meat. If the pan is old and seasoned enough, you can add the meat right to it, otherwise you might need to add a bit of vegetable oil. Depending on thickness, sear the meat on four sides for around 3-4 minutes per side.

    In a separate pan, have your sliced garden potatoes, onion, and garlic. Toss them in melted butter or oil with steak spice. Lay them out on a hot pan or wrap in tinfoil and place over a medium heat or low flames for 15-20 minutes.

    Once the meat is cooked to medium rare, allow it to rest for five minutes under tin foil to keep it warm before slicing it against the grain. Serve on a slab of pine wood and enjoy on a stump around the campfire b.s.ing about the shot you missed or the rookie who scoped himself.


    *Food for thought: If the idea of hunting disappoints you, I will repeat something I’ve said before and stand by. If you are willing to eat meat, you should be willing to understand the process from its life to your lunch. What steps happen at the farm, or factory, or butcher shop, or hunting trip, or wherever the protein of your last meal was sourced. A label on a box of chicken breast that reads “free range” does not absolve you from the fact that you are willing to exchange somethings life for the benefit of yours. If you are willing to understand the process, I think only then can you truly understand the efforts made by all parties*

“On a plate of bacon and eggs, the chicken was involved; the pig was committed.”