Childhood holidays were spent hunting deer after a pot-luck lunch for 50 family members overlooking his grandmother's pecan orchard.
They carried the youth about half a mile upstream to the interlopers' camp, which was strewn with abandoned clothing and cook pots, a deer carcass suspended in a tree, and laid him in the lean-to near the still smoldering fire.
At her roadside café, Sophea lifts the lid on a large pot, revealing a tiny deer's viscera floating in a green broth.
The 15 plant species were offered in pots "cafeteria style," where deer had a choice of each variety simultaneously.
The police watch for telltale paraphernalia like a woodsman packing a sawed-off hoe or hauling a large supply of garden fertilizer, potting soil, water and deer fencing into the forest depths.
Its most vociferous opponents paint animal advocates as foreign-financed traitors who would do away with such hallowed Chinese traditions as dog meat hot pot, ivory carving and dried deer penis, consumed to increase virility.
Inside the pot, which is shaped like a deer, Ms. McNeil also found a cacao-stained shell about the size of a hand.
Hop on a tractor and trailer ride through the deer park, watch blacksmiths in the forge and meet pot-bellied pigs, goats and guinea pigs in Pets Corner.
These days people eat from supermarket shelves rather than from the land, so deer and wild boar are no longer shot for the pot.
