Steak - Mark Schatzker [35]
The male who almost gored me, Chanssard reassured me, was not trying to gore me. He was being playful. The bigger male had by now moved on to the water trough, where he was carousing with three cows nibbling grass. This bull was named Viking, and he was the chief. Just recently, he had dethroned Noel, whom Chanssard pointed out off in the distance. Even from where we were standing, the scrapes made by Viking’s horns were visible on Noel’s flank. Up until a few months ago, Noel had been number one, but not anymore. Sexually speaking, Noel’s greatest days were behind him.
Responding to some silent bovine cue, the aurochs changed direction and drifted across the field and filtered into the forest on the other side. In less than a minute, they were gone, and if it weren’t for their scattered droppings, no one would know they had ever been there. Chanssard and I followed them in. It was cool and still in the shade, and the forest floor was dappled with shafts of sunlight shooting down through the leaves. Even though it was possible to see hundreds of feet toward the other side of the forest, only three aurochs were visible. The rest were camouflaged, their eelstripes mimicking shafts of light, making their dark hides all but disappear against the ground. The silence was interrupted only by the occasional Paleolithic moo.
Aurochs will spend at least half of each day in the forest, Chanssard told me. They keep cool and brush up against trees to clear the flies off their hides. Tree trunks were showing blond wood where aurochs had bitten off bark.
We set out back toward the water trough, avoiding the odd pile of droppings. I turned to Chanssard and asked, “When can I taste one?”
“Tomorrow,” he said.
Tomorrow was the annual Fêtes de la Ferme. Locals from far and near were coming to Chanssard’s farm to eat and drink their fill of organic beef and organic beer. The day arrived tailor-made for an aurochs party, sunny with the odd cottony cloud bobbing in the blue above. Two weeks earlier, Chanssard had lured a three-year-old bull into a livestock trailer with that most non-prehistoric food: grain. Its steaks were about to be cooked on a similarly non-prehistoric contrivance: a Smithfield Pro-Cook. Egg-shaped and green, it was the largest outdoor grill I had ever seen. A metal base was matched to a metal canopy, and sandwiched in between was a circular grill that could be rotated, raised, or lowered by an electric motor, all in the name of heat management. Beneath it sat a layer of hardened lava rocks, and beneath them a colony of gas burners capable of exhaling BTUs in the hundreds of thousands. According to Chanssard, his Smithfield Pro-Cook was one of only ten in existence.
Guests were trickling in by late morning. Some sat at banquet tables underneath a big tent and drank beer while a few stood leafing through a photo album filled with pictures of aurochs. Next to it was a framed photo of an enormous black bull with a massive set of horns, a big neck, and enormous testicles hanging between his legs. The bull was looking into the camera, mean and serious, sporting the ultimate mug-shot pose. His name, Chanssard said, was Siber, and he had been the chief before Noel. His end was as tragic as it was abrupt. He was in the midst of enjoying the great perk of chiefdom—mounting an aurochs cow—when he lost his footing, fell off, broke his back, and died. Chanssard gets emotional just talking about it.
The guests wanted to see live aurochs, so Chanssard took a group over to a field where he found that two guests had already wandered out on their own, without his knowledge. Had he not shown up, there might have been goring and screaming. Aurochs were nowhere to be seen. The field was eerily silent, as though a spaceship