Читать книгу Life with Forty Dogs - Joseph Robertia - Страница 10

Horsing Around

Realizing I was no longer alone, I dropped the ax and rubbed my bloody palms on the pant legs of my insulated work bibs. I hadn’t noticed the visitors at first, and now was feeling a little self-conscious about standing at the center of a thick coagulated puddle, and so many scarlet splatters beyond that, making the once-white snow around me look like a homicide scene.

I had woken up early, before the weak winter sun had risen, to begin cutting on the carcass while Cole went to work. Having already skinned it, and carved most of the meat off the bone in huge chunks, I was in the process of using my ax to chop out a rack of ribs when the vehicle pulled up my particularly long, purposefully secluded driveway. In that moment I had to have looked like a murderous lumberjack enthusiastically re-creating the infamous door-hacking scene from The Shining.

It didn’t help that I had barely slowed my swing when they first arrived. I had the radio blasting, so didn’t hear their vehicle’s engine, but uninvited guests always induce a hullabaloo from the dog yard. The explosion of barks announcing their arrival is what caused me to stop my now public display of dismemberment.

Leaning on my ax while I caught my breath and feeling my pulse come down from near–heart attack levels, I could see several well-dressed women and a male teen all nervously talking amongst themselves in a magenta minivan. Finally, after a few minutes, the boy must have drawn the shortest straw because he exited the vehicle and approached with clear apprehension.

Dressed in a dark suit, starched white shirt, and black tie, he walked to within a few yards of me and my carnage and then opened with, “Can I ask what you’re doing?” It was obvious, from his wide eyes and the porcelain hue of his face, he was sincerely asking.

“I’m cutting up some meat for them,” I explained, waving my arm toward the dog yard. “It’s … or rather, it was, a horse.”

He nodded thoughtfully, processing the information for a minute, but must have deduce nothing too nefarious was taking place. His safety secured, he didn’t waste any further time and cut to the chase.

“Do you have a few minutes to talk about Jesus Christ?” he asked.

I thought about it and said, “Sure, if you don’t mind helping me finish this.”

Mushers are many things: resourceful, thrifty, miserly, cheap. Whatever term you want to use, mushers tend to get good at saving a buck because the expense of running even a small kennel necessitates counting every penny. Dog food is exorbitant. And we’re not feeding the run-of-the-mill grocery store chow, but a specially formulated kibble with higher percentages of protein and fat to aid the dogs’ abilities to build muscles and contend with keeping on weight while burning thousands of calories per day from running.

In order to offset the food bill, we’ve had to get creative over the years. We stop by the local food bank weekly for any meats aged past “human grade,” and in summer we hit up canneries and local fishermen to collect salmon heads, which are cast off as waste but actually packed with nutrients for the dogs.

However, of all the free dog food we get, nothing could compare to the mother lode of meat that results from getting a call to harvest a dead horse. These calls can translate into thousands of dollars saved and an equal weight in pounds of red meat once butchered, not to mention all the organs—such as the liver and heart—they relish like a delicacy.

Almost nothing is wasted. We’ll run a hose through the stomach and intestines before offering the dogs a savory meal of tripe. We’ll also give them all the long, white leg and rib bones, from which the dogs first tear off the little strips of still-dangling sinew, and before long, they’ll gnaw down into the deep marrow. They even get the round, black hooves to chew on for enjoyment. Really, the only parts of the animal that will go unused are the lungs, hide, mane, and tail.

Since our dogs that normally eat—in addition to other supplemental meat products—a forty-pound bag of food a day (at a cost of $36 a bag at the cheapest), each horse will amount to a savings equivalent to about twenty-five bags of food (around $900).

Having horse meat also comes in handy once the racing season begins. Out on the Iditarod and Yukon Quest, they can get pretty worn down from running for 1,000 miles. Like us when full-body fatigue sets in, sometimes they’d rather sleep when they stop instead of eat. Other times, they may come into a checkpoint hungry, but become disinterested in eating the same snacks at each layover. Whereas having something novel like horse really excites the dogs and whets their appetites.

This smorgasbord may seem a bit macabre, but true Alaskans are a pragmatic bunch who believe just because an item or individual is gone doesn’t mean something useful can’t come from what is left behind. Perhaps it’s from living in a place with such long winters, where everything must be stretched to last and in the old days not having enough meant not always making it. Or, possibly, it’s that many who come here remember from the city lives they’ve left behind all the problems that can come from wanton waste. It’s tough to say for certain, but in my experience, most horse owners would rather know their dead equine went somewhere besides the cold ground and became something other than worm food.

It’s also not always about ecological efficiency. Sometimes it’s about practicality or staying safe. In winter, the ground freezes deep, and as hard and solid as a bank vault’s door, so any horse owner who hasn’t already excavated a hole for their recently departed equine isn’t likely to be able to do so until spring or even summer. And, as the days get warm enough to finally dig, so too do the bears come out of hibernation, ravenous for any source of protein, which easily includes the decaying carrion of a long-dead horse.

