Sacrificial Ram
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DESPITE THEIR CONVERGING interests, a striking divide still separates the rhetoric of hunters, whose culture comes out of farming and ranching, and environmentalists, who often live in an urban world and see untrammeled wilderness as a priceless sanctuary. It's another of our tedious "two Americas," and hunting culture is especially rife with a defensive loathing toward "antis," meaning antihunting types. FNAWS's Lee, for example, expresses frustration about people who don't like copper mines, but enjoy turning on the lights; people who want clean energy, but don't want wind farms in their back yards. He sees a similar double standard toward killing animals, "people saying, ‘I like to eat steak, but I don't want anything to do with the killing. So long as I can go to Safeway and buy a piece of meat wrapped in plastic, then my hands are clean.' If I'm raised in an urban situation, then I don't have to make the life-and-death decisions that people living close to the ground have to. If you talk to a farmer or a rancher, that's what they do. They raise food."
Lee explains that hunting transforms the way you look at the land. "You're out there thinking, ‘Did an animal pass this way? Are there tracks, or tears on the bushes, or rubs?' While a skier might just be thinking, ‘Can I ski here?' a hunter's looking at the whole food chain, the interconnectivity. When you ask hunters, they'll say, ‘I'm reconnecting with nature. I'm putting myself back in. Because for the other 363 days a year, I'm getting Styrofoam food. For two days, I'm reconnecting with what the last 3 million years of human existence have been.'"
After that big ram dropped dead in the rocks, and 27 other sheep sprinted single file through a sheer precipice, running for their lives—a magnificent spectacle—the ejidatarios lit up with relief and passed around a bottle of tequila. Drettmann was visibly elated and shaking with adrenaline, a cigarette trembling in his fingers. A red-tailed hawk looped into the returning stillness of the now-vacant canyon and two crows—los cuervos—chased away the hawk. Then we picked our way down a cliff to the scene of the kill. The big, dun-colored animal appeared to have simply fallen over on its side, a clean entry wound visible in front of its rear leg. The bullet had exited at the opposite foreleg, meaning it had been a perfect shot—right through the lungs, and perhaps the heart. The ram had died so quickly it hadn't even had time to bleed; its eyes remained wide open, as if still watching us, impassive.
Arce gestured at the ram's brow and told me to smell, so I pressed my nose into the forehead of that still-warm corpse and smelled precisely the earthy scent of the blossoming desert plant he'd pointed out in the soft dawn glow. The next hour was devoted to photographs—the ejidatarios with the ram, Drettmann with the ram, everyone individually with the ram, myself included. And then Chavarria sank a hook-billed knife into the skin behind the ram's head and began the long dorsal cut that would let Arce cape the whole hide for the taxidermist Drettmann would hire back home.
A taxidermist uses nothing but the skin, the hooves, and the part of the skull that anchors the horns—Drettmann would order a foam form, around which the skin would be stretched—but Arce left the entire head intact and the bottom leg bone attached to each foot, so the painstaking jobs of separating hooves from bone and facial skin and lips from skull could be done back at base camp. Passing this 60-pound mass to a goat-herd's son named Pancho, who strapped it to his back, Arce then butchered the remaining carcass, stuffing big slabs of meat into plastic garbage bags so the men could carry them down the mountain for a big fiesta a few days later. Leaving behind only the spinal cord and the viscera, we hiked downward, a long and ankle-twisting stumble back to spike camp. For the last hour, we walked in the desert darkness toward a campfire that was like an orange beacon twinkling below. Over a bed of mesquite embers, Arce and Chavarria grilled tacos de borregos cimarrones and ate them standing up in the cold desert night, and I found out for myself what big-game hunters the world over will tell you: that literally nothing tastes better than the tenderized backstrap of a freshly killed big- horn ram, cooked over an open flame.
Daniel Duane is the author of the memoir Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast and the forthcoming novel A Mouth Like Yours. His previous story for Mother Jones, "Meadow's End" (July/August 2004), looked at the work of a scientist who is "cooking" an alpine meadow under heat lamps to examine the effects of global warming.
Photo: Daniel Duane
