Killing Food

The day finally arrives. I've known—or hoped—it would happen for ages, though the date has been up in the air until yesterday afternoon. A quick phone call; much of it garbled by poor cell service, and the remainder poorly understood by an accent barrier. But the idea makes it through, and an item on my New Year's Resolutions list stands ready to be checked off:

Hunt an African animal.

Perhaps a bit outlandish, a bit bloodthirsty; but it makes sense in my own head, where musings spill like acorns in a cyclone, and misgivings come and go like flies in summer with no regard for propriety or property.

The gist is thus: What kind of savage hypocrite would happily eat meat yet be incapable of killing for it? What fool would subscribe wholesale to the fiction of plastic wrap, to the fantasy of cutlet? A steak, a chicken wing is not just a product, it's the product of a murder. Plain and simple. Blood was spilled. No two ways around it. An animal was killed; it was cut up nicely; a label was stamped on. Close not your eyes, lest they remain dark to all.

I'm here to get in touch, to dip my toe back into the cold stream of life, where throat-ripping brutality is the daily do. Ever see a hyena kill? How about a coyote's, for that matter? Ever watch a wasp paralyze a beetle and lay her eggs in its abdomen? I have. You can't help but shudder and watch intently. And let's not forget gamma-ray bursts and supernovae. Nature is no pretty picture, though it's beautiful and wild and profound. Camouflage and quickness are the only currency, and violent change the only constant.

So how dare I enjoy the fruits without standing in person at the point of decision and choosing to kill for food? I have to try it for myself. I have to get my hands dirty. If I can't do this, I quit meat for good.

I wake before my alarm. It promises to be a beautiful morning as I set out. To paint this sunrise would require every hue of the pastel rainbow, plus enough gold leaf to line the clouds. My way out is delayed by a rare leopard sighting by the main dam. A good omen, to be sure.

A mere 20 kilometers away, Daan's place is more beach-sandy than where I'm used to, dense with mopani trees a startling vivid green amid the dusty tan and khaki and gray of the dry season. The hardy leaves provide sustenance through the drought; ripped off by browsers, picked up by grazers, beloved by farmers. And then the mopani worms will be born, will crawl free, and will feed everything for weeks, like a locust plague fattens the land while it flattens the crops. For whatever combined flukes of geography, biology, and meteorology, out here not a day's walk away from our thorny tangle is a whole different rolling veld. More fat and gnarled leadwoods. Not as much grass. Fewer cat-claw acacias and spear-wielding shrubs. It's a different sort of beautiful, refreshing at this time of year. But the downside of the verdure is, you mostly can't see past layer two of bush, which tends to be about five meters from your nose.

We drive along narrow two-tracks, pinning turns at acute angles between broad baobabs. The cruiser bumps across what must be a good stretch of technical rapids during the rains. Daan points out an enormous thick-waisted tree. Says he had the dendrological society out to evaluate the granddaddy leadwood, and they estimated 6,000 years.
"Two thousand at the very least, they told me," he tells me proudly.

He explains that the bush isn't supposed to be this thick; that this hedging-in is a product of too much rain mixed with too much firefighting.
"Nobody obviously wants thei' feed burning and thei' game dying. That's the money, hey? But it's bad for natural processes..."

Without the periodic incendiary culling, the bush creeps thicker and weaves itself into living mesh. Some farmers actually go out with chainsaws and sweating workers to thin it out. Some guys are willing to do controlled burns—but when the controlled part fails, Daan says, "That other guy then, youh neighbor, can sue you. 'e can take youh farm then, hey."

Daan shifts his weight in the seat and adjusts the beer bottle between his legs. We turn up a dry riverbed of thick sand. Dried clots of grass and formerly floating detritus hang from tree clefts well above my waist. Daan stops and gets out to lock in the 4x4 pegs on the wheels.

He gets back in, and I pass him a stick of peppery kudu biltong. Best practice is to stuff your pockets until you forget about it. Then, later in the day when you're maybe reaching for a bullet or something, you discover the dry salty cache and rejoice. We both chew reflectively for a while, until he stops the car and we get out into the bush.

