Nov
21
You start with an elk, which you hunt through thick overgrown timber or soggy open clearcuts with your single shot rifle.
You aim for the animal’s vital zone, as close to the heart as possible. You assess the shot to see what the elk does—an instant-death hit is rare—and you may take a second shot.
The herd is long gone, and you hike a couple hundred yards to your elk’s body. First thing you do is roll it on its back, cut into the belly, and remove the guts. Drag it—all 700 pounds—up onto a landing to start the process of skinning it out.
Cut the legs off at the lower joints, and hook a gambrel under the strong exposed tendons. Throw a line over a tree or use a hoist attached to a truck, and haul your elk up in the air.
Now you begin cutting away the hide with a knife and pulling it down the body.
Down it goes as you cut and pull, cut and pull, cut and pull. All the way to the head, which you cut off. Maybe you take the hide off the head and turn it into a European mount, or maybe you just keep the antlers. Up to you.
At this point you begin quartering the animal. Cut the spine in half as best you can, top to bottom.
Then cut off the hindquarters and front shoulders, until you’re left with six large pieces: 2 hindquarters, 2 shoulders, 2 racks of ribs.
Take it all to a big walk-in cooler, and let it age for about a week. Then assemble as many helpers as you can to spend a long, tiring day cutting the meat off the bones and wrapping up steaks and meat that can be turned into burger.
Now the meat is in your freezer, ready to be turned into dinner.
There: you’ve got a perfectly organic, grass-fed, free-range, sustainable, low-fat meal. No chemicals, no holding pens, no factories, no antibiotics, no corn feed, no hormones, no slaughterhouses.
Ready to start hunting?
Nov
18
I’m reading a story (begrudgingly, because I’m not enjoying it but I rarely give up on a book, even the terrible ones) about a mother and her teenage daughter. The mother is hair-tearing over the daughter’s eye-rolls and secretive pot stashes and general state of repugnant teen angst while the daughter is constantly strutting around in jeans with three-inch zippers and doling out blowjobs and everyone’s just miserable all the time.
I don’t much care what happens because I’m so irritated by every character—go ahead, kill off the daughter! Impregnate her, give her an STD, fell the hand-wringing mother with a stroke, leave them all weeping on some blackened beach shore after bombs decimate their city!—but I also find myself grimly reading it in bed at night and after some particularly rebellious scene in which the daughter causes more heartbreak I want to sit up, toss back the covers, and go creeping into my sons’ bedrooms in order to inhale their innocent sleep-sighs. Curl around them with that oddly comforting smell of pee and pajamas, ruffle their soft hair and whisper that they should never, ever grow up and away.
The children no longer exude the pure animal need of babies and oh, I’m so glad to be done with that. They’re still bottomless in what they will take, though. You can pour in energy and attention until you’re teary-eyed with boredom over playing Legos or lining up stuffed animals for an endless squeaky-voiced tea party and they will always want more, more, more.
It isn’t lost on me, though, that this time is drawing to an end. Right now they want nothing more than for me to focus on them, play with them, give them snacks and listen to them. They allow me to hold them, kiss them, fold them into my arms. They crawl over me like puppies, giggling.
The other night the boys were getting ready for bed and they ran shirtless from one end of the house to the other and I realized that Dylan’s baby pudge is long gone. He’s still irresistibly soft to the touch, his skin a pillowy expanse over those funny rounded joints toddlers have, but his belly is lean. His legs are getting longer, his butt is a tiny sideways letter B with no dimples in sight.
And Riley, my god. I stared and stared at him—not, obviously, seeing him unclothed for the first time, but somehow really seeing his small body, how he’s suddenly looking so different. The incipient V-shape of his chest, the tight navel, the actual dents and visible fibers of his muscles, the tender cords of his neck. The only infant-esque curves left are the planes of his face. He’s made of bones and blood and perfection and a thousand paths that shoot off in all directions. I don’t know where he’ll go. I’m terrified by it, sometimes.
There are times when I feel nearly crushed by the gravitational swirl of being at home all day, the children siphoning away my last bits of patience. Those times are real and valid and can’t be dissolved by cross-stitched reminders that I should cherish every moment, feelings can’t be ordered around that easily. But there are other times when I want to spread my arms wide, float on the surface of this fleeting year of us being home and together, just us, before school and friends and sports and music and everything else. While they still want all of me, any of me. Before they grow up and away and maybe I, too, am a helpless mother tearing out her hair and hoping to God that everything works out in the end.
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