Naked and Marooned

by Ed Stafford

  Whether it was the physical nutrients or the psychological boost I’m not sure but I vowed that it was up to me to pick myself up. This wasn’t a prison, this wasn’t a scheme devised by someone else to test me; it was my idea, my dream, and it was totally and utterly up to me to approach however I wanted.

  The massive log on the fire smouldered away and the scene reminded me of an indigenous village in the Amazon − crude but simple and efficient. I was starting to look like I knew what I was doing.

  Now more in control than ever before, I skipped up the hill and set the goat trap in seconds. I think the antibiotics did have an effect. The lethargy had gone. I had energy and spark.

  I had to carry out my daily seafood forage round the island and gathered my stuff together. The temptation, for this everyday and uneventful task, was to go light, just the GoPro and coconut palm leaf basket, and get back in time to do something worth filming. But the coconut crab had taught me that I needed to expect the unexpected and be ready to capture events at all times and so I grabbed my spear, one of the bigger video cameras, the Cinesaddle and all the spare batteries and CF cards that I needed to film. My old Scout motto, Be Prepared, echoed in my head.

  Fully kitted up and loaded down, I turned left out of camp heading south down the beach. The sun was not yet at its hottest and, on the western shore, still partially hidden by the island. Decaying green coconuts lay in the sand to remind me of every nourishing drink I had smashed from the trees. I was alert as I approached the usual places where crabs ventured far enough from their protective rocks and I was ready to crush an unsuspecting creature at every opportunity. My feet were now tough and leathery. The coconut crab meat made me feel strong and robust. I was back in control and proactive. I was now convinced that I was the only person who would decide the quality of my existence on this island; I felt I was at last shedding the apathy and near-despair caused by my being unwell.

  The tide was low and exposed the large flat reefs that stretched out into the sea like waterlogged football pitches after a monsoon. These were home to the bigger, tougher crabs that defiantly stood their ground and snapped ferociously at me − until, that is, I unceremoniously stamped on them with my bare feet. I built up a respectable number of crabs and collected two pots of larger snails that would provide me with my basic protein needs for the day. Nothing spectacular − but it would do. I knew the importance of using every small success to bolster my new positivity.

  I was calm as I circled the island, my head in a good place. I was able to find fun in my situation and was planning to set the goat trap again. Killing a goat was my ultimate, elusive goal, the one that I’d still not yet achieved. I rounded the northern point of the island on to the firewood beach and immediately found that my mind was playing tricks on me again.

  A large piece of driftwood had washed up into the bottom of one of the trees and the silhouette was the shape of a goat. I shook my head and cursed under my breath, looking away, suppressing the frustration at the reminder of what I’d so far failed to catch. As I looked away a desperate and frightened bleating rang out across the beach.

  My head snapped back towards the tree line to confirm the impossible. I squinted to focus on the subject and felt all my senses sharpen at the significance of what I was now registering. The petrified goat bleated again.

  I had come too close too many times to leave anything to chance. Nothing could have distracted me from the immediacy of what was happening. Point-of-view GoPro on − ‘beep’. Main camera on. Radio mic on − ‘check check’.

  I approached the distressed animal with the stealth of an old lion that has not eaten for weeks. Nothing was more important than this moment. As I closed in I could see that the goat had initially got its horns tangled in the vines but that it had clearly panicked and had now trapped its whole neck in the thick fibrous chains. It was Black Stripe, the big-testicled billy goat. He jumped and bucked powerfully as I drew closer, screaming like a mother whose child’s pushchair has been trapped in the closing doors of a departing underground train. Both the goat and I knew exactly what was happening.

  My immediate concern was that the increased panic would enable Black Stripe to free himself, so I had to grab his horns while he was still trapped. As I did so I could feel a muscular explosion of energy as he kicked back fiercely, only just missing my own legs. With one horn in each hand, and standing beside the desperate beast as if I were wheeling a bicycle, I allowed myself time to think.

