Maine: starting up from stars

Seems everyone's is putting out a cookbook these days. Might as well try to make one myself.

Boiled Venison with Squash and Cabbage

Ingredients:
- venison
- squash
- cabbage
- water
- fire

Materials needed:
- knife
- burned out can
- kindling

1. Walk secondary roads for several miles till a road killed deer is found. Early mornings during the autumn rut are best.

2. Check for freshness of deer. Check eyes for clarity, feel stomach for distention, look for parasites. Ticks will leave a cold deer.

3. Drag the deer off the road to a secluded spot. If this is not possible - there is a steep drop, perhaps, or a swamp, or the deer is too large to move - then proceed to 4. directly, but beware the eye of passing motorists. Work with skill and caution.

4. Peel the skin off the back of the deer and remove the meat from either side of the spine. This will likely be the least damaged from impact. Look for deposits of fat. Cut these out and take them as well.

5. Glean vegetables from a harvested field. In this case, squash and cabbage. Late-summer and autumn are best.

6. Break sticks, build a fire, boil water.

7. Put meat and fat into boiling water.

8. Cut squash lengthwise and roast on coals. Remove seeds if preferable, otherwise leave.

9. Chop cabbage, add to pot.

10. Scrape off blackened skin of squash, add to pot.

11. Let reduce. Eat when ready.

Note: Recipe equally applicable to animals and vegetables besides those stated.



I boiled the flesh of many animals I found in the can I carried: elk, mule deer, black-tailed deer, turkey, grouse, mussels, snails. Vegetables too: corn, squash, beans, potatoes, cabbage, and puffball and oyster mushrooms. No salt. No spice. An animal simmered in its own grease is flavor enough.

Save in one case I could name. Outside Belfast, Maine a ruffed grouse broke its neck against an oncoming car. Plucked and gutted, I boiled it that night with nothing more than the greens from its crop - a parcel of evergreen seeds and wood sorrel leaves, their tri-folds lapped into hearts. Even after an hour, the result was a bitter black broth and a tough-breasted bird that, but for a slight give in texture, may have been confounded with oak wood. It was a meal fitting with the piercingly cold night night and tasted of winter hunger and ache of a dark season. Nowhere near so good eating as deer or turkey, or even porcupine.

My hands smelled of shucked grouse for the next day, even after washing. Strong offal and gut juice early on, fading out to vinegar and earth, and finally in the afternoon, old leather. A good smell, one that could be held without minding.

This was not commonly the way I ate each day, but I never passed up an opportunity to do it. To pass by an intact, human-killed animal without any eye towards making use of its body did not seem to fit with the code I had set. To participate in each place I came to, eating with the custom of the territory, or on occasion, eating the locals themselves. The word for this is 'communion.'

Just as sound does not stop but spreads outwards without end to vibration, so too do what might rightly be called the vibrations of life. Some vibrating atoms in the sun made grow the browse that fed the doe that fed me. For the others fed by the same deer - the scavengers who came after - they now hold echoes of those same quaking atoms, and too will pass them on. Namely thru scat, or being themselves eaten. And so photosynthesis and consumption are the processes by which light is made flesh. It is a sequence not only observable, but in keeping with the progress of creation. Before beasts walked the land and birds flew the sky and the waters teemed with living creatures, before seed-bearing plants and trees that bore fruit with the seed inside, was not there first light?

No animal gives itself over to be eaten. Rabbits run, fish mass and evade, even flies caught in spiders' webs will fight the captor. In the final stages of exhaustion, it is not to the predator, but to its own willed death that the prey surrenders. Man may be separate from this view in so far as alone of all creatures, he may have some directive over his body, and so may indeed give of himself. But it is a choice rarely made, a decision passed over so as to take from the earth, even to the last, by denying his remains entry back into cycle.

After a life made on the eating of the once-living, it is a hypocritical and separatist view to insist the dead of one's own kind be filled with poisons, or placed in vaults, or burned to ash. The greater reverence would seem to be in allowing their inclusion in the flow that brought them starting up from stars.