Milwaukee, Wis. ? The wild game feasts were a fall ritual that drew outdoorsmen to the Waterhouse family cabin overlooking the Brule River, and filled the cedar-frame retreat with the aromas of partridge, Western elk, moose and Wisconsin white-tailed deer.

Now, years later, the legacy of those hearty spreads of the late 1980s and early ’90s is a medical mystery linking three of the diners James Botts, Wayne Waterhouse and Roger Marten.

One by one, the three have died from rare brain diseases, leaving their families and health officials wondering whether their deaths were an eerie coincidence or evidence that the deer and elk brain disorder known as chronic wasting disease has crossed the threshold from animals to people.

Either way, their tale is one more warning sign on a cautionary trail cutting through the heart of deer hunting.

Waterhouse and Botts both died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an always-fatal brain ailment that occurs in only one in a million people. Marten was believed to have died of Pick’s disease, a somewhat more common neurological disorder that can be diagnosed in error when the true culprit is Creutzfeldt-Jakob.

Over the years, as many as 100 men may have taken part in the wild game feeds at the Waterhouse cabin. The odds are strongly against two men dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, according to Dennis Maki, a professor of medicine and an infectious disease expert at the Wisconsin University. Three would increase the odds dramatically.

“It’s very suspicious,” he said.

The families of the three men were devastated and baffled by their deaths Waterhouse and Marten in 1993 and Botts in 1999 all before chronic wasting disease was known to exist in Wisconsin’s deer herd.

“Did hunting kill my dad? Did deer kill him?” asked Waterhouse’s son, Gary. “If you’d have taken deer hunting away from him, that would have been the end of him. … Maybe the deer killed him. I don’t know.”

Raising more suspicion, however, is the fact that some of the meat served at the wild game feasts was elk and deer from Western states including Colorado, where chronic wasting disease has been endemic for decades.

Presented recently with specifics of the cases, state public health officials expressed concern.

“We’ve immediately decided to proceed with an investigation,” said Jeffrey Davis, chief medical officer and state epidemiologist for communicable diseases at the Wisconsin Division of Public Health.

He said the state will request death certificates and clinical and laboratory records for the three men.