Cloven Hooves. Megan Lindholm

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СКАЧАТЬ think about it as my father and I work to break the moose up into smaller pieces. Some of it is hatchet and ax work, some of it is for the meat saw. Head off, front quarters, hindquarters, backstrap, neck. My sisters are sickened by this work. They flee the great darks and the heavy cold of the night, they shun the bright blood and the musky smell of just downed meat. Even my father does this work grudgingly, thinking of getting up at six tomorrow to go to work, wondering if we will be caught poaching, cursing when the heavy head refuses to come free of the neck section. None of them feel it the way I do.

      They can no more understand what I feel than I can comprehend their feelings. I know what they think. They feel debased by this confrontation. Meat from the store in cardboard trays wrapped in plastic, meat with tidy price stickers and labels, that meat is food, is flank steak, chuck roast, ground round. None of it is labeled, “Cut from the shoulder of a large dead animal in a snowy field at night.” There is nothing to remind them that the hide was pulled away from the flesh while it was still warm, and the steam rose into the night to the greedy waiting stars. They do not want to remember they are predators, carnivores. They’d rather eat the flabby muscles of an animal raised hock-deep in its own shit, castrated and injected and inspected, a smack in the head to fell it, a large white room to chill it, humming machines to cut it into neat slices. De-animalized meat. The thought disgusts me, as they are disgusted when they think of their sister putting her knife to the dead flesh of an animal, kneeling on it as she pushes the blade into the dead flesh. Once the guts are out of the way, the hindquarters are separated from the rest of the animal at the place where the ribs stop and only the spine connects. We hurry, hacking at it with knives and saw and hatchet, trying to ruin as little steak as possible. Then the hindquarters are spread, to reveal the inner side of the backbone, and we work down it with a hatchet, and then knives, cleaving it into the separate legs.

      “You done?” my father asks, and when I nod he takes a grip on one hindquarter and heaves it up. I help, guiding more than lifting, and the leg is dumped onto a piece of polyethylene sheeting. I am obscurely shamed that I could not lift the moose quarter by myself, and so I am determined that I will at least ferry it to the garage on my own. There my father will tie a piece of yellow nylon rope to it, piercing through the leg between the bone and the long tendon, and hoist it up to the rafters and let it sullenly drip blood for four or five days. Bleeding the meat, this is called, and it is important, for otherwise the meat will be tough and taste gamey. But for now my father has turned back to his butchering, is using the hatchet to chop through the vertebrae. A tiny fragment of splintered bone flies up to sting my cheek. It reminds me of what I am supposed to be doing.

      The piece of black polyethylene is the size of a bed sheet. I turn my back to it, grip two corners of it, and bring the corners up over my shoulders like a harness. The moose leg is heavy, but the polyethylene is slick against the snow. Once I have it moving, it glides along over the snow behind me. When we reach the packed snow of the driveway, it moves even more easily. I roll the leg off the sheeting onto clean snow by the garage, and run back for another load.

      Before midnight, all the meat is hung. My father and I contemplate it. It swings slowly, eerily, with gentle creakings. The garage is unheated, but it leeches enough heat from the house that it stays just above freezing. The slow patterning of blood drips will continue to speckle the concrete floor. We nod in satisfaction, and my father slowly tamps tobacco into his pipe. He lights it, sucks it noisily to life, and then turns away from the moose. I pull the string that turns out the light. We step out of the garage into the night, and he reaches up to pull the heavy door down. We are in the blackness of night again.

      My father’s streamer of pipe smoke rises up, like the steam from the moose’s exposed entrails. He has shoveled snow over the gut sack to hide it. By morning it will have frozen solid. The dogs will dig down to it, and spend weeks nibbling and licking at the frozen delight until it is gone. There remains only the head. We both know that.

      “Get rid of the head,” my father says simply, and turns toward the house. I watch him go. The windows of the house are warm and yellow. I know that by now my brothers and younger sisters are in bed, probably my older sisters as well. The skin of my face is so cold, it feels like a stiff cardboard mask. I can move my toes, pressing them down hard against my mukluk soles, and awaken them to pain. The moisture of my breath has frozen into a solid cake of frost on the muffler over my mouth. I want to go in.

      But there is the head.

      The door thuds behind my father and I am alone in the dark. I dare not even go in to fetch Rinky for company, for he would be too interested in the head and guts. He’d only make the task harder. I snatch up the black polyethylene sheeting and start off toward the garden.

      A head is not as big as a hindquarter, but it is an awkward shape, and heavier than you might think. The best way to lift one is to grip it by the bases of both ears, keeping the hacked-off neck turned away. The nose is pressed to my chest, the empty jaws gape tonguelessly. Even in the frigid air, the smell of moose and blood is strong. I turn quickly, letting go of the ears so that the momentum of my turn flings the head neatly onto the polyethylene sheet. I diaper the head up in the sheet, leaving myself one corner to use as a handle.

      The night is clear and cold. I turn my back to the house with its warm yellow windows, and I pull. The head rides along at my heels as I leave the yard and the tire-packed snow of the driveway and enter the woods. I have already decided where I am going.

      I follow one of my favorite trails. The trees are cottonwood and birch, alder and diamond willow. My path winds among them. Smaller bushes claw briefly at my burden, but don’t manage to rip the plastic. I drag it on, leaving a peculiar wrinkled trail, like the path of a giant worm. The head pulls easily, the polyethylene gliding over the snow. I am able to walk at a normal pace, and fifteen minutes later I am where I wish to be.

      Here there are spruce trees, sudden groves of them in the deciduous forest. For some reason, they grow in irregular huddles, in groups of ten and fourteen and nine. But almost always in the center of each huddle is a tiny clear space where no trees grow. I get down on my knees and crawl beneath the outer swoop of branches, past a trunk, and here the snow is shallower, for the upper branches have caught most of it. Then out again, through deeper snow, and I am suddenly inside the grove. A moat of snow and a wall of needled branches surround me. Looking straight up, I can see the black sky and the Dipper hung on it. Unceremoniously, I dump the head here and leave it. I wad the black plastic up under my arm and crawl out again. The walk home seems longer than the walk here. The woods seem lonelier and darker, and I am shivering before the lights of the house crack through the trees to beckon me on.

      My father is in the bathtub, my mother is reading in bed when I come in. No one calls out or questions me. No one save Rinky greets me, and he greets me with a wriggle of delight, his hackles rising excitedly at my blood smell. I shed my outer clothing by the door, and do not turn on the light as I go down the stairs. Everyone down here is asleep, vague blanketed shapes like furniture in storage. I am still shivering when I strip in the darkened basement and climb into bed. Rinky is snorting and rooting through my bloodied clothing as I fall asleep, my head cradled on arms and hands that still smell of sweet, sticky blood. I dream of bright white sunlight on the snow, and a faun gouging the frosted brown eyes from a moose skull and slipping them into his mouth. It is a good dream, and I smile in my sleep.

       FIVE

      Tacoma

      The Farm

      June 1976

      Ten or fifteen years ago, the farm was a dairy farm. And the room that I stand in now was genteelly referred to as the milking parlor. Now it is a living room, and is part of what Mother Maurie calls “the little house” as opposed to her own “big СКАЧАТЬ