Paul Kengor: Deer days in Western Pa.

“Do you actually eat the deer after you shoot it?”

So asks an incredulous friend who lives in a large city. It’s a rhetorical question, with a sharp degree of derision. The expected reply: “Oh, no, no. We’d never do that. Instead of eating the deer we, well, well … .”

Well, I don’t what the heck the expected reply was, come to think of it. What did my friend expect me to say? And what would have been judged more palatable (pun intended)? What if I had said something like, “No, no, my buddies and I take the bloody dead thing, mount it to the hood of our swerving car, antlers and all, and we drive around honking the horn, rip roarin’ drunk, tossing Rolling Rock beer cans out of the window. You ever see the classic movie ‘The Deer Hunter’? That’s what we do. It’s a blast.”

I can’t imagine my friend would have found that response more impressive.

My answer instead was unhesitatingly direct: “Of course we eat the deer!”

I stopped there, knowing that an extended answer might have mortified my friend: “Actually, we first eat the deer heart. It’s our favorite part of the beast.”

My friend might have called the police.

Welcome to deer days in Western Pennsylvania. My words here will not shock natives of this region, even if they scandalize tender outsiders. City dwellers on the coasts and elsewhere find deer season in Pennsylvania perplexing. I always enjoy enlightening them to our tradition, as they stare on with looks of both bemusement and concern that I and my kin are hicks at best.

In fact, when I think of it during such conversations, I hit my urban interlocutor with a major culture shocker: “Did you know that in some school districts in Western Pennsylvania the first day of deer season is a day off?”

That one never ceases to amaze.

Of course, the reason so many schools have done so is because every boy and his brother stay home that day to drudge into the woods to shoot a buck with Dad and Grandpa. Growing up in Butler, my buddies and I never missed an opening day. My dad and brother and I headed to my grandparents’ house in Emporium.

Much of this is admittedly unique to Western Pennsylvania. My brother now lives in Eastern Pennsylvania, where his suburban neighbors view deer as sort of oversized garden-stompers, nuisances prancing around their backyards breaking fences — like big bunnies, though they can cause major damage to your $60K SUV that someone else has to fix. Shooting a deer to them would be as bizarre as changing their own oil.

My brother in Eastern Pennsylvania remains an avid hunter, which means he basically has his choice of an almost unlimited number of deer he could shoot. He must be viewed as a kind of Grizzly Adams in their gated community. And yet, if there was ever a famine in Montgomery County, his neighbors would be kicking down the doors of Starbucks crying for food, whereas his freezer is always full.

And so, city slickers might judge us Western Pennsylvania folk a little odd, but I’m happy that deer season remains alive and well here.

And yes, we eat the deer.