The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [180]
The one emotion I expected to feel but did not, inexplicably, was remorse, or even ambivalence. All that would come later, but now, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, I felt absolutely terrific—unambiguously happy. Angelo wanted to take my picture, so he posed me behind my pig, one hand cradling the rifle across my chest, the other resting on the animal. I couldn’t decide whether to smile or to compose a more somber expression. I opted for the latter, but I couldn’t quite manage to untie the knot of my smile. “Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanting animal,” I’d read in Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations, but I was unable to locate this feeling, either immediately before or after the fateful shot. Nor did I register, yet anyway, the slightest disgust at the creeping stain of the animal’s blood on the ground, the stain that I remembered Ortega calling a “degradation.” I was still too excited, too interested in this most improbable drama in which I had somehow found myself playing the hero’s part.
5. MAKING MEAT
The sense of elation didn’t last. Less than an hour later I found myself in a much less heroic role, embracing the pig’s hanging carcass from behind to steady it so Angelo could reach in and pull out its viscera. I was playing the nurse now, passing him tools and holding the patient still. Using a block and tackle and a stainless steel hanger with two hooks that Angelo had forged expressly for this purpose, we’d managed to raise and hang the pig by its rear ankles from the stout limb of an oak tree. A scale attached to the rig gave the weight of the animal: 190 pounds. The pig weighed exactly as much as I did.
Dead bodies are awkward, among other things, and negotiating one this big proved a difficult, clumsy, and oddly intimate operation. It took us a while, but we managed to hoist the pig up onto the hood of the ATV, get it up the hill without falling off and then into this tree. I kept finding myself in awkward embraces with my pig, as when I had to press with all my weight against the carcass when it threatened to slide down off the hood, or when Angelo needed me to wrap my arms around the pig to keep it from swinging while he cut into it. Dressing the pig was further complicated by the fact that we planned on making prosciutto, which requires that the hide covering the hams be left intact. So instead of skinning the hindquarters we had to shave them, painstakingly scraping the animal’s dust-caked thighs with our knife blades to remove all her bristles.
Next Angelo made a shallow incision along an equator circling the pig’s belly and began to gently work the hide loose. I held down a narrow flap of skin while he cut into the fat behind it, leaving as much of the creamy white adipose layer on the carcass as possible. “This is really good fat,” Angelo explained, “for the salami.” The flap of skin grew larger as we worked our way down the body and then slowly pulled it down over the pig’s shoulders, until the inside-out skin looked like a discarded sweater caught in the instant it comes over the head. What hunters call dressing an animal is really an undressing.
As we drew the skin down over the rib cage it exposed the bullet, or what remained of the bullet. It had torn a ragged slot in the last rib and come to rest there, just beneath the hide. “Here’s a souvenir for you,” Angelo said, extracting the bloody, mangled chunk of metal from the bone like a tooth and handing it to me. The bullet was too smashed up to easily identify its caliber, though it occurred