A neighbor of mine had a horse die in his backyard one spring and acted a bit lackadaisical in regard to doing anything about it. As a disclaimer, he was a guy who flourished in a neighborhood without a homeowners’ association. To focus on just the largest items, no less than a dozen rusted trucks sat on his lawn (if waist-high grass constitutes a lawn) all in the state of disassembly they were left in after officially declared “broken down.” So the horse initially didn’t stand out among the overwhelming assortment of junk in varying forms strewn about.

That is until a behemoth of a brown bear boar took up residence right on top of the long-stiff stallion. The bruin ate what he could, then fell asleep across ribs as large as barrel staves, to defend the dead horse from any would-be scavengers, including the humans who lived there and now urgently wanted to remove the carcass. Their attempts were met with bluff charges, popping jaws, and the intimidating swat of a paw with five-inch-long claws—large enough to take a man’s head off. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game finally had to be contacted to resolve the issue.

Our first call for a horse came from a couple looking to avoid such a scenario. They were young, twentysomethings, down from the city to house-sit for the parents of one of them—a reed-thin girl with flaxen hair who we soon found out was by far the more masculine of the two, at least in terms of dealing with deceased barnyard animals.

“We didn’t know what to do with it, so I called my parents and they said call a musher,” the girl explained from the other end of the line.

I was at work at the local newspaper when I got the call, but have always found showing up presentable for an office job a taxing endeavor. I long ago resigned myself to stretching my Casual Friday wardrobe over the five-day workweek, and as such was dressed suitably enough to go straight to the horse. Cole was dressed the same for similar reasons, but wearing her favorite forest-green “Kenai Peninsula 4-H” sweatshirt, so we left work early and headed to Sterling, a rural area where a lot of farmers and livestock owners live.

It was sweltering by Alaskan standards as we pulled into the paddock. The summer days were long, and the sun beat down mercilessly on the chestnut-colored quarter horse now in permanent repose. Hundreds of plump-bodied flies had already gathered and we knew it wouldn’t be long until this horse was giving off a stink capable of chumming in bears for miles around.

One look at the young couple and we knew this situation was the deep end of a pond they never learned how to swim in. Not wanting to get dirty they had worn rubber hip waders, typically used for fishing in waist-deep water. Shaking hands with the young man further escalated my fears about how much work we’d get out of them. Not just limped pawed, but also the skin of his palm felt as soft as a puppy’s belly rather than tough and calloused. The girl’s hands were covered by ruby-red rubber dishwashing gloves, so I couldn’t initially gauge her grit.

Even more unfortunate for us, the horse died in a part of the pasture cluttered with trees. These obstacles prevented us from backing right up to the animal, and the house sitters lacked the approval—and I suspect know-how—to use any heavy equipment to help us lift the quickly bloating beast into the bed of my truck.

“Any chance we could butcher, or at least gut and quarter the animal right here, so we could load it in manageable pieces?” I asked. I had packed my knife set for just such an eventuality, but all color flushing from their faces told me the answer was “no” even before the words “we’d rather you didn’t” left the girl’s lips. So we had but one option: doing it the old-fashioned way with a lot of heavy lifting.

We backed as close as we could and from the tailgate I put out boards to use as a makeshift ramp. With the hand-crank winch I also brought and attached to tie-off eyelets in the truck bed, the plan was to drag the horse up. We got everything in place, but when we started to winch the animal—now starting to loudly flagellate from the gasses building up internally—it weighed more than the maximum load the eyelets could bear. They popped off like pellets from a scattergun, rendering the winch useless.

This complicated everything.

We made a few feeble attempts to winch it from nearby trees, but the device was a puny, poor man’s special (like I said mushers are pretty frugal) and not made for hauling the dead weight of a 1,200-pound horse, even if we could have gotten the correct angle, which we couldn’t.

We knew we needed a new plan, so after a lot of head scratching and a little bit of swearing, we rolled the horse onto a tarp, then wrapped it around the beast like a burrito. Two of us pulled from the bed: Cole on the long black mane and me on the tail. The young couple stayed on the ground pushing, and using two-by-fours like leavers, but we kept losing our purchase on the horse as its corpse shimmied up the ramp.

We needed a fifth person, so I called an acquaintance from work, a recent transplant from Vermont. He promptly showed up in wingtip loafers, pleated khakis, and a baby-blue oxford button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows.

Clearly he was ready to work.

The only way it could have been worse was if he’d shown up with a monogrammed handkerchief in his breast pocket, but at least he showed up. A lot of lesser men would have declined my offer once the details were revealed.

Through the horde of flies, we commenced to pushing and pulling, grunting and straining, a little more swearing, and lots of sweating throughout it all. The couple looked like city slickers, but they worked like farmhands. After a few hours—amazingly without any pulled muscles or broken bones—we finally managed to get the hoofed heavyweight into the bed, mostly anyway.

Its stiff legs extended straight toward the sky, and once we closed the tailgate the horse’s head was a little too large to fit all the way in due to the onset of rigor mortis, so we had to drape it over the tailgate. With nostril flaps drooping, pale tongue dangling, and eyes clouded with the opaque haze of death, I won’t deny it was a ghastly scene, but we had no other way to transport it home.

