Call of the Mild
Page 22
With each torn piece of tissue, the intestines and stomach bulge farther out of the abdominal cavity. Eventually, they sag downhill in a pile that looks larger than the body they fell from. Next, I pull out the wide, floppy mass of a diaphragm. A gush of blood follows.
I shove the offal a little farther downhill. We will leave it here, and assume that coyotes, vultures and other animals will feast on it. Andy has told me that when he or a family member shoots a deer on public land near his parents’ house, they hear coyotes later that night, yipping with pleasure at their discovery of the gut pile. We humans are, after all, just one fraction of the food chain.
I reach up into the elk’s body cavity again, this time with a knife, to sever the windpipe and pull out the heart and lungs. I can barely reach that far up in the animal. I manage to cut the windpipe, but I can’t get my hand in far enough to grip it and pull it out. I ask Scott to do it, then explain what he should feel for, what he should grab.
He kneels on the ground below the elk and reaches up, into it.
“Whoa.” He retracts his arm. “I just felt the heart.”
“That’s okay. Keep reaching past it.”
“No, it’s like it had this energy. I mean, it’s this elk’s heart.”
Scott’s words hang in the air for a moment, yet another reminder of what I have done by taking this animal’s life. The heart, the motor of life for this giant animal. Perhaps it does have an energy of its own.
Scott reaches back in, up to his shoulder, and pulls. Out come the final organs.
Next we cut the elk in pieces, to transport it back to our car. We saw off the bottom half of each leg. Then we sever the front half of the animal from the back, just above the pelvis. This is our first glimpse of how thick the muscle is—several inches of meat surround the spine—and of how much food we will reap from this animal. Not that we are in the mood for eating.
“I think I’m a vegetarian now,” Scott will tell me as we pack the animal out of the woods.
Along the spine, we separate the animal again—two hindquarters, one half of a rib cage attached to one shoulder and foreleg, then another half of the rib cage attached to its own shoulder and foreleg. The head and neck are a fifth piece, just as heavy.
Together, we hoist one piece of the animal into the air and then Scott holds it in place while I open a canvas drawstring bag that I purchased at an outdoors store before deer season. Scott lowers it in. We repeat this for each quarter, and each time the process grows more difficult.
“How are we going to get these pieces out of here?” I ask Scott. “We’re exhausted and we haven’t even started yet.”
“We’ll just do it,” he says, shrugging.
We strap one of the canvas-covered quarters onto Scott’s backpack, and then I struggle to help lift it onto his shoulders. Our hike back to the car isn’t long by elk-hunting standards—a mile and a half, perhaps—but it’s over steep terrain, littered with trees, rocks and downed wood. I worry that Scott will injure himself, hiking with so much weight on his back.
I take a second quarter and wrap it in a tarp, then sling a nylon strap around it. I will try dragging it, like a makeshift sled. The trek is difficult. My tarp doesn’t slide particularly well over the uneven ground. I have to crouch down and shove it over bumps and logs. Other times I stand downhill and heave like I’m in a tug-of-war match. Both of us have to take breaks every few minutes, to catch our breath and regain some muscle strength. It takes us two hours to reach the car.
On the next trip, I drag the elk head using the same tarp-and-strap setup. Scott hoists another quarter onto his backpack. During our breaks, we talk about how physically demanding big-game hunting is.
“I never thought of hunting as an extreme sport before,” Scott says.
We get back to the elk for the third and final excursion. We place the last quarter—the largest one, a front shoulder with leg and ribs attached—on the tarp, and each of us holds one strand of the nylon strap. The sun is setting, and there is no way we’ll get back to the car before dark. We both pull on our headlamps before we begin the haul.
“Just one more trip through Fortitude Valley,” Scott grunts.
I smile. And then I stop. Stunned. Make no mistake, we are standing deep in Fortitude Valley. I am drenched in blood and sweat. My legs and arms are so fatigued that they are sore to the touch. I’m so thirsty that my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. We drank the last swig of water from our packs hours ago.
