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By Root 412 0

had hovered over the farm in the middle of the night and vacuumed up every last beast into its hold. Chanssard cupped his hands to his mouth and let out a loud whooping sound. A second later, aurochs began streaming out of the woods. Chanssard walked over to Noel and slapped his blond eelstripe, sending a burst of dust into the air that smelled of wet, sweet leather. A swarm of flies was buzzing around Noel’s head, as flies do in warm weather, and they descended, all at once, onto his steroidal shoulder. Chanssard took aim at the flies and slapped. Noel, however, was looking the other way, mistook Chanssard’s kindly slap for a fly, and jerked his head around, sending his pointed horn into the middle of Chanssard’s forehead. The impact sounded not unlike an unshelled hazelnut being hit out of Yankee Stadium. Chanssard stood there, stunned, then steadied himself and announced that he was okay. The point of Noel’s horn had left an impression in the skin between his eyebrows. Any more force, and Chanssard’s forehead would be referred to in the past tense.

Back at the tent, the Smithfield Pro-Cook was, by now, very hot. Chanssard cut a big rib steak especially for me, and then an equally large rib steak—also for me—from a Limousin cow, the idea being that I would eat both and note the differences. As far as appearance, the two steaks were almost identical, both deep red with hardly any marbling, although the Limousin steak had little wisps of yellow fat on the side that the aurochs steak lacked. The Limousin steak smelled sweet and earthy, and the aurochs steak smelled beefy. I couldn’t help but wonder, Was I actually smelling raw aurochs? Was the smell image in my mind identical to one experienced by Magdalenian Woman?

The Heck brothers may have thought so, but they were less than open about their program’s imperfections. On Göring’s game reserve, calves were often born that did not look sufficiently like aurochs and were shot in the name of purity. Most scientists are skeptical about the genuineness of the Heck brothers’ creations, and would consider my referring to Chanssard’s animals as “aurochs” to be charitable, if not incorrect. In these circles, they’re known as “reconstituted aurochs” or “Heck cattle.” In truth, not all Chanssard’s aurochs look convincingly aurochslike. Some have dun-colored hides, or horns that point up instead of forward, and eelstripes that are the wrong color. All suffer from short, fat heads that should be longer and more slender; they are not as large as they ought to be—not by a long shot—and many of the females have outsize udders, which, as bovine traits go, is seriously domestic.

The difference in aroma that I had detected among the two steaks, furthermore, may have had more to do with gender than breeding. In America, bulls are almost never eaten because they’re considered to have an unpleasant taste. I pressed Chanssard about the apparent phenomenon of unsavory bull beef. He said yes, bulls do taste odd, but only once they get to be about four years old. In France the taste of young bull beef is one that some steak lovers prefer. He took the raw steaks and placed them on the hot grill. They sizzled identically.

With the exception of the Smithfield Pro-Cook—which contained flagrant technological advances like metal forging and the extraction, storage, and transportation of natural gas—the scene was almost prehistoric. Male Homo sapiens congregated around the cooking aurochs flesh and assumed the stance of lieutenants, flipping and prodding meat, but only with Chanssard’s permission. Female Homo sapiens sat at tables and talked. To their undoubted disappointment, Chanssard, the prestigious provider of aurochs meat, is not single.

When the steak was done, which is to say seared on the outside and raw in the middle, I found myself facing an unusual and difficult moment. Among the Nazis’ millions of victims were my father’s family. On July 4, 1941, they knocked on the front door of his home and took his father, Henryk Schatzker, prisoner, made him dig his own grave, and later shot him dead.