Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [118]
When Neal and I hesitated, he impatiently waved us away. "I'll need help in skinning and boning out," he said. "When I'm ready, I'll wave and you can come back."
The labor of skinning a human body is beyond belief. Perhaps a surgeon would make nothing of it. It might seem simple to a butcher. To us, with our scarred and half-frozen fingers and hands, it was next to impossible.
When in exasperation I cursed my helplessness, Captain Dean urged me on. "We can't stop," he said. "If we stop now and wait till tomorrow to finish, it may freeze so solid we can't do anything with it."
The skin wasn't like a rabbit pelt or a deerskin, that can be raised a little at the neck and then pulled off cleanly from the whole body. This skin had adhesions, so that when it was raised at the neck, it had to be pared away from the flesh beneath by continuous slicing and slashing. Also, unlike an animal's skin, it was tender in spots, so that it was forever ripping or being pierced by our knives.
I thanked God we were no longer hampered by the gulls. If they had been about us, as they had been before Langman killed that progenitor of all gulls, they would have swooped upon us to snatch the flesh from our very hands and soar away, yelling in triumph.
The tide was on the make before the meat had been
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stripped from the leg bones and arm bones, and laid off from the ribs and back. All these were rolled by Neal in tight cylinders and tied with rope yarn.
We wedged the bones into the crevice in such a way that no seal or gull could dislodge the boulders above them.
Even then we weren't finished, for the rolls, the slabs of meat from belly and buttocks, the liver, the heart and the fat-encased kidneys had to be sunk in an even deeper crevice nearer the tent, covered with three feet of seaweed to guard against freezing, and the seaweed in turn topped by a double layer of boulders.
We worked in silence, except when Neal brought the kidneys back to the captain, after washing them in salt water.
"Keep those on top of everything," the captain said. "That fat is just as good as mutton tallow. Maybe we can use it for poultices."
When we returned exhausted and depressed to the tent to feed those comrades who had lain there, sunk in helplessness because of some frightened quirk of their disgusting brains, Langman, White and Mellen, as able-bodied as any of us, refused to eat.
"An insult," Langman mumbled, "to the spirit of a friend."
"Langman," Captain Dean said, "my duty by you is done. Eat or don't eat, as you please. But my duty to the rest of us is not done, and if I hear any more talk out of you about this meat being anybody's spirit, you'll rue the day!"
"Are you threatening me?" Langman asked.
"Yes, I'm threatening you," Captain Dean said. "If you pour out your spleen on these others, I'll protect them by
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stopping your mouth. This meat I'm offering is nobody's spirit. It's beef. It was animated once by a soul and a spirit, but the soul and the spirit have gone from this island, leaving only beef behind."
He threw up his hands in disgust at Langman's mutterings, drew his knife and carefully divided the rolled meat into slices.
"Listen carefully," he said, before he handed out the slices. "We have enough beef for a week, if we're careful. If Langman, White and Mellen don't eat, we'll have enough for a longer time. But this you must do: you must scrape the beef to a pulp, and with each piece of pulp you must chew seaweed. You mustn't gulp it down. You must not gulp it down."
He handed around the meat, and the tent was filled with the soft sound of scraping and chewing, audible above the angry roaring of the breakers.
I tried to remember what Captain Dean had said about