Yes, I’m in Fortitude Valley and yet, somehow, I’m loving it. Even though I’m still reeling from the gutting process, I’m already looking forward to all of the meat we will reap from this elk. I’m proud of myself and proud of Scott. I had doubts the whole way, but in the end I did it. We did it. It’s pitch black outside when we get back to the car. Grunting, we heave three of the quarters into the Rocket Box on top of our Subaru. We set the last quarter and the head in the back of the station wagon and close the door. Eleven hours have passed since I pulled the trigger.
That night, I toss and turn, replaying the day that just happened. I worry that the meat hasn’t cooled properly and we’ll find it spoiled the next morning. This becomes the latest worst-case scenario to avoid.
We awaken early and drive home, where Andy and Jessie (who have returned to Bend following graduate school) come over to help us butcher. Most books and experienced hunters recommend hanging the quarters for a week or more. The idea is that this gives some of the connective tissues time to break down and tenderize the meat. But the weather has warmed up, and we don’t have a place to hang the meat at a safe temperature. Tough meat seems a small price to pay to keep this animal from going to waste.
We carry the four quarters into the backyard and hang them, using nylon ratchet straps, from a pergola that stands over our grill. Andy is gentle in his critique of my field-dressing and quartering methods. He says that we got all the meat, which is the most important thing. But we could have separated the quarters more easily by knowing which joints to break. We should have skinned the elk in the field, to make it lighter. We could have left ribs and more of each leg behind, to pack it out more easily. Instead, we skin each quarter as it hangs. With one hand, I stretch the hide down and away from the leg. With the other, I use the knife to sever any thin, stringy connections. The inside of the skin is gelatinous and slippery-smooth. I shake salt over the inside of each piece of hide, then roll it for later tanning.
Next, we take down the skinned quarters and set them on tables we improvised by laying sheets of plywood across sawhorses. Andy hands me a sharp knife and explains that my next job is to separate the muscles. The highlight of my entire education was the dissection unit in seventh-grade biology, so butchering is right up my alley. It’s fascinating to take apart an animal and see the glorious intricacies of life’s own design. Scott and I focus on this part of the butchering while Andy oversees us and slices the detached muscles into steaks or stew meat or roasts. Jessie packages the cuts using a vacuum sealer. Into buckets go the scraps, which we’ll grind into burger meat the next day.
As the sun goes down, I finish one hindquarter and move on to the right front, which is where the bullet entered the elk. The trauma has changed the physical makeup of the meat: Clotted blood forms a dark, gelatinous coating over it. I have to discard layers of it to unearth any normal-textured meat that remains.
Jessie, who has shot and butchered two deer of her own, will later tell me that she views this as a critical part of hunting. Seeing the bullet trauma up close helps her understand the consequences of pulling the trigger. Earlier, as the butchering lagged on, I found myself forgetting, for long stretches, that we were picking apart a real life. The elk had started to look like meat—regular old sides of beef that hang in butcher shops or fancy steak houses. But now, as I poke the formations of congealed blood, this trauma brings me back to the stark truth of what I have done, of the cost of all this meat.
As we butcher, Andy grills one of the fillet
s so we can try it. It’s delicious and as tender as store-bought filet mignon. Elk meat tastes a lot like grass-fed beef, or a strong-tasting version of regular grain-fed beef. It’s much leaner than beef, so burgers don’t hold together well on the grill. Soon I will find myself adding a spoonful of olive oil to recipes such as meat loaf.
The day after the butchering is done, I buy a chest freezer. We tuck it in a corner of our basement and fill it with the wrapped meat of my elk. Because I didn’t take the animal to a professional butcher, it was never weighed and I don’t know exactly how much meat we got out of it—but it’s in the hundreds of pounds, for sure.
