The Brown One

QOTD: Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance and respect all the creatures, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope. -But, Dad, don't we eat the antelope?- Yes, Simba, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life.

(NOTE: This blog is pretty graphic, about a cow slaughter, just so you're not surprised.)

Darren, Chris and Rickford's son walked toward the corral, long ropes in hand, me following. We weren't there just to collect meat, like I initially thought. They talk in Makushi, and I hear 'brown one' in there somewhere. Plops of poop, gushes of pee, wooshes of breath sound from the corral as RJ jumps over the 7-foot high fence, whips the rope around and gets the cow he wants, first try.

The rope is being anchored by one fence post and held by Chris and Darren, and as the cow tries to pull away, other cows run around and get in the way. Some cows, in the excitement, start headbutting each other, others try mounting each other. It looks like a few cows nudge the roped one, others nervously jump over the rope. As the cow bucks around, the boys pull the rope, getting it closer and closer to the edge of the corral. The rope is around its neck and it's breathing hard.

All the other cows calm down and stand away from the struggling cow, watching it and us, as if questioning with their eyes "What's going on, what are you doing to our friend?" The rope gets pulled enough so that the cow's head is sticking through the posts. RJ takes one of the kitchen knives they've been sharpening with a file, and I look away, to wait until the cease of the cow's breathing comes, until the cow is more or less motionless on the ground, right inside the corral. They loosen one of the horizontal posts, and pull the cow out by it's tail, as the other cows come and sniff at the cow and the blood on the ground.

RJ and Darwin first make a light cut all the way down from the throat to the anus, and you can see the hide splitting. One guy starts and one end and one guy starts at the other, with the cow on its side, and they slight scrape the hide away from the body, until it gets to the spine. They make a traced line around the front and hind leg and peel the hide from it, too, as well as cut and break off the calves. They start by cutting the meat that rests against the spine, a long rectangular line of meat that gets put, bloody, into a rice bag. The cow is rolled over, hide scraped away on the other side, the strip of meat from the spine again. A triangle around the anus is cut away, this will be used to help pull out the guts later. Darren and RJ seem to work casually yet efficiently, each knowing what needed to be done, each complementing whatever the other was doing. An incision was made into the calf muscle, for example, and then Chris was called to come and pull; he grabbed the new hole between bones, and pulled the leg away from the body. It was looking more and more like the meat I am used to seeing hanging under a benab, to have a chunk cut off and buy 5 pounds of.

A big cutlass is used to separate the spine till the tail, chunks of meat get cut from the neck, from the haunches. Then they cut from neck to anus comes and guts slowly seep out. So big! RJ feels around what must be the several massive stomachs and it has a look and sound of a waterbed. Branches with leaves were put on either side of the cow, as they moved it from side to side; the hide was also layed out under the carcass. With the neck as one grip and the anus area as the other, Chris and Darren pull out the guts to one side. They spread the hind legs and cut them away, toss them into the back of the Land Rover. The cut the ribs from the spine on either side and take those, too, to the Land Rover. The front legs, the head cut off, to the Rover.

The cow more or less dismantled, I jumped down from my perch on the fence, noting they'll take out the liver from the viscera, and wondering what will happen with all the rest before we go. Dogs were already about. Ryol starts cutting out the liver, but then the other guys start cutting the fat off of the other guts and body parts to collect. And then Darwin cuts into the stomach - WHY??? I'd noted appreciatively that no guts were punctured as they got moved around, but then they cut open one of the many stomachs and it was chock full of half-digested grass that had almost the consistency of the grass that gets stuck in the chute of the lawn mower. Just one other goop to dig their hands into, to wipe off the knives before they resharpen, to stain their clothes.

Which reminds me, as the cow was still standing and thrashing, it spewed snot all over RJ's face, which made him gag and spit and throw off his shirt which made ME gag. I seemed to spend the entire ordeal almost wanting to get sick, but not quite.

They dumped, shook and scooped the grass out of the stomach and all its numerous folds and piled it off to the side. They took the large intestine and squeezed it like a tube of toothpaste, letting the poop plop out. The took the small intestines... and did the same thing... liquid poop, siphoned out, length by length then piled to the side. The liver and pancreas went into a bucket, the other entrails went into a plastic bucket, it all got loaded up, except for the hide, which RJ drug back to the house.

THIS was the Mackeydon I have heard mentioned many times, and have stopped at a few times, but never put two and two together. This is the actual ranch part of K/bu. Ryol says they (K/bu Ranch) come to get a cow when they have a steady set of guests coming in. I'd never seen a slaughter before; it took being a substitute assistant manager at K/bu to see it happen.

I spent 6 days, 5 night at the Lodge, CH's sister eco-lodge downriver, helping Auntie D. McTurk with the ranch there. I helped coordinate other volunteers, answered email reservations for the lodge, helped arrange grocery lists, talk with travel companies in GT, etc. It was quite an experience, which can be summed up in:

The Goods:
kittens!
cream!
coffee!
silence!
mangoes!

The Bads:
caborrahs
flies
implicit decorum
silence

The Uglies:
isolation

A good time to think about a lot of things, like the Circle of Life, the duties of a manager of an eco-tourist lodge in the Rupununi, and the future.