Drew came from inside the house. The screen door winced and fell home. His boots announced across the porch, down the three concrete steps, and into the yard where Jefe reclined with a liquor drink. Swarms of flies rose and fell as he walked through the grass.
"Hey Jefe, can we go shoot a barbado?"
Jefe looked into his glass, then out to a point in the distance, then back at Drew.
"Well I guess that'd be alright."
Barbado are a breed of sheep. As unsporting as it sounds to hunt sheep, barbado are spry bastards. Lean and quick, barbado breed and graze unchecked. Free to roam, jumping fences, they're a menace. They're also deemed livestock by the state of Texas, so you can hunt them without a permit. Acreage rolls out in every direction, but these are limited resources, an already narrow ledge on which Escondido Ranch survives. We weren't allowed to shoot a ram. There were already hunters on the land promised the prized males.
JW plucked a .22 from some corner of the house. Though the boilerplate image of “rifle”, wooden with crosshatching on the forestock, it was a mistake he would later confess to as, “a .22 is the totally wrong tool for the job." Bowman leaned inside his truck and emerged with his birthday-present-to-myself .270. Forged from matte finished ultra-lite composite, it was a slender, sinister piece. He handed me the gun with a box of bullets.
"It's dead aim and scope sighted, so if you miss, it's your fault," Bowman said, his broad grin rounding out the brim of his palm leaf hat.
"Operator error," I replied. He nodded and threw a pat into my back.
I hold a firearm the way a bachelor holds a baby, unsure where to put my hands, fearful of the temperamental package. I passed the bullets to JW and shouldered the rifle like a continental soldier.
We roused Mark from his nap. He’d never shot a gun before and displayed a lip-licking enthusiasm when talk of a hunt came up earlier. The two boys, Leif and Dallas—13 and 8 respectively—were given permission to tag along. They could be counted on. Denim clad like their fathers, they were more reliable than Mark and I combined. JW was the driver. He knew the land, and Jefe's truck seemed best operated by his son. Drew was shooter elect. Leif and Dallas were assistants. Mark and I were tourists.
The monstrous F-250 lurched across Escondido's less used roads. Throaty diesel hummed over Bob Wills, "Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer)." We churned over rocks and swayed inside the cab as land and truck wrestled for superiority. JW would stop, check a tank, stop, check a lock, stop, inspect some fence line, but our directionless drive arrived at the herd of barbado like inevitability. He stopped the truck and killed the engine.
Drew stepped out of the front seat and loaded the .270. Barbado dotted the crest of a gentle slope in the distance. Mothers and children, an afternoon graze, like the sun made the scene from its pastoral rays. Drew sighted a sheep from the road. He supported the gun on the hood of the truck, and the tension between forefinger and trigger cast a stone silence over the group. Drew leaned in, his hand began to tighten, and he pulled back.
"That's like a 400 yard shot," he said looking to the group for some consensus opinion.
"You should try and, if you can, walk out to that white thing," Leif motioned toward a large rock out in the pasture.
Drew crept into the pasture and quietly got on his belly. He steadied the rifle across the rock, and again took aim on the herd. There is a certain ache of anticipation before a gun goes off. Gravity seems to tighten. Muscle winds around bone. The air shrinks, and noise falls away.
Air burst around the rifle. A boom and snap cracked against the tranquility. The herd skittered, then froze.
"You missed?" JW taunted, arms crossed on his gut, leaning against the hood of the truck.
Drew, with wordless resolve, pulled another bullet from his shirt pocket, reloaded, and fired again. The herd darted into the line of brush on the horizon.
"I think I got one." Drew checked his scope again.
"Did you shoot one?" I asked.
"Yeah, but I don't think I killed it."
He got to his feet and walked the gun back to JW. The two young men, Mark, and myself fell in behind Drew to find the animal. JW stayed by the truck.
"That's damn near 300 yards," Drew muttered through his dark beard, bespectacled eyes shaded under his black hat.
"You think so?" Mark replied.
"I'll count it out," Dallas chirped as he widened his gate, counting each step.
Our blue jeans whipped through the grass. Birds traded nervous chatter. I turned to Mark, "Have you ever seen this, an animal drained out?"
He arched his eyes and shook his head, a curious grin smeared on his face. I'd come to Escondido a handful of times since I was a boy. Not enough to make a man of me, but she's deflowered a delicate sensibility or two.
"It's some commune with your food type shit."
"There it is," Drew pointed.
A brown barbado lay silent in the grass. Unmoved, head up, the creature showed no panic or self-pity. There were no bleats. There was no desperate scramble on her front legs. She was stoic, the beast of burden tied to a life falling away with each heavy booted step. A pinky-sized exit wound on her spine, like the frayed edge of a page, was a determination of certain death.
"It's 253 steps," Dallas reported.