Instead I focused on the positive. We had managed to move a mountain of dead weight and because of that I felt like I had conquered Denali. My arms were limp and rubbery from fatigue, the muscles in my back sore and tight, and I was soaked to my socks with sweat, but happy to have the bulk of the heavy lifting behind us. Cole and I still had to go home and butcher it for several more hours, but the couple’s problem was getting ready to pull out of the pasture.

With everyone feeling pretty pleased with our group performance, I had my buddy snap a quick photo of us with the horse, so we could remember the herculean feat of strength and Edison-like ingenuity we’d all just displayed to accomplish a mutual goal. Also, at the time I maintained an active blog about our year-round mushing lifestyle, primarily for our families and friends in the Lower 48. I thought the image would encapsulate a day in our life.

I was a little embarrassed because at that time, I had lost a competition at my work to see who could grow the longest beard before either the itching became unbearable or the publisher physically throttled one of us for not being office-presentable. The contest rules stipulated whoever broke early had to, for one day, come in with a ridiculous moustache as their penance. I had that day skillfully shaped my remaining whiskers into what is known as a “horseshoe”—one grown with extensions down the sides of my mouth—to announce my defeat. To be honest, it made me look like someone who without question had on an ankle bracelet and by law shouldn’t be within 500 yards of an elementary school. Little did I know my upper lip accoutrement would be the least of my problems when this picture came back to haunt us.

We said our good-byes and headed for home. I had taken the rest of the day off from work due to an “extenuating circumstance.” It was a long trek though, and I began to second-guess my decision to drive so far with the horse’s head prominently displayed to any motorists unfortunate enough to follow us. At one point I even pulled over and respectfully covered its face with a plastic bag thinking it would reduce the gruesomeness of the spectacle. Instead, it transformed something already mildly creepy into a much, much worse show of horror.

Seeing its long-nosed facial expression so suffocatingly fixed from beneath the plastic, it really hinted at something fiendish transpiring, possibly even with overtones of bestiality or other unhealthy sexual ambitions. Cole, with total agreement from me, yanked the bag and we continued on our way with fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, on the way out of town, I heard the wail of a siren and saw flashing blue lights in my rearview mirror. I pulled over and a state trooper strutted up to the driver’s side window, with his chest puffed out and campaign hat pulled down low to just above his eyes.

“What seems to be the problem, officer?” I asked coyly.

“Well, you could start by telling me what you’re doing with a moose out of season,” he said. Poaching is a serious offense in the Greatland, a sacrilege really, and I could tell this lawman was ready and eager to write me a litany of citations.

“I don’t mean to tell you your business, officer, but that’s not a moose.”

“What do you mean it’s not a moose? I just walked past—” he stopped in midsentence while staring at the rounded hooves of the horse, rather than cloven ones of a moose. He scanned the rest of the corpse and when I saw his head snap backwards practically off his shoulders, I knew he had registered the mistake. He said nothing more than “have a nice day,” before heading back to his cruiser.

It was our first horse, but far from our last. Each and every equine donation that followed presented its own unique set of problems to overcome and backbreaking work to endure, but the money saved and the dogs’ satisfaction made it worth the effort. In fact, the only time I have ever regretted doing anything with a dead horse came a few months after I posted the picture of that first triumph.

Over the years and as Cole’s fan base grew to include folks from all around the world, the photos we’ve posted on our blog began to bring in mixed reviews from strangers. Internet anonymity often means people aren’t scared to pull their punches when it comes to letting you know exactly how they feel about an issue, and no subject was more controversial than our harvesting of horse meat.

Some people who had horses or—as was often synonymous, lived lifestyles where butchering livestock was a common occurrence—wrote to pass on praise for making the most out of a sad situation. Others respectfully wrote to say that while they could never bloody their own hands butchering an animal themselves, they acknowledged the undesirable process was how meat got to their tables, and they understood why someone else wouldn’t want to waste a half ton of meat.

Still others—which we learned from their Internet profiles were mostly very young people, or those living a completely urbanized lifestyle where beef, pork, and chicken were known only as neatly packaged products from the grocery store—would write to tell us, in loquacious detail, what horrible people we are.

I don’t know what any of them looked like, but from the diatribes they sent, I could imagine their sour faces, and practically feel the heat of anger with which they hammered out their polemics on the keyboard. And to be honest, their e-mails initially stymied more than angered me.

Most horses we hauled back to the kennel had died of old age, or, by their owners’ hand as a result of some geriatric condition that caused them to no longer have a pleasant quality of life. One or two had also been accidental deaths, such as a horse breaking its neck after running into a fence when something spooked it. We have never, and I mean ever, personally killed any of the horses.

So it came as a complete shock to me when one morning while checking a social media site, I clicked on a link a friend sent me with the comment “WTF?!” underneath it. This brought me to a site offering “Texas Horse Hunting,” which to be clear was not advertising hunting by horseback, but actually hunting and killing horses with, as the site stated, “sticks, clubs, or crossbows.”