CHATFIELD, Minn. _ Steep hills, hardwood forests, narrow valleys and scattered farm fields define the village outskirts of Money Creek, a corner of the Driftless Area in northeastern Houston County stitched together by dirt roads.
Craig Ihrke has hunted Minnesota whitetails there for 32 years, about 9 miles from the Wisconsin border at La Crescent. The venison has a regular place on his family's dinner table, served with an extra sense of pride that it was brought to fork from a life of living close to the land.
Unbeknown to Ihrke's family and friends this fall, chronic wasting disease (CWD) was lurking in their woods. Hunting on 320 acres, the clan shot a dozen deer _ dutifully hanging them in the cold for butchering on the day after Thanksgiving. Along the way, they treated themselves to meals of fresh tenderloins.
"That's how we do it every year," Ihrke said.
Craig's son Luke is a 16-year-old wrestler at Chatfield High School and a veteran of the group's deer camp. He provided one of this year's highlights at 8 a.m. Nov. 17 by shooting a nicely antlered, 10-point buck that strayed 40 yards in front of his ladder stand. When Craig heard Luke shoot, he walked over to help with the field dressing.
It wasn't the biggest buck Luke had ever shot, but it provided an attractive bookend to a monster eight-pointer shot nearby on the same morning by Luke's cousin, Jack Ihrke, 24, of Plainview.
Jack's family hosted the meat-cutting party and Craig divvied up the packages, careful to evenly distribute the prime pieces by taking from various piles.
Luke was at wrestling practice on Dec. 3 when he missed an unexpected call from Erik Hildebrand, CWD project leader for the DNR. The biologist delivered an urgent heads-up.
"The adult male deer you shot on the 17th ... came back as a suspect," Hildebrand said in his message on Luke's cellphone. "On that first test it was a very high suspect."
In a follow-up, Craig asked Hildebrand, "Would you eat it?" The answer was immediate: "Oh, no." Federal disease experts recommend not eating meat from any CWD-infected animal.
Craig Ihrke spread the news among his hunting partners. Luke's buck was the first CWD-positive deer detected in Houston County since CWD surveillance started there in 2002. The finding was announced swiftly by the DNR because the deer was located outside the core area of CWD in the southeast. Luke's Money Creek buck was 31 miles east of the disease zone's epicenter in Preston.
"It was a jaw dropper for everybody," Craig Ihrke said.
Luke said he regretted the news, thinking: "Why does it have to be my deer?"