Daan looks around, listening and sniffing. I take potshots with a .22 to warm up. The bullets are cheap and the report is negligible, thanks to a MagLite-size suppressor screwed onto its muzzle. I've heard carrots snap louder. This is illegal in the states. Yet no game will be panicked by a gunshot...good thing to have.

"Ready to walk?" he asks, flicking a Bic to test the wind. He lights a cigarette and walks opposite the drifting smoke. You can also kick a puff of dust to see which way the wind. No one around here really sticks a dirty finger in his mouth.

"If they see you," Daan warns, "it's okay, because they know the danger. They know exactly whe' you ah. But if they smell you—they gone like last month's pay. They don't know whe' you ah, but they know they's something. So they pfft! fuck right off just in case."

For a long while it's all tracks, no animals. There are a few promising piles of dung. The freshest has a green sheen and still smushes. Older is hard as pebbles. Still older crumbles to pale dust and becomes part of the shifting, living ground. We walk as quietly as we can, a rocking sort of tiptoe to shift weight without stepping. Yet despite our care, we broadcast our way with the hush of canvas, the creak of leather boots, the crunch of sand, grass, and twigs underfoot.

Periodically we stop to listen. Thunder tides of quelia whir back and forth some distance away, moving on the wing like a living cloud or a school of fish. Daan points out a few horn-rubbed bush trunks. Young eland bulls, he says. Rubbing horns on anything they come across, the randy buggers. These marks are a few days old.

We palm branches aside and dodge thorns, ducking the more menacing twigs and pushing through the less ferociously defended. We stop to listen. Ants crawl along a twig, on about their Sisyphean task to digest the garbage of the world. The gun gets heavy. It's a BRNO Arms .270, a Czech piece. Nice scope. No strap. A working gun, evident in the scarred stock and dulled steel. I feel a new appreciation for soldiers who have to lug these things around all day every day. My elbows kink up. I relax my hold on the stock and envy Daan's gunless at-ease gait. We stop to listen. Daan points out the husk of a mantis egg-sac near a small yellow daisy-like flower. He checks back to make sure my bolt handle is at a safe half-cock position. It is.

Then Daan stops cold, holds a palm back near his hip. I freeze. Hear snorts. Then I see them, darks shapes through the bush. Wildebeest. A few of them. Stock still as we are; wary, watching, searching. On alert.

We breathe as shallowly as we dare.

I scan for more animals and crawl my fingers along the stock toward the trigger, having earlier given up the alert grip for the comfortable. The receiver rustles my jacket. Daan frantically waves quiet. The wildebeest turn.

"Gun up," Daan whispers harshly.

I thumb down the bolt lever and raise the rifle, looking for a shot.
Too slow.
They leave, loping off into the bush, invisible before I can drop the scope from my eye in disgust. Daan explains just how still we have to be, lest they see any too-quick change of shape. I realize I'd been turning my head to assess my peripherals. Chin back and forth, nose flying like a flag, head shape changing like a predator.
Oops.

We follow their tracks through the bush. They're running, cleft toe-marks deep with a long V of sand kicked behind the heels. We come out on a sandy river bed and walk along it.
"Here they started walking," Daan points out.
Some eland tracks cross the trail. Running as well. If only I'd gotten a damn shot. Wildebeest is supposedly nice meat. And the skin is storm-cloud blue, streaked with black.
Still we follow, until the trail goes cold.
We walk to complete the loop, still hopeful but healthily skeptical. Daan shows me a level clearing where a village once sat, a hundred or so years ago. He kicks at a ball-round rock near a low, wide concave stone, both of them dense and ground smooth, from mortar-and-pestling maize and grass. He picks up an angular coin-sized fragment nearby. "Pottery shard," he says, and tucks it in a pocket for his kids.

