Steak - Mark Schatzker [34]
In Berlin, Heck’s Corsican and Camargue cattle were mixed with Spanish fighting cattle, for their angry temperament, a woolly-looking critter from Scotland, and various other breeds. He crossed them and crossed them again. He crossed some bull calves with their mothers, and he kept crossing the most aurochs-looking males with the most aurochs-looking females. And then one day, to Lutz Heck’s great surprise and greater joy, an aurochs was born, eelstripe and all. Over in Munich, where brother Heinz was engaged in the same pursuit with his less exotic cattle, the very same miracle happened: a cow likewise gave birth to a calf that looked very much like a wild animal that had been extinct for centuries.
On a crisp, sunny day in the autumn of 1938, the Nazi aurochs fantasy became reality. Several trucks pulled in to one of Hermann Göring’s favorite hunting preserves, backed up, and opened their doors. A big bull walked out into the bright autumn light and stood not far from Lutz, its horns glinting in the sharp autumn light. As Lutz wrote, “Its rapid and lively movements and its wildness, heightened by anger and agitation, were fine to see.” The aurochs pawed the ground and sniffed the air. After a time, it nibbled tufts of grass and dropped a turd. “The huge animal,” Lutz Heck later wrote, “was a living picture of primeval strength.”
The bull aurochs now thrashing his head back and forth inches from my tender belly was also a living picture of primeval strength, one apparently intent on turning me into a dead picture of modern weakness. More than half a century after the Nazis’ demise, it seemed I was about to become their latest victim.
Chanssard intervened. Which is to say he casually extended an arm, grabbed the young bull by the horn, and shoved it away.
Like many in southwestern France, Chanssard lives in the thrall of prehistory. When he was fourteen, he volunteered on an archaeological dig and watched as the skeleton of a woolly mammoth was unearthed. He would be raising mammoth today if it were possible but has settled instead for a herd of aurochs. In the fall of 2003, almost sixty-five years to the day after aurochs were released on Göring’s preserve, he bought four females and a single male—all descended from original Heck stock—and released them into his fields. He didn’t see them again up close for three years. No matter how carefully he approached, he couldn’t get within three hundred meters without the aurochs bolting. With time, they came to know him, and now, if they spot him from across the field, they saunter over for a visit. But Chanssard will not go near them at night, and he doesn’t dare approach a mother with a fresh calf, because he is sure she would kill him. There are aurochs in Poland and Estonia, he told me, who get harassed by wolves. When the wolves approach, the aurochs bolt, then form a circle with their horns out, as musk ox do, protecting the little ones in the center.
Chanssard has other fields farther down the road, where he raises traditional beef cattle, a local breed called Limousins that could not be more different from aurochs. During the day, the Limousins will branch off into various groups, but aurochs always maintain the herd. If a single aurochs sits, the whole herd sits, but Limousins make no effort to coordinate their sitting and standing. When a Limousin cow gives birth, she does so in the middle of the field with everyone watching. A pregnant aurochs, on the other hand, disappears into the forest—Chanssard has no idea where they go—and returns several days later, her calf in tow. Aurochs run faster then Limousins, wear a thicker hide, and have a more desperate-sounding moo. Chanssard will not let the aurochs get near the Limousins, because