Drew pulled his leather work gloves between his fingers and dropped to his knees. He pulled a knife from the sheath on his belt, and as easy as kindness, plunged the gleaming blade into the barbado's throat. He twisted, pulled, and finished with a jagged tear across. She went limp, and Drew—with duty to animal and task alike—reached in, grabbed her hindquarters, and hoisted them skyward.
Her head lolled about in the dirt undone from essential ligament and muscle. A cordovan runnel spilled onto the earth. The volume of blood receded to a trickle. Tongue between her teeth, a ghostly hiss collapsed into a gurgle. Drew dropped her back to the dirt.
The barbado was rolled onto her back, wide black belly exposed. Drew started in with a different knife designed with a large hook on the back of the blade. He dragged the hook across her belly a few times unable to penetrate the hide.
"I need a better knife," Drew looked to the group.
Leif conjured a handsome blade from his belt, the kind a tow headed teenager in a cowboy hat should own. Drew slid the knife down the animal's belly, and she came unzipped. Intestines bloomed from the widening slit. The stomach came out, an overstuffed, sinewy sack. Drew went elbow deep in to the carcass, knife first, and her catalog of innards gave to his blade. Each piece, curved and mottled, seemed absurd out of the context of her body. A run-on sentence of organic matter cut to pieces and splayed out as nonsense.
"That's a good looking liver," Drew hummed. "Fuck...I nicked it. Sorry."
"Is it ruined when it's nicked?" I asked.
"Nah, it's just really bloody."
Drew worked with his knife, "There's the bladder." He held up a clear bulb about a third full of yellow tinged liquid. He continued to work the intestines from their place. Something in the digestive track caught knife end, and a corpuscle of almost feces ballooned out.
Drew sat back on his heels. "I don't know how to get these guts out of here."
I looked to Mark, his jaw slack. I looked at Drew, he shrugged, "I've never field dressed one of these."
Leif spoke up, "You have to cut 'em, and then pull it out its butt."
"What?" Drew shot back.
"You have to cut its butt. Then pull them out," he echoed.
We took a collective moment of consideration.
"Here, why don't we lift it up so everything can come out," Drew suggested.
I was near the tail. I reached down, saw the postmortem shit squeezed from her sphincter, and recoiled.
"I don't want to get blood on my hands. Sorry." A small shame pinched my gut.
Without hesitation, Dallas stepped in and grabbed the tail. They lifted the barbado, and her guts rolled onto to the ground, and we prepared to walk the kill back to the truck.
"You left the lungs in there," Leif mumbled, embarrassed for us.
"Really?" Drew replied as he laid the sheep back down and pulled open her chest cavity. A respiratory system met his inquiry. "No shit..."
"You gotta cut the esophagus, and then pull 'em out.” Leif had a method.
"You can get in here if you know what you're doing," Drew held the knife out to him.
Leif waived him off, but got in close and pointed out where to cut. Drew angled himself from his knees and worked his blade around tissue hidden in the recesses of the cadaver. He wrenched the hearty cord, and the lungs came out, a wet pop sounding the severed connection.
Drew worked off his gloves, their fingers black with blood. "Okay, who wants to carry this back to the truck?"
Stung from earlier, I quickly grabbed her hind legs. Mark grabbed the rest, and we set back across the pasture toward the truck. About half way, he turned to me and said, "I think I'm okay with never shooting a gun for the rest of my life."
The barn at Escondido Ranch is a long, rectangular structure, twenty feet high and fifteen feet deep. Walled on three sides with corrugated panels, the front is open. Barrels of feed and an assortment of rusted tools line the walls. A Chevy truck sits on blocks. Two long wires, stiff and set close together, wrap around a roof beam and stretch to about five feet off the ground.
Dusk light painted the dim interior as the boys carried the barbado inside. CA, Jefe's older son, and Bowman gathered round to admire the kill. Bowman fingered where hide and fat came together, "Good kill. She's older than a yearling, maybe two years."
We formed a semi-circle near the dangling wires. I posted up on the truck. Mark put on his glasses and watched hand under chin, his academic instincts having taken over. JW went back to the porch to drink a beer. When we were boys, JW was the one always forced to do the cutting.
Drew lifted the barbado by its back feet, and Bowman wrapped a wire around each leg just below the ankle. Wires taught under her weight, the carcass hung spread eagle. Her head swung about, throat open like a crude hinge. Exposed in the light, flesh curled back from incision, the wound threw off an ugly glisten.
"What happened to her throat?" CA asked.
"We had to cut it," I replied.
CA perched his hands in his blue jean pockets, "Wasn't a clean kill."
Drew stood back, new gloves on, a carbon knife inscribed with Japanese characters in hand. He’d butchered animals of any shape and size, skinning a different matter altogether. Bowman moved to action.
"Here, you start around the ankles," he moved his knife in a tight circle under the joint.
"Alright," Drew mirrored his action and sliced deep into the tendon. His side dipped half an inch.
"Not too deep, or it'll...well, it'll fall," Bowman chided.