Food isn’t the only thing this elk has given us. I freeze three pieces of hide, and try my hand at tanning the fourth, for a furry wall hanging or, at the very least, some fly-tying materials for Scott. I scrape the flesh off the inside, then stretch it and dry it in the basement. In the summer, I will soften it with a store-bought tanning kit.
Elk have two rounded molars in their upper jaw that are sometimes called ivories. Old-timers carry these teeth around in their pockets for good luck. So I carefully cut these teeth out of the gums, then dry them and brush off the remaining tissue. These tokens of my hunt are too precious to carry around in a pocket, so I tuck them in my jewelry box.
I take the head to a taxidermist, for what’s known as a European mount—no fur or glass eyes, just a cleaned white skull and antlers. On the way to pick it up, I worry that it will look creepy: the hollowed-out areas where eyeballs used to sit, the broken edges where nose cartilage once met bone. But when I see it, I get to relive the satisfaction and thrill of the kill all over again. We hang it carefully over our mantel. To me, it looks elegant. It is art by nature’s incomparable design, a token of a rite of passage that still feels so mystical that without such physical reminders, I might doubt it ever happened. When I look at it, I am reminded of all the feelings summoned during the hunt: intense pride, satisfaction, exhaustion, awe, gratitude and, yes, guilt.
Guilt is an unavoidable part of hunting. Nearly every hunter I’ve ever met has admitted to feeling guilty about killing animals. Since I shot the elk, this guilt has also started to feel appropriate, even necessary.
What got me interested in hunting in the first place was the archetype of a hunter who respects her prey. But at times, I fell into my old habit of wondering if that “respect” wasn’t just a convenient form of self-deceit, like claiming that a prenuptial agreement is a symbol of love.
The idea of respecting something and also eating it is a tricky one indeed, and it has confounded humans for a long time. In his paean to deer, Heart and Blood, Richard Nelson describes his love for the species and acknowledges that as a hunter, his actions might seem to conflict with this love. Then he adds: “If this seems contradictory, then the whole living process is a contradiction. We love apart from ourselves that which we also kill to sustain us: great trees become our houses and furniture, flowering plants become our vegetables and fruit, fellow creatures become our food and clothing.”
A local Indian woman once explained to me how her tribe, the Umatilla, reconciles this apparent paradox. They view eating an animal not as a heartless act of cruelty, but as a display of gratitude and respect. They believe that many animals already inhabited the earth when man first arrived. The Creator called all of these creatures together and told them to prepare for a new being, man. The other animals would have to take care of man, who would first appear as an infant, the Creator said. Salmon was the first animal to step forward and offer to help nourish man. Deer was the second. It’s no surprise, then, that salmon and deer are such important animals. If one year went by and no humans ate salmon or deer, the animals would be deeply offended. Both would feel as if they had lost their great importance.
Regardless of what you think of this creation story, the last part rings true. The more we eat something, the more it becomes an integral part of our culture and the more we will fight to keep it around. One can’t imagine humans letting cattle go extinct. Or potatoes.
According to Erich Fromm, hunters have always had respect—perhaps even love—for their prey. There is, he writes, “no evidence for the assumption that primitive hunters were motivated by sadistic or destructive impulses. On the contrary, there is some evidence to show that they had an affectionate feeling for the killed animals and possibly a feeling of guilt for the kill. Among Paleolithic hunters, the bear was often addressed as ‘grandfather’ or was looked upon as the mythical ancestor of man.”
In addition to the guilt over killing such a large, beautiful animal, as time goes on I begin to feel guilty about how quickly I encountered it and what a close, easy shot I had. My elk-hunting experience was, as a friend points out, “the aesthetic ideal.” It was on public land, in a place I had come to know and love during deer season. It was also very, very lucky. Faced with waiting another year to bag a large animal, I had started making backup plans. I contacted landowners who had crop-protection preference tags that extended the season and briefly considered hiring a guide to show me the ropes in an area that was unknown to me but familiar to him. I am grateful that I didn’t have to fall back on these other options.