  ‘Breathe, Stafford − reassess the situation.’

  The goat was going nowhere. As strong as it was, the vines were as thick as boa constrictors and, if anything, appeared to be tightening around Black Stripe’s throat. I had time. What did I have with me? I immediately realised that my new knife was back in camp. Could I go back and leave the goat here? No fucking way. I was not allowing any possibility of this animal escaping. I would not take my eyes off this creature until it was dead. All I had was the crude spear that I was using to smack eels and to lever crabs out of tight spaces.

  I had never killed a goat before. I had never experienced the strength of a trapped animal like this. I tried to break its neck by wrenching it back but could tell immediately that this would not work. I dug my fingers into the goat’s windpipe and clamped down on the airway. The goat wheezed but I could not close the airway enough to starve it of oxygen. I am not proud of this, but I considered all the vulnerable entrances to the animal that would allow me to dispatch it quickly. I took my stick and drove it into the goat’s eye to try and pierce its brain. The blood-curdling scream was terrifying as the animal was blinded but the stick snapped and I knew it would not die this way. My last option was brute force: I stepped over the goat as if I was riding it and, with my left hand holding the animal’s left horn, I brought my clamshell down with my right hand on to its forehead.

  From the first strike it took fifteen minutes for the animal to die, battered to death by a giant clamshell. I hate cruelty to animals and I am not proud of doing this, but I had to eat.

  Still tangled in the vines, the bloody goat hung limply from the tree. It was primal instinct maybe, but I was happier than at any previous moment on the island. I had meat. I had a skin. I had achieved what I had been dreaming of for forty-three days. My torso and arms were spattered in blood as I hacked through the vines with the clamshell to free the carcass. Once free, it fell to the floor and I attempted to move it for the first time. It was incredibly heavy − around fifty kilos, I would guess − and I used every ounce of energy to haul the beast up on to my shoulders to take it back to camp. As I strained under the weight of the warm meat I felt like a giant. To the tune of ‘Peaches’ − ‘Movin’ to the country − gonna eat a lot of peaches’ − I sang, ‘Got myself a goat − gonna eat a lot of goat meat’ over and over again.

  (Hardly surprisingly, two months later Discovery Channel would take one look at this footage and inform me that it was not transmittable. It was horrific, bloody and prolonged. I could only console myself that I had killed the goat as quickly as I could in the circumstances. If I had not been on the island the animal would have remained trapped and died of thirst − a far more drawn-out death.)

  My legs were quivering under the strain as I let the goat fall from my shoulders and slam down hard on to the forest floor outside my shelter like a boxer hitting the canvas.

  Despite the fact that I’d spent over ten minutes carrying the dead animal, I still worried as I headed back to get my camera equipment from the north of the island that the goat would be gone when I got back. This was too good to be true. Was it definitely dead? Had I dreamed the whole incident? Was I mad and I would get back and find nothing there? The blood on my arms reassured me that I could believe what was going on. I really had killed a goat.

  Sure enough, the carcass was still there when I returned and I set up the cameras to record the lengthy process of cutting up the animal. I knew that in this trop
ical heat the meat would not last a day unless I cured it so I had to work fast. It was mid-morning and I could not afford to have any meat lying around or not ready by nightfall.

  First I had to skin the animal. The hide could be used as a blanket to keep me warm at night or even a poncho-like cloak if it was supple enough. I retrieved my knife and hauled the large whetstone from the shelter and sat down to sharpen my most precious tool. Slow rhythmical figures of eight acted as a head-clearer for the labour-intensive task that lay ahead. I’d never skinned anything bigger than a rabbit or a large snake before and so this was using basic skills and just applying them to a bigger project.