Bowman rolled back the hide from her leg. Drew followed suit. They worked their way down, precision cuts swiped here and there parting skin from meat. Red barbado meat crept from behind her pelage; shank, backstrap, ribs. They cut inside her free hanging front legs and unwrapped the shoulder meat. Hide separated from flesh, it hung about her head like an upturned cloak.
CA rolled over a red wheelbarrow. Bowman started in on the joint above her free hanging foot. He slid his knife deep into her leg and sawed into the bone. About to give way, Bowman snapped off her foot over his knee. The discarded limb hit with a thump in the wheelbarrow. On her other leg, Drew forced the joint in the opposite direction, and the cannon bone splintered. Another thud in the wheelbarrow.
Bowman set about the task of removing the head. Sat on the ground, he dug his heels into the dirt.
"Just twist it off!" Dallas called out.
With a palm on each cheek and her ears clenched in his fingers, Bowman wound the head round like a crank. The carcass swung, and his leverage slipped from under him. He looked up, "I said I wasn't going to get involved."
"Where is our red hatchet?" CA mouthed around his dip of tobacco. "We used to have a red hatchet just for this." He sauntered off to better survey the wall of tools.
Bowman twisted the head again, jaw locked as he exerted himself against the break point. The head, again, held its own. Bowman, satisfied with his effort, stood up and dusted himself off.
"Well..." he said resigned as he slipped off his gloves and moved into the semi-circle next to me. Propped against the Chevy, right heel perched on the wheel well, sunglasses still on nearing twilight, Bowman took me in.
"I see you're doing a pretty good job," he shot across the bow.
CA materialized from the barn shadows with a wood saw more rust than anything. He held it out to me.
"I..."
Drew reached for the saw and I choked back my excuse with relief. Drew lowered himself to the ground, and CA handed him the tool with an OR Nurse's reverence. He passed a few wide swipes on her neck, and the corpse swung rendering his effort useless.
"Someone help him," Bowman spit in the dirt.
I stepped forward and braced her twisting carcass with my bare hands. A thick, raw smell curled around my arms and neck and into my nose. Warmth still radiated from the meat. The gnawing of saw on bone reverberated through the dead beast. Each tooth's growl echoed through my fingertips. The head gave way, and Drew placed it in the wheelbarrow.
Meat exposed, Drew quickly settled into his element. Her shoulder meat came away first. He cut out the back strap and then worked his knife around the first shank. The center of the wheelbarrow was designated for consumables. A host of flies danced around the fresh kill.
Drew separated the first shank, and an empty chest cavity dangled from a leg hung on a wire. He worked the tenderloin from inside her lower back. Bowman took the first shank, laid it across the top of a feed barrel, and took the wood saw to her fetlock. Meat in the middle, he tossed her other foot into an open corner of the wheelbarrow.
Dallas waived the flies off the meat and picked up the discarded hoof. He held it in the light, turned it over in his hand, and set it down on the meat pile. I reached in and flicked it off. The ingots of meat shown so red in the light, my primitive brain engorged, I sunk my hands into the pile. I held shank by exposed bone. Backstrap, supple and wet, draped over the edge of my hand. Her tenderloin cried out to me. To show her to the sky, mouth and forehead smeared with blood, a hunk of flesh between my heathen teeth. But this was not my kill. I rearranged the pile by size. Barbado essence permeated my skin.
"What'd you touch all that stuff for?" Dallas asked.
"What'd you touch all that stuff for?" Dallas asked.
"That's the meat."
"That's the meat?" Dallas replied like a little boy.
Drew freed the last shank as Bowman held on to the rib cage.
"Anyone want these ribs?" Drew asked. "That'd be a good roast. Just the whole thing," he continued as he sawed through the leg bone on the still suspended shank.
Bowman set the entire barrel of ribs on the edibles pile. Two pellets of poop clung to the inside. Drew laid the last shank home, and Mark pushed the wheelbarrow across the yard. Each piece was hosed down, dropped in a large black trash bag, stuffed into a cooler, and buried under ice.
"Where does all this go?" I pointed at the hoofed, woolly detritus left behind.
"Dad said to put it in the far back corner of the arena," JW replied, the green garden hose crooked in his arm.
"Just...on the ground?"
JW grinned, scrubbing his hands, "Buzzards gotta eat."
Mark grabbed the wheelbarrow, and I followed him into the arena.
"How about all that?"
He shook his head, not in shock, but jarred with clarity. "That thing is...it's the same size as Kaiser, you know." Size had little to do with it. Mark's big black dog was suddenly an animal, too.
We went to the far corner of the lot where fence angled back toward the house. In the distance, birds circled around the bounty extracted in the pasture. Mark tipped the wheelbarrow, and discarded remains tumbled to the ground. Limbs pointed to the four corners, head wreathed in hide, her open eye—covered with a thin film of dust—followed us across the field.
