---

Brad Wight can hang 10 bears at a time. Or 14 deer. Or six or seven moose — or beef critters — inside his enormous 8-by-8-by-16-foot cooler.

To local hunters and Oxford County deputies with spoiling roadkill, his Newry business is known simply as “Brad Wight’s cooler.”

For about 30 years, Wight has been filling a disappearing niche, keeping game from going to waste for hunters who can’t cool their own meat before its processed.

“I get all kinds of people,” Wight said.

Some want to cut and wrap the meat themselves. They bring animals to him to hang, then return later, taking a quarter of the meat at a time. Others don’t have time to skin and quarter, so they leave that work to Wight and come back later to transport the meat to a cutter in Livermore, Hartford or Oxford. He’s the middleman.

He charges $15 a day for cooler space, no matter the animal.

As of Jan. 11, when he sent off his last beef critter, the season was over. “The cooler is empty and my hands are cold,” Wight said.

ROADKILL ANY TIME

While he isn’t expecting game from hunters until early fall, Oxford County dispatch or a motorist could call about a roadkill any time. In the fall, he said, those calls came once or twice a week.

Wight always asks what hit the animal. The answer can determine how much meat is salvageable.

In summer temperatures of 70 or 80 degrees, he said, he usually won’t take a roadkill because it spoils too fast. But at 20 or 30 degrees, “it would be good all day.”

In 30 years, he has handled only two bear roadkills.

“Bears have to get taken care of real quick because they have so much fat on them, they hold the heat and the meat will spoil quick,” Wight said. He uses a winch and a small trailer to haul animals in.

The largest animal he hauled was roughly 2,000 pounds — a big bull.

“She was a friendly bull, that’s good. I had her on my trailer on the Parkway (near Bethel Village). All the skiers (heading to the mountain) were behind me and that big bull is laying there on that trailer dead. The flatlanders got an eye-full. Some were backing way off, and somebody even passed me,” he said, laughing at the memory.

Wight taught all three of his children how to skin and quarter. His daughter at age 7 could fit her small hands down the gizzard of a chicken, better than anyone.

He has tried to convince others to buy a cooler and do what he does, including a Buckfield friend who hunts. But that friend still brings his deer to Wight in Newry, who’s the only one around doing this kind of work.

A PIG SLAUGHTER

Asked if it’s messy work, Wight said no, because animals have usually bled out by the time he starts.

“Once you slit the throat the blood drains out and when you skin and quarter it ain’t bloody,” he said.

He works with 10 or 12 knives, he sharpens himself, each for a different purpose. One cuts the hide around the legs, another angled skinning knife removes the hide without cutting into the meat.

On 12 acres facing Mt. Will, Wight has a wide open pasture with two cows, two calves and several chickens poking around an open eave attached to the barn.

For three years, he bottle-fed the calves of one cow that could no longer nurse.

“She was a good cow, but couldn’t nurse her calves. Then I put her in my freezer,” he said of the 800-pound animal.

Not far from his back door lies a dead coyote, half-covered in snow, waiting for a friend to come get.

He points out a single-line of tracks in the snow from a fox that ventured near the house and he marvels at antlers he and his daughter find while walking this time of year. Holding a seven-point antler from a shelf in the house, he said, “I would have liked to see this young deer.”

Wight said he was about 18 and with his great-great uncle as they watched pigs get slaughtered in Albany at a friend’s house.

“I can do that,” he thought.

Reactions to his business vary, he said. Some people are offended. Others are fascinated.

He recalled two elderly women who parked across the street to watch him skin and quarter an animal.

“Oh, I remember doing that with my grandfather,” one reminisced.

Another time, a family pulled over, hoping to glimpse a Maine moose among the pretty autumn colors.

“This guy here is dead, but you can come look at him,” Wight said.

They came down and touched the antlers.