The rest of the day passes as a casual walk in the bush. We get back in the car and check all of Daan's usual places—but nothing. At one point some guinea fowl flush up from the road, running and flapping and bobbing along, and I crawl out the passenger window as we follow them, to grab the .22 from the gunrack before they cut into the bush. "At least we must get something!" Daan curses. But by the time I get back in and thumb the bolt lever, they're too far into the bush for the popgun bullets.

At his house that evening we braai short ribs and get drunk on whiskey while the coals settle in. Daan produces a handful of Chinese firecrackers. His kids giggle and cover their ears, dancing on tiptoes as he sparks off the little poppers.
"Well that's the loudest bang I've heard all day," I quip, thinking of the .22.
"Hell," Daan laments, shrugging and sipping his drink, "that's just hunting. Sometimes it's nothing."

Next morning the bush is equally eerie-quiet, with nothing but quelia rushing here and there about their en-masse quelia business. We chew on biltong and brood, increasingly pensive as the sun climbs the sky.
"Sorry, Paul," Daan shrugs. "I don't know why nothing is out. This weather..."
"Yeah."
We walk on. He shows me some baboon shit, a sticky clump of berry pips on rocks and other surfaces, some smeared in streaky territorial patterns like gang graffiti. We follow some old tracks as the afternoon wanes. Near one of the water holes we find his two half-wild horses, with their tagalong subadult zebra. The little guy snorts in alarm and bucks off a few meters, but stops when the horses don't follow. Daan strokes their necks and comments on how fat and healthy they look. One chews the unlit cigarette from his hand, munching it greedily down, and folding his lip over his nostrils to trap the smell. We walk on.

Then, disappointed, Daan has to go back to the house to take care of some business. But he's arranged a tracker. "This is Geiss," he introduces. "If he can't find you an animal, it can't be found."

Geiss is tall and slight and dark, teeth flashing in his face under a young-man's thin tight mustache and proud little patch of goatee. His eyes are narrow and discerning, and his subtle smile as inscrutable to me as the tracks he reads like plot arcs in a book. He wears the usual green canvas uniform, with ragged sneakers and a thorn-frayed camouflage cap. We shake hands and then stroll into the bush without a word. I realize too late I've left without my hat, and my newly shorn head will surely roast in the afternoon sun.

Geiss walks me along a two-track in the opposite direction from before, through an orchard-looking stretch of land. He peers at the ground, walking as though he knows the way, one arm crossed behind his back, fingers in the crook of his other elbow. A butane-blue sky blazes overhead, and I curse my forgotten hat and its useless shadow slanting down the arm of the couch.

We walk for ages. I check my watch. Dangerously close to my time limit before I have to get back for work and other nonsense. Just an hour or so left. Then Geiss stops me with a raised hand. I freeze. Eyes darting.
"I have go the toilet," he says, and shambles into the bush for a while. I squat beside the rifle, for the first time coming to grips with the possibility that I may have a fruitless hunt. And who knows when I'll get another chance.

Geiss returns, and we turn off into the bush, rocking-walking as before, as quietly and carefully as we can. He doesn't stop to listen, but makes turns and adjusts his course while slithering through branches and bushes. I don't see anything that looks like fresh spoor, and I begin to feel discouraged as five o'clock tiptoes closer.

We stroll into a more open section, with lower underbrush and taller, sparser trees. Gratefully I pass through a few spots of shade, pretty much ready to head back, discouraged and hot and tired.

"They!" Geiss whispers like a hack saw, pointing. "Luke luke luke! Impala!"
"Where?"
Heart pounding, I fumble the bolt lever down and locked, and swing the .270 up, sighting along the scope for my prize. There!
I find the impala in my eyepiece.
No horns. It's a ewe.
A brief hesitation grips me. But then I remember:
I'm not here for trophies, I'm here for meat. I'm not here to crow, I'm here to prove myself a point. And a young impala ewe makes a much finer dish than a long-horned sinewy old ram, though her head wouldn't impress much up on a wall. But I've never been one to relish the idea of a murdered animal reading over my shoulder in the lamplight, scoffing and pointing out all my gaffes and goofs and gall-garbled gabble, even if it is just molded plastic and fancy stitching. I am eager for the pelt, but I don't give a tinker's damn for a stuffed head over my mantle. Rather relish the wild flavor at its tenderest.

