Two Stops Past Siberia

We slaughtered a cow last Sunday! Right.

I got home in the morning, around 9, for the sole purpose of seeing the animal meet its maker. She was tied up to the tree next to the clothes line. Just chillin’ there.

We hung around, had breakfast, no big deal. And then, maybe an hour and a half later, we got down to work. Two guys helped my dad, the first was Cholpon, the guy who lives with us, sometimes. I think he’s my mom’s brother, but I’m not sure. He’s always doing funny stuff like bundling up to go to the outhouse, and drinking honey seeped through a radish (apparently good for your throat).The other was a savvy looking guy who I’ve seen around before named Aibek. He seemed to really be the ring leader. He helped do the complicated job of tying up the heifer’s legs so that all three of the men could simultaneously pull the ropes and she’d fall over. But as knowledgeable as this man seemed to be, I think since it was my Dad’s cow, it was his job to do most of the slaughtering.

With the cow on the ground, my Grandma came out to insist that we do an omeen and said a little prayer. Then my dad brought out a knife and started the work. We had a little trench dug there in the snow and dirt. The other two men held the cow in tow with ropes, one binding all the legs, and one tied to its nose. My dad approached it from the back and just slit the animal’s throat. But that’s not where it ended. For whatever reason, this one cut was not enough. He had to keep getting in there to finish the job. This was the only really gruesome part of the exercise. The only thing I hadn’t seen before. He just kept going into its throat to cut more stuff apart. The whole while, blood was pouring out, frothing in the snow. The cow was breathing, but the steam was coming out of the cut in its throat. It was twitching around, trying, perhaps, to get free. My dad just kept cuttin’.

All the while, I was filming the event. Once it was over, my dad asked, “are you scared?” “No,” I said. Then I got a “good job!”

With the cow dead, the scene looked like some sort of Hollywood horror set. There was the pit of blood, surrounded in white snow, except for what had been made into froth from its throat breath. There was the log its neck had been held over. After it had been dragged away from this scene, there was a smeared trail of blood. Watching the animal go was even worse, as by this time, the cut had been made so deep its head almost hung around as a courtesy.

At this point, the skinning began. I contemplated leaving, as I’m pretty familiar with this process, but, knowing that only in staying for the things you’ve already seen can you begin to see new things, I stuck around. I had this thought many times, and in the end, only left because I had to.

At this point, during the skinning, the guy who seemed to be the most experienced in the matter, started asking me if I was gonna do any of the butchering. “You keep taking pictures-” he just kept saying. Finally, my dad took the camera from me, gave me a knife, and they showed me how to cut off the skin.

I kept noticing how this was in stark contrast to my old family’s house. There, the slaughtering of cows was work. It had to get done, with quality, and the quicker the better. Sure, it was fun to talk about me helping, but nobody actually seemed to want me to get in there. Maybe I should have hung around the garage more, like a kid brother, until they finally gave me a knife. But I never did, and they never offered. Actions speak louder than words, especially when you can say so few, and no matter how many times I asked to be taught, they’d just signal good intentions, and then leave it at that.

But here, in this new family, (who seem a bit more emotionally involved with me regardless), it was the winter slaughter. This was going to be the meat for the whole season. It was a big deal, and I was part of the family. Unlike a kid brother tagging along, I was a part of the family, and they wanted to include me. So they did.

My dad said he’d take some pictures of me, and I got in with the knife. There is some kind of film between the skin and the meat of the animal. Like the glue you see when you pull a price tag off of a birthday present. My job was to cut this glue. I needed to keep from cutting the skin, so I’d have something to pull on, but I also didn’t want any meat left on the skin. So the cut had to be right in the glue, next to the meat. But as I did that, I found I was cutting a bit of the meat too. There is some kind of a film between this glue and the meat proper. When I looked at where the other guys were working, their films were intact. Mine was not.

So I kept going, enjoying myself all the way. I noticed the guy skinning the ribcage on the other side of the animal had moved from the knife, and when it was convenient just used his fist. This has the advantage of guaranteeing you won’t cut the flesh. But before I could try it, my apparent slowness caught up with the group (perhaps from watching the other men, perhaps from being too careful, or maybe from watching the flesh of this animal quiver, and remembering only minutes earlier it had been alive), and my dad stepped in to finish the job. After that I took some more pictures, lots more pictures, but it was the end of my specific work.

With the cow skinned, the first thing they did was cut off the legs. They’d already broken the shins off at the knees, and now was getting down to the meat, the haunches. They cut little handles between the muscles or tendons in the leg, chopped it off at the joint, and then carried it into the garage. It was so cold already, that we were going to have no problem freezing this meat. With the legs cut off, they moved to open the animal up.

Now, at the butcher’s house, I had never gotten to see this process. For some reason, I always just assumed you’d open the ribs near the butt up first, and then get the organs out. But they didn’t touch the back hips until the very end of the day. This part started with the front ribs, near the neck. They cut some of these open, using sharp knives. Occasionally, they’d use a hammer to put a knife through a bone. With the first few ribs out of the cage on either side, they then broke off what appeared to be the breast bone. This provided clear view of the lungs, and the beginning of the organ bag.

This I learned at Bucknell, from a girl who went hunting with her father and brothers. All the organs come in a sack. This makes them easy to clean out, from perhaps a deer, but in the cow, it only helped in the beginning. As we were breaking open the rest of the ribcage, the organ bag stayed pretty much intact. But at some point, the intestines and stomach started to spill out. Once we had the ribs splayed, they dragged the organs over to a plastic sheet.

Here, the women stepped in. They got to work emptying remaining poop out of the intestines, and otherwise cleaning the edible organs, which comprise the vast majority. My dad cut some hair from the tail to tie up two parts of the intestines before cutting them, I assume from the end of the tube to the anus. At this dismantling point, I also got a clear view of the big white wind-pipe, and the smaller, softer esophagus. The wind pipe, I would late have the privilege of watching my mother run her teeth along the inside of during dinner, as if it were an artichoke leaf.

With the organs over to the side, being cleaned by the women, there was one large organ left alone. I had previously assumed, it being so big, that it was the stomach. It was not the stomach. It was a calf. There was a bit of talk about it. I guess they hadn’t known the cow was pregnant. There wasn’t much talk, though, at least not much that I could understand. Instead, someone just picked it up, cut the umbilical cord, and brought it to a lonely spot in the snow. Later, they’d slit its throat, as if it might otherwise get up and walk away.

At about this time, or perhaps before, more friends and neighbors started to show up. They came to help a bit and just hang out. This was, after all, a big event. At some point, three guys, all around my age, showed up with a bottle of vodka and a dozen beers. They pushed my dad to drink, which he did only politely, and then declined. I was not so savvy.

See, I’m usually better at sneaking my way out of drinking than I am a direct and persistent refusal. These guys would not let up. We talked. The one was hoping to marry his girlfriend next fall. After admitting this was my first cow slaughter, they wanted to charge me for watching this, so I quickly changed my story. They wanted to go to America with me when I left, as everyone does. But in the end, they wanted me to drink.

For this young American, three shots of Kyrgyz vodka on an empty stomach pretty much suffice. I followed it with a little beer, and proceeded to get quiet. I was drunk, and I didn’t want to proclaim it. Unfortunately, as the butchering slowly moved into the garage, and I got to talking at my Dad and one of the guys who had pushed the booze on me, I repeated something I had misheard my dad say about me on a previous occasion. “Right now,” I said, “I am very interesting in sheep.” Unfortunately, I said something to the effect of “right now, I am very drunk to sheep.” Right. They laughed. As they should have.

Originally written Dec. 9th 2009