could have been worse was if he’d shown up with a monogrammed handkerchief in his breast pocket, but at least he showed up. A lot of lesser men would have declined my offer once the details were revealed.
Through the horde of flies, we commenced to pushing and pulling, grunting and straining, a little more swearing, and lots of sweating throughout it all. The couple looked like city slickers, but they worked like farmhands. After a few hours—amazingly without any pulled muscles or broken bones—we finally managed to get the hoofed heavyweight into the bed, mostly anyway.
Its stiff legs extended straight toward the sky, and once we closed the tailgate the horse’s head was a little too large to fit all the way in due to the onset of rigor mortis, so we had to drape it over the tailgate. With nostril flaps drooping, pale tongue dangling, and eyes clouded with the opaque haze of death, I won’t deny it was a ghastly scene, but we had no other way to transport it home.
Instead I focused on the positive. We had managed to move a mountain of dead weight and because of that I felt like I had conquered Denali. My arms were limp and rubbery from fatigue, the muscles in my back sore and tight, and I was soaked to my socks with sweat, but happy to have the bulk of the heavy lifting behind us. Cole and I still had to go home and butcher it for several more hours, but the couple’s problem was getting ready to pull out of the pasture.
With everyone feeling pretty pleased with our group performance, I had my buddy snap a quick photo of us with the horse, so we could remember the herculean feat of strength and Edison-like ingenuity we’d all just displayed to accomplish a mutual goal. Also, at the time I maintained an active blog about our year-round mushing lifestyle, primarily for our families and friends in the Lower 48. I thought the image would encapsulate a day in our life.
I was a little embarrassed because at that time, I had lost a competition at my work to see who could grow the longest beard before either the itching became unbearable or the publisher physically throttled one of us for not being office-presentable. The contest rules stipulated whoever broke early had to, for one day, come in with a ridiculous moustache as their penance. I had that day skillfully shaped my remaining whiskers into what is known as a “horseshoe”—one grown with extensions down the sides of my mouth—to announce my defeat. To be honest, it made me look like someone who without question had on an ankle bracelet and by law shouldn’t be within 500 yards of an elementary school. Little did I know my upper lip accoutrement would be the least of my problems when this picture came back to haunt us.
We said our good-byes and headed for home. I had taken the rest of the day off from work due to an “extenuating circumstance.” It was a long trek though, and I began to second-guess my decision to drive so far with the horse’s head prominently displayed to any motorists unfortunate enough to follow us. At one point I even pulled over and respectfully covered its face with a plastic bag thinking it would reduce the gruesomeness of the spectacle. Instead, it transformed something already mildly creepy into a much, much worse show of horror.
Seeing its long-nosed facial expression so suffocatingly fixed from beneath the plastic, it really hinted at something fiendish transpiring, possibly even with overtones of bestiality or other unhealthy sexual ambitions. Cole, with total agreement from me, yanked the bag and we continued on our way with fingers crossed.
Unfortunately, on the way out of town, I heard the wail of a siren and saw flashing blue lights in my rearview mirror. I pulled over and a state trooper strutted up to the driver’s side window, with his chest puffed out and campaign hat pulled down low to just above his eyes.
“What seems to be the problem, officer?” I asked coyly.
“Well, you could start by telling me what you’re doing with a moose out of season,” he said. Poaching is a serious offense in the Greatland, a sacrilege really, and I could tell this lawman was ready and eager to write me a litany of citations.
“I don’t mean to tell you your business, officer, but that’s not a moose.”
“What do you mean it’s not a moose? I just walked past—” he stopped in midsentence while staring at the rounded hooves of the horse, rather than cloven ones of a moose. He scanned the rest of the corpse and when I saw his head snap backwards practically off his shoulders, I knew he had registered the mistake. He said nothing more than “have a nice day,” before heading back to his cruiser.
It was our first horse, but far from our last. Each and every equine donation that followed presented its own unique set of problems to overcome and backbreaking work to endure, but the money saved and the dogs’ satisfaction made it worth the effort. In fact, the only time I have ever regretted doing anything with a dead horse came a few months after I posted the picture of that first triumph.
Over the years and as Cole’s fan base grew to include folks from all around the world, the photos we’ve posted on our blog began to bring in mixed reviews from strangers. Internet anonymity often means people aren’t scared to pull their punches when it comes to letting you know exactly how they feel about an issue, and no subject was more controversial than our harvesting of horse meat.
Some people who had horses or—as was often synonymous, lived lifestyles where butchering livestock was a common occurrence—wrote to pass on praise for making the most out of a sad situation. Others respectfully wrote to say that while they could never bloody their own hands butchering an animal themselves, they acknowledged the undesirable process was how meat got to their tables, and they understood why someone else wouldn’t want to waste a half ton of meat.
Still others—which we learned from their Internet profiles were mostly very young people, or those living a completely urbanized lifestyle where beef, pork, and chicken were known only as neatly packaged products from the grocery store—would write to tell us, in loquacious detail, what horrible people we are.
I don’t know what any of them looked like, but from the diatribes they sent, I could imagine their sour faces, and practically feel the heat of anger with which they hammered out their polemics on the keyboard. And to be honest, their e-mails initially stymied more than angered me.
Most horses we hauled back to the kennel had died of old age, or, by their owners’ hand as a result of some geriatric condition that caused them to no longer have a pleasant quality of life. One or two had also been accidental deaths, such as a horse breaking its neck after running into a fence when something spooked it. We have never, and I mean ever, personally killed any of the horses.
So it came as a complete shock to me when one morning while checking a social media site, I clicked on a link a friend sent me with the comment “WTF?!” underneath it. This brought me to a site offering “Texas Horse Hunting,” which to be clear was not advertising hunting by horseback, but actually hunting and killing horses with, as the site stated, “sticks, clubs, or crossbows.”
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