moose meat

  He had never, even in a butcher shop, seen so much meat in one place. She was a house of meat. Again he lifted the back leg and couldn’t move her, even with the guts out. But as he lifted the leg he noted that there seemed to be a seam where the leg joined the body, a junction, and he put the knife there and cut and the leg lifted away from the body.
  He kept lifting and cutting, all around the top of the back leg, pushing up as he did so until it was joined only at the hip socket, which rotated freely, and he cut around the socket with the knife, and it popped loose and the leg lifted completely away.
  Just that, her back leg, was heavier than the doe, and he realized it would be hard to get the leg back to the shelter.
  This would be a long job. He decided to pull the leg back and then return to finish up. An all-night job. And it would be cold.
  He took off with the leg and used nearly twenty minutes just to pull it to the shelter and was almost exhausted when he got there. He stored it along the wall and went back to where the body of the cow lay.
  It was now midday and he was starving. He took fifteen minutes to gather wood and start a fire near the carcass and when it was blazing well he cut a strip of meat from the rump near where he’d lifted the leg off and hung it over a stick so that it was nearly in the flames.
  He went back to cutting and skinning while it cooked. He cut away the right front shoulder — it lifted off much the same as the rear leg, the shoulder blade cutting away, and then the leg, and he dragged it back to camp and when he returned, the meat on the stick was perfect: burned a little on the outside and cooked clear through.
  He cut pieces off and ate it standing there, looking down at the rest of the cow, and he thought he’d never tasted meat so good. It was better than deer or rabbit or foolbirds, better than beef. And there was fat on it, more fat than the doe had, and he craved fat, ate one piece of fat alone that was hanging on the side of the meat and had cooked separately and still craved it. He cut two large pieces of fat off the carcass and hung them over the fire to cook while he went back to work.
  With the right legs gone she was lighter and by lifting the legs on the ground he found he could just roll her over to get at the uncompleted side.
  Once she was over he skinned the side as he’d done the first one, working up to the back after cutting around the legs until the hide was completely free of the carcass. Then he cut the legs loose, dragged them one at a time back to camp and returned to the body of the moose in darkness.
  Finding his way was no problem because there was a half-moon and it lighted the snow into something close to daylight. But the cold came now and he had no gloves. His hands chilled as he worked on the damp meat and he had to warm them over the fire often, which slowed him, and by midnight everything in him screamed to stop.
  But the cow was a treasure house of food and hide and he wasn’t about to leave her for the wolves, or the bear if it came along again. So he kept working.
  With the legs and rump gone the remaining part of the carcass was not too hard to handle. He used the hatchet to chop through the spine in two places and separated the back, middle and front end and it amazed him how much all animals were alike. She was immense, but the cow was built almost like a rabbit, with the same basic layout.
  The same design, he thought, grinning, and supposed if he were on all fours he would look the same.
  He cut her head away with the hatchet and dragged the front section of her body, the rib cage and the hump meat on top of her shoulders with it, back to the camp and then the rear end and the center at the same time.
  That left only the hide and head. The head he could come back for tomorrow and he set off with the hide at probably four in the morning.
  It was the worst. It was staggeringly heavy — he couldn’t lift it — and dragging it back to camp, with his bow and arrows on top of it, exhausted him.
  At camp he looked at the pile of meat and hide next to his shelter wall, smiled once, shucked out of his rabbit-skin shirt, crawled into his bag and was in a deep, dreamless sleep in seconds.