Dying Time

Reflections on hunting, killing, butchering and an ocean of blood

As I sit here writing this, the nicks and cuts on my hands are finally healing. It is only the third day since the beginning of December that I have not been awash in blood and guts and gore and death. Winter is dying time.

I am home from three straight culinary hunts, and the back-to-back-to-back sessions of hunting and killing, skinning and gutting, butchering and trimming and packing and cooking are over. But they left a mark.

Right now it feels like PTSD Lite. Nothing compared to the real horrors of combat or worse, combat medicine, where the gore is human and the cries are in a language you can understand. But the stark reality of where meat comes from can leave the uninitiated dumbstruck. Even I, a veteran of this sort of bloodwork, feel very happy to be done with it all.

Like last year, I shot three deer: this year it was a tiny yearling, a mature doe, and a very old buck. More on the buck in another post. But I had a hand in skinning, gutting and butchering close to 40 deer in six days, then a flock of ducks after that.

Not all of the clients’ animals were killed quickly. A few had suffered that hunter’s euphemism of being shot “a little far back,” which means gut shot, a slower death wherein your innards are turned into a hot, toxic soup that the person cleaning the animal must then contend with. But even animals killed quickly and humanely bleed. A lot.

If you’re not aware, blood is alkaline, and having your hands covered in it for hours does something to them. Even after washing, which requires intense scrubbing sometimes, they feel raw and tight and rough. Deer fat gets under your fingernails and the smell sticks for days. The stink of the fermenting contents of the deer or duck’s last meal lingers in your nostrils long after you’ve showered.

(For those of you thinking I ought to wear gloves, I cannot. It ruins my sense of touch with a knife, and has caused more cuts than I care to recount.)

This is the price of eating meat. Morrissey, the lead singer for the Smiths, was something of a maudlin, emo crooner, but when he sang “meat is murder,” he was only exaggerating a bit. Because meat is death. (So is vegetarianism, because many animals die in the harvest of grains and vegetables.) And being surrounded by all this, for days on end, does something to a person.

I found myself repeating ruefully the phrase tattooed on the arm of the man who forged the boning knife I used for all these deer: “Blood makes the grass grow.” That man, Jesse Vosler, served multiple combat tours and saw true horrors. He and his partner, my friend Anna Borgman, make their living as slaughtermen in Montana. They do the dirty work of turning living animals into meat for a living. It is not easy.

I’ll spare you the gallows humor we three fall into when we’re together, talking the trade. If you’ve ever hung out with ER doctors or cops or combat veterans, you know. Humor is really the only way to cope with it all.

But there is genuine fascination in the process, even wonder. Old injuries especially. My buck had a forelock that was twice as thick as it should have been. It looked like a break that hadn’t set right. But it was so old it was hard to tell when it happened. I’ve seen all sorts of arthritis, fused joints, scars and healed bones, and innard irregularities in my time. Animals are tough.

Take apart enough deer, or any other animal, and you see individuality. This one is fatter or leaner, that one is unusually muscular. This one over there is weirdly elongated, and so on. Animals are beings, not widgets.

I never get tired of the endgame of the process: the butchering. Once an animal has been skinned and gutted, reduced to a hanging carcass, it’s almost “meat” in the sense that many of you think of meat. Butchering gets you over that finish line.

It is an intimate process. I’ve said before that it feels like opening a present to me, and it still does. This cut or that, once made, flips a switch in my brain from butchery to cookery. For example, the guides shot a huge wild hog, a sow, and I took one side of her. Because I cut it, I could “harvest” a pork knuckle off the front leg, a cut widely used in German cooking that is very difficult to find in the United States (they’re all smoked here). So this excites me, because I can finally do one of those recipes.

I think there is strong human significance in the fact that most hunting seasons, and most traditional livestock slaughter, happens at the end of the year. Days are cold, which helps for food safety. Forage is thin and about to become thinner, which means some of the wild and tame animals (and humans) wandering the earth now will find themselves on the table of the White Queen of Winter come February.

The beautiful products of our bloody harvest — sausage and bacon, cured and dried meat of all kinds, a freezer full of wonder — come right at the moment our days are shortest, when we need something special. A Christmas goose. A saddle of venison. A smoked ham, studded with cloves and sticky with honey or molasses or maple syrup. Yes, even a supermarket turkey.

I am happy to be done with the bloody bit. But I regret none of it. I’m skilled at this work, and, at its core, I know where my food comes from. I killed so that I may eat, and so that people close to me can also eat; I shot three deer because several friends need it, and my ability to help them gladdens my soul. And in all of this, there was no corporate middleman, no factory, no filter.

And the animals? They lived the life Nature intended, right up to that terrible moment I squeezed the trigger. No cages, no pens. No growth hormones. No human cruelty. Think for a moment: Would you rather live a life of captivity and ultimately be led to slaughter, or take a killing bullet at some random moment? I know my answer.

It’s been three days now. The blood has seeped into the soil, where it will help the grass grow next spring. And all winter and into the spring, I will feast on the treasures that that bloodwork created. Every package a gift, every meal a celebration.