  I rolled the goat on to its back and worked back and forth just under the animal’s sternum to make a longitudinal cut through the skin. The knife required a sawing action to work through the tough hide and once I’d made a hole I began to cut from the sternum to the genitals, carefully lifting the fur from the belly so that I didn’t cut into any internal organs. Every two minutes or so the blade would become dull and I had to break off and spend thirty seconds sharpening it. I just had to accept the limitations of the poor-grade metal and settle into a routine of cutting and sharpening.

  I gently sawed around the genitals and began to cut a line up each of the back legs to the knee joints. At each knee I then cut a ring around the joint.

  Returning to the sternum, I sliced up to the throat and then sawed off the head whole. I had to use a clamshell to smash the knife through the spinal cord to sever the head completely from the body. Once removed, I tossed the head to one side.

  I made further cuts up the forelegs and around the knees and then I began the process of peeling back the skin from the dead body. The aim was to remove the hide in one large piece so that I could lift the skin and gently slice the membrane attaching the skin to the muscle. The slightly blunt knife was perfect for this as it was forgiving and I only made one small cut through the hide in the entire process of removing it.

  Without keeping a note of the time taken, I would say it must have been early afternoon by the time the skin was completely freed from the animal. I hung it over a branch to deal with later and it immediately started to attract flies.

  I’m no butcher but I’ve gutted fish, tortoises and one tapir (not killed by me) in the Amazon, so the next task was to remove the stomach, bowel and intestines. Being herbivores, goats have vast stomachs and so this required a fair bit of yanking and cutting to free the huge sacks of digesting vegetation and shit. Invariably some of the excrement leaked out of the bowel as I removed it so I hauled the entire carcass down to the water’s edge to wash it with seawater.

  I piled the intestines up and put them to one side as I suspected there might be some use for these non-edible parts later. Then I had the very physical but relatively simple task of cutting up the remaining carcass into manageable portions. Each leg took about ten minutes to hack off with my blunt tools. I dunked them in the sea and placed them on some palm leaves. I managed to snap and twist one rack of ribs off the spine but the other side was impossible as I no longer had any torsion to apply. I settled for leaving that part of spine and the second rack of ribs joined together. Then I was left with all the regular cuts of meats that make various steaks. There was so much meat that I started to worry that I was not going to get it all cut up before it got dark.

  With the sun now very low in the sky, and firewood still to collect, I loaded all the meat into a jerrycan with the top cut off that I had salvaged. I dunked it all in seawater and scrubbed it clean as best I could. I then hauled the meat-filled tub and the legs back to my shelter. To get the meat off the floor I cut it into shoe-sized chunks and hung it from the coconut palm spines of my shelter. The thatch made a perfect hanging rack with ready-made slats and I collected beach hibiscus bark to tie it all to the thatch directly above the fire.

  By dusk I had managed to hang the last piece of meat above the fire. ‘I just caught a goat! I just killed and skinned and quartered a goat. I have four legs, two racks of ribs, two big slabs of meat, all hanging above the fire.’

  I knew that the heart, kidneys and liver would not last and so these were my supper. In the dark I chopped the internal organs into small pieces with the knife, using the camera case as a chopping board. A splash of seawater and a covering of rainwater and they were boiled in the huge soybean can.

  The result was a vast steaming meal that I placed on the ground between my legs. With my scavenged spoon I scooped up a chunk of meat in the poor light, not knowing what I was going to get. It was a lucky dip of three distinct flavours: liver, heart and kidneys − which would it be?

  Memories of me as a seven-year-old at school in the dinner queue came swimming back as I bit through a large chunk of tender liver and the meaty juices filled my mouth. Never a huge fan of liver, the taste was familiar and yet here elevated to the food of the gods. The texture was soft and giving, but the flavour was a work of art: rich and fine. I let out an unconscious moan of sheer pleasure and my eyes filled with tears of happiness. Forty-five days without red meat is a very long time and my sense of appreciation was nothing short of extraordinary.

