The 4-by-8-foot trailer being pulled down Highway 371 near Brainerd was stacked full of deer — a couple dozen rigor mortised, frozen legs pointing skyward. Deer heads, tongues hanging out, lolled over the side of blood-stained pickup trucks.

If you are a deer advocate, driving on the highways this time of year must seem like some kind of deer Armageddon.

It remains a perfectly normal activity for a lot of us, particularly those from rural Minnesota. It would seem a wholly barbaric and bizarre ritual to many in the nation. And I suppose, to a point, it is.

Hundreds of thousands of hunters, spending far too long together in close quarters, shooting deer, filling up small-town gas stations and restaurants while entirely at ease with their blood-stained clothes and hands.

More and more women hunt (about 7 percent of deer hunters), but it remains a male-dominated endeavor.

For our group — stepsons Dustin and Wade, their friends John and Rick, my son Andrew — it’s an annual tradition in northern Minnesota. I get to be the curmudgeon, and I play the role full-throttle. They must endure the exact same jokes I’ve told each of the last eight years. I remind them of my years of hunting prowess.

I like to walk quietly up to them in the woods, approaching a likely deer spot, and whisper in an Elmer Fudd voice, “Be vehhwey vehhwey quiet.”

Next year I plan to wear black wing-tips, black socks and shorts around the cabin.

They endure it, through a sense of duty — and because I own the cabin.

Each year requires nightly trips to the Harriet Club, a dilapidated, low-ceilinged little roadhouse on the corner of two roads. It’s not the middle of nowhere, but you can see it from there.

Until the passage of the smoking ban this year, everyone smoked at the Harriet. There was an ugly peer pressure for even lifetime non-smokers to light up if they spent any time in the Harriet. Nine-year-old children, in for a burger with their dad, would get disdainful looks for refusing to light up an unfiltered Camel.

Actually, it was better at the Harriet before the smoking ban. Now, without the thick blue haze, it’s easy to see the bar and the people in it — both rather disturbing sites.

Deer hunting is proof, if we needed any, why men, without guidance from women, would destroy themselves and the world in a matter of months.

Those not killed off by drinking, sloth, violence and carousing would be soon finished off by their diet.

The menu in deer camp remains simple: fried potatoes, fried eggs, fried bacon, fried deer tenderloin, fried pork chops, generous amounts of salt, tubs of butter — all washed down with Budweiser and Captain Morgan/Cokes.