Steak - Mark Schatzker [32]
I got thinking about aurochs again. When European aristocrats hunted aurochs, the meat was considered a delicacy. It would be wrapped in aurochs hide and sent, as a gift, to the king. No one ever did that with a dead rabbit. An old Polish poem speaks of roasting a red aurochs calf for a wedding feast. Did aurochs taste exactly the same as modern cattle? Were they gamy, rich, strong, sweet? It’s been almost four hundred years since the very last aurochs keeled over in Poland, and history has not left much in the way of adjectives.
Hours later, I drove north to a town called Nanteuil-en-Vallé, which, like so many small towns in rural France, was built to fairy-tale specifications hundreds of years ago. After refrigerating my insides with a beer at the local bistro, I stepped back into the greenhouselike interior of my car, headed down a country road past fields and woods, and pulled into a driveway where I was greeted by the most stylish-looking farmer I have ever seen. He had a trim haircut and was wearing green, svelte-cut overalls, the only such pair I have ever encountered. He shook my hand and smiled. His name was Xavier Chanssard, and he had something he wanted me to see.
We walked over some fields to the base of a small hill and found the first set of droppings: fresh, but no longer glistening. A good sign. We set off up the incline, and were not yet at the summit when horns came into view, skyward pointing and sharp enough to impale a falling apple. The beasts, evidently, had sensed our arrival and wandered over to sniff the air and assess the danger level. Their faces were dark, broad, and serious, on the verge of becoming annoyed that someone had interrupted their midday meal, but also curious.
Aurochs.
The herd numbered at least sixty, with a big bull, maybe 1,200 pounds, standing out in front. By the looks of things, they were all competing in a who-can-grow-the-biggest-horns contest, and the big bull was in the lead, his own set being thicker and curving out wider than any of the others. A blond eelstripe ran down his ample back, and he had more muscle hanging from one shoulder than could be harvested off my entire physique. The bull was walking heft. The bull was confidence wrapped in black leather.
Convinced that we represented the same threat level as the flies buzzing around his head, the bull sauntered off to join three smaller cows. Safe, I thought, but not for long, because a younger male with smaller horns—a male with something to prove—caught sight of me and set off my way. His pace was brisk, and as he approached he lowered his head and picked up speed. Horns pointed forward, he thrashed his head from side to side in the manner of a puppy destroying a slipper. I stepped back. The horns did not make contact, but it was hard not to imagine them shredding my skin, catching a loop of intestine and unraveling my insides. If I trip, I thought to myself, he could drop his shoulder on my chest and punch the air out of me.
The aurochs stepped forward and thrashed again. I now believed my life to be in genuine danger of ending. The moment was oddly philosophical. As the distance between my body and the aurochs’s head closed, my thoughts turned to my young daughter. She would grow up explaining to people that her father was killed by an extinct species of primitive cattle in the south of France, a story that was equal parts romantic and ridiculous. I would not be the first Homo sapiens to perish at the horn of an aurochs, but I would definitely be the most recent. And it was all thanks to the Nazis.
The Nazis are notorious for their repugnant belief in the inferiority of human races other than their own. But the history books have been somewhat narrow in this regard, because the Nazis also applied their unsparing brand of prejudice to the animal world. Some animals, they believed, were better—more mighty, heroic, and noble—than others. While they busied themselves rounding up and killing Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies, they also tried their hand at creation. They invented