  I considered the number of things that had had to be in place for this day to have worked. I could not be cooking the meal without the recently salvaged larger soybean tin pot. I had most definitely needed the knife to skin and cut up the carcass. Both were relatively recent acquisitions. Had all the waiting been part of the grand plan? Was this always going to be the day when I caught the goat? I blinked at the magnitude of what I was contemplating.

  That night I offered thanks for the food with every ounce of my body. It was incredible. ‘Coconut crab for breakfast – goat kidneys for supper. Life, quite possibly, could not get any better.’

  Right then, all things considered it couldn’t.

  I was aware that my grazed and cut hands were sore before I even opened my eyes. When I did, a sense of gratitude swept warmly through my torso. A whole goat’s worth of meat was swaying in the smoky breeze above me. I’d tied the head to the side of the shelter, out of the smoke, and the skull spun ominously on its hibiscus cord warning any other animals that I was now in kill mode.

  I untied a rack of ribs the size of one of those early laptops and placed it on the embers for breakfast. As I sat there turning my ribs occasionally I noticed that the spines of each thatched palm tile that ran horizontally above me were already stained brown from the permanent exposure to the fire’s smoke. Its alternative use as a drying and smoking rack should work perfectly.

  The morning was to be all about efficiency. Although I’d got the meat chopped into vast slabs and hung them over the fire overnight, they must now be cut into much finer strips in order to allow them to dry out and to expose the flesh to the curing properties of the smoke. The camera case was being used as a chopping board again but today was not one for considering the morality of this. Yes, I’d brought it with me. No, it wasn’t something that I’d found in Lemon Camp. Yes, I would use it. I utilised the expanse of flat black plastic to assist me in chopping up the vast amount of meat. Every two or three minutes I would grind a fine edge back on to my knife to ensure that it slid cleanly through the red flesh. Essentially, I carved the entire body of the animal into long thin strips. Each strip was then dunked in a bucket of seawater to add salt and then carefully hung in the smoke above the fire to dry and for the outer layer to carbonise.

  The flavour of the smoky ribs made me shudder with ecstasy. I tore the barbecued meat from each bone with the delight of a hungry dog and yet my whole situation was becoming increasingly civilised with each day. I realised that without decent food I had simply begun to shut down. I was aware enough of my body to physically feel the proteins entering my muscles and beginning to repair them. I had estimated that the ribs would last three meals but I seemed to polish them off by mid-morning and so put the lower spine on the coals for lunch.

  The key thing was
to ensure that none of the meat went to waste. Every strip was cut as thin as possible and I could tell that this jerky was going to work well. I stood back to admire my wall of perfectly sliced meat curing in the lazy smoke of the fire. For someone who had lived off raw snails for two weeks it was quite a sight.

  Calmly and peacefully I then went for a morning swim. By now I realised that stopping for five minutes to really have a nice time by doing something like swimming was very beneficial to my mental health. Dripping and clean, I emerged from the water charged with energy and life.

  I needed to do something with the goatskin quickly, as it was covered in flies. In order to process rawhide into a more supple leather I knew that I had to soak it in the brains of the animal as I’d tried to do with the dead kid. But untying the goat’s head immediately revealed maggots between the flaps of neck flesh. On day two! I hoped desperately that this was because it wasn’t hung above the fire with the other meat, but the rate of decomposition was startling. It meant that I needed to work fast.

  I smashed at the skull on Snail Rock to make a hole big enough to allow me to scoop the brains out with my fingers. The resulting goo I then mixed with seawater and submerged the hide in it using the cracked plastic jerrycan. This helped keep away the flies as the hide was weighed down with a rock below the level of the liquid.

  Lunch was ongoing and constant − I munched the lower spine like a doner kebab, eating the cooked meat and then placing the carcass back on the fire to cook the now exposed uncooked flesh.

  I heaped the offal from the goat into a pile to see if any animals would come and eat it. Lungs, oesophagus, stomach, intestines and testicles. I added the smashed-up head, too, and noted that it was mainly flies and tiny hermit crabs that were interested.