Most of all, though—more than the meat or the ivories or the mount or the photos—I came away from the elk hunt relishing my memory of the experience. It marks the beginning of something that I hope will be part of the rest of my life. The elk has lifted me over some imaginary threshold, though I still consider myself a novice hunter. Perhaps I always will. The more I learn about hunting, the more I realize I still don’t know. I understand why some hunters become obsessed; there is so much to learn from each individual animal. Every fall, a hunter gets to see a new group of deer behaving slightly differently from the previous ones. She gets to see if the ground where she found last year’s buck is still attractive to a new generation of animals. Just as Heraclitus said that no man steps into the same river twice, it is also true that no hunter visits the same land twice.
It’s a pleasant surprise how many friends are eager to try the elk meat. We invite friends and family over for elk chili with adobo. We give away packages of meat to friends, who report back with recipes and stories of how their own special meals were received.
Twice a week, Scott and I eat elk for supper. With so much in our own freezer, I try to avoid buying meat. Every month or so I buy a whole chicken, which I roast and then stretch into other meals such as enchiladas, stir-fry and chicken soup. The rest of our dinners are meatless. I notice that our weekly grocery bills are more than twenty dollars lower than usual.
That winter, Scott and I face another circle-of-life moment as we talk, yet again, about starting a family. The subject arises as it always does: suddenly. Only this time, there is no long discussion, no back-and-forth hypothetical debate. After years of talking about it, we simply decide to ditch the birth control and see what happens.
At times, I struggle to shoo away nagging questions. (Will I be able to get pregnant? What if we have a baby who has major health problems? What if she or he dies suddenly, like Audrey? Or like Nathan?) In May, I discover that I am pregnant and due in January.
I had expected pregnancy to be riddled with fear and anxiety. But the instant I see those two pink lines, my only feelings are shock and joy. Scott takes pictures of the three of us—him, me, Sylvia—to remember the moment. Weeks tick by and my heart remains wide open. Yes, my future could hold unfathomable sadness. I could lose this baby—to miscarriage, stillbirth or death—at any moment. I do think about this. But somehow, for some reason, I don’t dwell on it. I vow to deal with life as it unfolds. Each day, hope surprises me by trumping fear.
My overarching wish for this child is that he or she will grow up strong, curious and brave. Tucked underneath is the smaller hope that someday we will hunt together, absorbing the world around us side by side. Hunting has allowed me to explore some of my greatest questions and fears. Ultimately, it helped lead me to the decision to bear this child.
There are so many things that we stand to lose, as a society, if hunters go extinct. Of course there’s the money from hunting and fishing licenses. If environmentalists won’t or can’t hunt or fish, then it’s time to revamp our conservation funding model, which is still based almost entirely on license fees. Hikers and bird-watchers are literally not paying their share.
Hunting license fees pay for the majority of wildlife conservation programs in the United States, including those that protect non-hunted animals. Hunters who pursue migratory waterfowl in any state, for example, must pay for a federal license each year—called a “duck stamp”—to fund wetland conservation. In 2010, my stamp cost $15.00, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that $14.70 of that went to purchase or lease wetlands for the National Wildlife Refuge System. That same year, I paid $58.00 for a general Oregon fishing and hunting license and an additional $20.00 for the right to hunt upland birds and waterfowl.
Hikers and bird-watchers, who did not pay these taxes, benefited from the ones I did. My license fees helped pay for biologists to study animals and restore important habitat. Some of my money even helped non-hunted animals like songbirds and pygmy rabbits (tiny rabbits that burrow in sagebrush country). As hunting and fishing have declined nationwide, conservation projects have multiplied and become more expensive. To fill the funding gap, states have jacked up the costs of hunting and fishing licenses. In 1982, for example, 16.7 million Americans spent a collective $259 million on hunting licenses and fees. Averaged out, that’s about $15.50 apiece. In 2003, 14.7 million hunters spent a total of $679.8 million, or about $46.12 each. Costs more than tripled in twenty-one years, much faster than the rate of inflation.