The art of butchery | Animals | Forums

Nice article on how we have lost touch with our food

The skin did not come off like a sweater, as I’d been told it would. I’d looked at how to do it in the classic Joy of Cooking, figuring the directions for squirrel couldn’t be much different from rabbit: hook it through the heels, yank the skin down to its paws. I didn’t have a hook, but even the falconer, Chris Davis, who had given me this squirrel, made it seem so simple – use scissors, he’d said, and snip horizontally into each side from the gaping hole where he’d gutted it, grab the corners of the soft fluffy pelt and pull up. Pull down. Voilà.

Sitting out by the fire pit in my back yard on a late November evening, my fingers grew stiff and numb as I pulled at layers of epithelial tissue I could not see so much as sense, subcutaneous membranes of iridescent silver visible only when I shone my headlamp just right. I could see places where the talons of the hawk that had caught the squirrel had punctured into the muscle, bruising it. Little by little, I worked the rich gray pelt down and away from the purple muscles, snipped away the durable membranes, and turned the small mammal from one piece into two.

I snipped off the head and feet with a pair of shears and buried them in my compost pile. Yesterday, when Chris had given me the squirrel, the eyes had been wide-open and filmy white. I was grateful that they’d shrunk to nearly closed overnight. I’d hardly noticed the face as I skinned, but I might have if it still had the demon-ish pale glare. The task was engrossing, a science project, or dinner preparation, a little of each I suppose.

The pelt was now one loose piece, intact except for one place where I’d accidently cut through with the scissors. It went into one Ziploc bag to be salted, while the rest of it – the body or the carcass (what does one call it at this point in the process?) – got a quick bath beneath the garden hose, and went into another bag and then into the refrigerator for another day of tenderising, for the mysterious bacteria to do its work to render the flesh from muscle into meat.

I did not have anything to do with the killing of this squirrel. I wasn’t even present for its death. I’d gone out with Chris, who hunts with Harris hawks, as part of another project I was working on about falconry. There was a good possibility that one of his hawks would catch a squirrel, and so I asked if I could keep it if that happened. But the hawks we hunted with didn’t catch any squirrels that day. Chris happened to have some in his van from the previous day’s hunt, already gutted with snipped-off tails, which he’d given to the kids he’d brought out hunting as good-luck talismans.

When Chris’ hawks land on a kill, he moves in quickly, gives the birds a piece of raw meat to distract and reward them. Then he wraps his hand around the squirrel, collapsing its ribs to suffocate it, because the hawks’ talons won’t kill it quickly enough, even if the bird has begun to tear into the still-living animal.

As I butchered and prepared the squirrel for eating, I realised how much the follow-up work is often overlooked. The hunters in my family always emphasised the kill, the moments of being in the deep silent woods, the story of the first buck snort, the chase, the final shot. Stories of sitting stock-still in deer stands, or crawling on hands and knees after a blood trail.

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