food bill, we’ve had to get creative over the years. We stop by the local food bank weekly for any meats aged past “human grade,” and in summer we hit up canneries and local fishermen to collect salmon heads, which are cast off as waste but actually packed with nutrients for the dogs.
However, of all the free dog food we get, nothing could compare to the mother lode of meat that results from getting a call to harvest a dead horse. These calls can translate into thousands of dollars saved and an equal weight in pounds of red meat once butchered, not to mention all the organs—such as the liver and heart—they relish like a delicacy.
Almost nothing is wasted. We’ll run a hose through the stomach and intestines before offering the dogs a savory meal of tripe. We’ll also give them all the long, white leg and rib bones, from which the dogs first tear off the little strips of still-dangling sinew, and before long, they’ll gnaw down into the deep marrow. They even get the round, black hooves to chew on for enjoyment. Really, the only parts of the animal that will go unused are the lungs, hide, mane, and tail.
Since our dogs that normally eat—in addition to other supplemental meat products—a forty-pound bag of food a day (at a cost of $36 a bag at the cheapest), each horse will amount to a savings equivalent to about twenty-five bags of food (around $900).
Having horse meat also comes in handy once the racing season begins. Out on the Iditarod and Yukon Quest, they can get pretty worn down from running for 1,000 miles. Like us when full-body fatigue sets in, sometimes they’d rather sleep when they stop instead of eat. Other times, they may come into a checkpoint hungry, but become disinterested in eating the same snacks at each layover. Whereas having something novel like horse really excites the dogs and whets their appetites.
This smorgasbord may seem a bit macabre, but true Alaskans are a pragmatic bunch who believe just because an item or individual is gone doesn’t mean something useful can’t come from what is left behind. Perhaps it’s from living in a place with such long winters, where everything must be stretched to last and in the old days not having enough meant not always making it. Or, possibly, it’s that many who come here remember from the city lives they’ve left behind all the problems that can come from wanton waste. It’s tough to say for certain, but in my experience, most horse owners would rather know their dead equine went somewhere besides the cold ground and became something other than worm food.
It’s also not always about ecological efficiency. Sometimes it’s about practicality or staying safe. In winter, the ground freezes deep, and as hard and solid as a bank vault’s door, so any horse owner who hasn’t already excavated a hole for their recently departed equine isn’t likely to be able to do so until spring or even summer. And, as the days get warm enough to finally dig, so too do the bears come out of hibernation, ravenous for any source of protein, which easily includes the decaying carrion of a long-dead horse.
A neighbor of mine had a horse die in his backyard one spring and acted a bit lackadaisical in regard to doing anything about it. As a disclaimer, he was a guy who flourished in a neighborhood without a homeowners’ association. To focus on just the largest items, no less than a dozen rusted trucks sat on his lawn (if waist-high grass constitutes a lawn) all in the state of disassembly they were left in after officially declared “broken down.” So the horse initially didn’t stand out among the overwhelming assortment of junk in varying forms strewn about.
That is until a behemoth of a brown bear boar took up residence right on top of the long-stiff stallion. The bruin ate what he could, then fell asleep across ribs as large as barrel staves, to defend the dead horse from any would-be scavengers, including the humans who lived there and now urgently wanted to remove the carcass. Their attempts were met with bluff charges, popping jaws, and the intimidating swat of a paw with five-inch-long claws—large enough to take a man’s head off. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game finally had to be contacted to resolve the issue.
Our first call for a horse came from a couple looking to avoid such a scenario. They were young, twentysomethings, down from the city to house-sit for the parents of one of them—a reed-thin girl with flaxen hair who we soon found out was by far the more masculine of the two, at least in terms of dealing with deceased barnyard animals.
“We didn’t know what to do with it, so I called my parents and they said call a musher,” the girl explained from the other end of the line.
I was at work at the local newspaper when I got the call, but have always found showing up presentable for an office job a taxing endeavor. I long ago resigned myself to stretching my Casual Friday wardrobe over the five-day workweek, and as such was dressed suitably enough to go straight to the horse. Cole was dressed the same for similar reasons, but wearing her favorite forest-green “Kenai Peninsula 4-H” sweatshirt, so we left work early and headed to Sterling, a rural area where a lot of farmers and livestock owners live.
It was sweltering by Alaskan standards as we pulled into the paddock. The summer days were long, and the sun beat down mercilessly on the chestnut-colored quarter horse now in permanent repose. Hundreds of plump-bodied flies had already gathered and we knew it wouldn’t be long until this horse was giving off a stink capable of chumming in bears for miles around.
One look at the young couple and we knew this situation was the deep end of a pond they never learned how to swim in. Not wanting to get dirty they had worn rubber hip waders, typically used for fishing in waist-deep water. Shaking hands with the young man further escalated my fears about how much work we’d get out of them. Not just limped pawed, but also the skin of his palm felt as soft as a puppy’s belly rather than tough and calloused. The girl’s hands were covered by ruby-red rubber dishwashing gloves, so I couldn’t initially gauge her grit.
Even more unfortunate for us, the horse died in a part of the pasture cluttered with trees. These obstacles prevented us from backing right up to the animal, and the house sitters lacked the approval—and I suspect know-how—to use any heavy equipment to help us lift the quickly bloating beast into the bed of my truck.
“Any chance we could butcher, or at least gut and quarter the animal right here, so we could load it in manageable pieces?” I asked. I had packed my knife set for just such an eventuality, but all color flushing from their faces told me the answer was “no” even before the words “we’d rather you didn’t” left the girl’s lips. So we had but one option: doing it the old-fashioned way with a lot of heavy lifting.
We backed as close as we could and from the tailgate I put out boards to use as a makeshift ramp. With the hand-crank winch I also brought and attached to tie-off eyelets in the truck bed, the plan was to drag the horse up. We got everything in place, but when we started to winch the animal—now starting to loudly flagellate from the gasses building up internally—it weighed more than the maximum load the eyelets could bear. They popped off like pellets from a scattergun, rendering the winch useless.
This complicated everything.
We made a few feeble attempts to winch it from nearby trees, but the device was a puny, poor man’s special (like I said mushers are pretty frugal) and not made for hauling the dead weight of a 1,200-pound horse, even if we could have gotten the correct angle, which we couldn’t.
We knew we needed a new plan, so after a lot of head scratching and a little bit of swearing, we rolled the horse onto a tarp, then wrapped it around the beast like a burrito. Two of us pulled from the bed: Cole on the long black mane and me on the tail. The young couple stayed on the ground pushing, and using two-by-fours like leavers, but we kept losing our purchase on the horse as its corpse shimmied up the ramp.
We needed a fifth person, so I called an acquaintance from work, a recent transplant from Vermont. He promptly showed up in wingtip loafers, pleated khakis, and a baby-blue oxford button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows.
Clearly
