A sample of the offerings served up at the wild game banquet at Mount Moriah Baptist Church outside Garner.
Michael Johnson and his son Joshua, 9, sample some venison chili and other fare at the wild game banquet held at Mount Moriah Baptist Church outside Garner.
GARNER The men arrived toting crocks of wild boar gravy, trays of deer quesadilla and plastic tubs of kangaroo meat.
They stirred the venison chili, peeled the foil off the rabbit and stuck a test-fork into the deep-fried alligator.
Then Bobby Hoffman lifted the lid off the evening's treasure: a pot of bear stew, flavored with the 400-pound beast his brother shot at Lake Waccamaw, retrieved with the help of a four-wheeler.
Thus did the Baptist men bond, their handshakes greasy with game, and the heavens smiled down upon their bounty.
"Boil the dickens out of him," Hoffman advised his fellow bear-eaters, "and always boil him with a bay leaf."
Nothing builds fellowship quite like meat, especially meat you shot, ground and simmered in your own crock pot, which is why the wild game banquet at Mount Moriah Baptist Church just outside Garner drew 173 males - a sizable percentage of them decked out in camouflage.
Men don't always mingle well at church functions, explained Pastor Michael Tolar. Here's a chance to get them sitting at the same table, looking one another in the eye, swapping hunting stories and stewing secrets, agreeing God is good.
Get men gabbing over a plate of pheasant and wild rice on Saturday night and you'll see them singing hymns together on Sunday morning, brothers in a peaceable kingdom.
"Just a good old Baptist time," said Hoffman, who teaches carpentry at Wake Forest-Rolesville High School. "Here's some wild fried chicken. It came from Lowe's.
"It's kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing."
Now 5 years old, the annual January banquet sprung out of a pair of realities: plain-old barbecue won't pack a church hall, and hunters make up a goodly portion of the Mount Moriah flock.
As January marks the end of deer season, Baptists aplenty around Clayton and Garner tend to have freezers stocked with deer meat. That explains the venison chili, venison roast, venison stew and deer cubes laid out at the Mount Moriah potluck.
Deer cubes, by the way, got scarfed down like they were fudge. If anybody ate salad, I didn't see it. The whole church carried the aroma of animals on the run.
"I had alligator, fish and kangaroo," said Jacob Tolar, 8, the pastor's son. "That's the only interesting thing. Last year, I had moose."
For his venison chili, Buck Adams supplied the doe he shot in Bertie County, seasoned with every spice in the kitchen. Robert Fowler Jr. ground it at the country butcher he operates in Zebulon with his father - a partnership that won Adams, an assistant sergeant-at-arms in the North Carolina House of Representatives, best dish in 2011.
"He wouldn't give me half the plaque," Fowler said in mock complaint.
But anybody who brings a dish to Mount Moriah gets the dual pleasure of bragging on how it was prepared and how the main ingredient was outwitted in the wild - a satisfaction denied the host of an ordinary pig pickin'.
Hoffman explains that it is one thing to shoot a bear, and a far trickier thing to drag its bulk out of the woods.
Luckily for his brother, the bear in the banquet stew met his end along a power line, clear enough for a four-wheeler to pass.
But the story behind the alligator, illegal to shoot, must remain hush-hush. Suffice it to say the big reptile crawled into the wrong yard, one where a small child lived, and wound up on the menu. The Lord provides.