And there she is, grazing and scanning and chewing, about 60 meters away in dappled bush shadow, blending with the busy backdrop. Blink twice and lose her, and I only get one shot. She stops chewing, and twitches her ears my way, sniffing the air.
My heart pounds.
She chews.
I take a deep breath, willing myself calm, willing myself back together, willing myself into the moment. Eyes on the crosshairs, crosshairs just behind her shoulder, elbows tight, cheek relaxed on smooth sun-warm wood; watch the drift and measure breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Finger on the trigger, hand easy on the stock, squeeze-don't-pull, tighten so smooth and slow I'm startled by the crack! and buck of the gun against my shoulder.

There's a moment suspended in time, frozen there for eternity. A suspended snapshot where the deep crack! still rips, where the acrid tang of gunsmoke hangs in the air. A benighted instant of not knowing whether she's down or disappeared. My disbelief checks the script, confused. My spirit holds its breath. On the other side of the tableau, a creature is jerked to awareness of a narrow shaft of her body, a sudden spindle through her core, impelling her toward the ground and somehow radiating pain and blood and she can't draw breath. Cud forgotten. Joints giving way. Mouth open. Vision clouding with fire. Adrenaline pouring itself out heroically but in vain. Diaphragm pulling desperately to inflate a shattered vacuum, terrified heart pumping and pumping forever pumping into empty space.

When my vision clears and Geiss assures me I've hit, I rack the bolt just in case, and we move forward. She's dropped right where she stood. Not even a startled bound. Legs folded beneath her, for all the world like she's taken a quick nap—except for the autonomic arching contractions of her neck, and the spittle-flecked working of her mouth. My shot is a few inches back of where I meant, shredding lungs instead of puncturing heart, but it's done the trick by the time we arrive at her side.

I lay a hand on her back. Soft. Warm. Graceful and smooth even in death. A wave of sadness washes over me, tumbling me toward an embroiled surf of melancholy. This is a creature, a living set of sensations, fears, connections, social scopes. Calmly going about its daily function and minding its own business; until I nodded yes-okay to myself, and pulled the trigger.

Then I wriggle and rise to the surface, gulping a breath of pride and exhilaration. I've executed my primeval destiny! I've succeeded to secure survival. I've brought home meat; that high-density, life-giving, storable energy that contributed so much to our long-ago physical and mental development as we walked the savannas in search of purpose.

Then I'm under again, noise rushing in my ears, seeing nothing but a young being ripped from a moment of life, a severed web of possible futures, a neat little jigsaw piece in this mysterious turmoil; just to fill my plate and fulfill my introspective quest. Died unable to take a breath, losing consciousness and life in the same few frantic moments.

And then my face unfurls a giddy grin, and I regain my footing over adrenaline-wobbly knees. Part of her part in this thing is to die for me and my part. A savage life lesson. I thank the impala for showing up in my time of neediness, and mouth a silent sorry. Geiss opens his dime-store knife and plunges the blade into the soft throat, rocking it back and forth to make gurgling squelching crunching sure she's dead. He prods an obsidian eyeball. Not even a flicker.

But ATP ripples the superficial muscles, quivering the limbs spastically until its reserves are spent. Death in real life is not the neat Hollywood collapse–last word–wrenching groan–eyes-closed stillness. There is no idealistic romance in the movement and storage of energy. After a bit, Geiss hoists the body onto his shoulders by neck and forelegs, neverminding the thin blood streaming from the wound, and we hike to the road in silence to wait for our ride.

As Daan arrives we eviscerate the impala, and he has me take a bite from the raw liver. It's a tradition for a first kill, he says. Bush sushi. I paint blood stripes on my cheeks, and just barely resist a triumphant screeching war cry. Conscience assuaged, for the time being; feeling in touch, a bit, with my ancestors at long last.