A savage life suzanne winckler

44 THE SATURDAY EVENING POST July/August 99

SAVNGE LIFE IJ you want to be att amnivore. you should try kiUin(.j your owti meat.

by Suzanne Winckler n /)i/ liabfrl liiihinson

fc>.v years I butcher chickens wiih a friend named Chuck who lives near the

farm my husband and I own in northern Minnesota. Chuck buys chicks and lakes care of them fur lhe ton weeks it lakes them lo mature. I share in the feed costs, but my main con- tribution—for which 1 get an eijual sliaie of birds—is to help slaughter them.

One day last fall, ( huck. two other friends, and I htitchered 2S chickens. We worked with- out stopping troni 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. By the lime it was over, we had decapitated, yutted. plucked, cleaned, and swaddled each bird in plastic wrap for the freezer. We were exhausti-i( and speckled with blood. For dinner thai nighi we ate vegetables.

Butchering chick- ens is no fun, which is one reason I do ii. It is the price 1 pav for being an omnivore and for eating otlu'r meal, like beef and pork, for which I have not yet determined a uork- able way to kill.

Tbe first time I caught a chicken to chop its bead off, I no- ticed, as I cradled it in my arms, thai il had the hefl and piiabilily of a newborn bab\. This was alarming cnotiyh. bin when I beheaded it. I was not prepared to ^ be misteil in blood or to watch it botince nn the ground. Headless chickens don't run ;irouiul The\ thrash with such force and seeming cnorilinalion ihat they sDniL'limes Uirn hackflips. V\hi.-n I first saw this, three things bccatne clear to me.

I reali/.ed why cultures, ancient and coriictiiiiorary. de- velop elaborate rituals lor coping with the grisly experience of killinii ¡ui> sentient creature. I understiind why so many people in my largely bloodless nation are alarmed at the thought ot killing anything (except insects), even though they eat with relish meat other people process for tliLMii. I saw why a small subset ol my contLMnpt>raries are so horriticii

by the thought t)f inflicting pain and causing death that they maintain people should

never kill anything. One risk 1 run in this sell-imposed

ftiod-izathering exercise is leaving the inipres.siun, or perhaps even

furtively feeling. Ihat I am su- perior to the omnivores who lea\e the killing of their meat to someone else. 1 don't think I

am. Slaughtering my own thickens is one of two op- portunities (gardening is the other) wlierc 1 can dis- pense with [he layers of anony inouN people be-

iwecn me and my food. 1 have no quarrel with them. I jtist dnn t know who Ihey are. They are not pan o\' my stnry.

Killing chickens pro- \ides narratives for gather- ing, cooking, and sharing Ibod in a way that buying

il Slyron)iim package of chicken breasts does not. I re-

member the weather nn the days we ha\e butdiered our chickens

and the friends n\er the years who've come to help, wlin have ineludcd a surgical nurse, a cell biologist, a painter ol' faux in- leriors, a Minnesota state representative whn is also a logger, a zoologist, a ntirse with Head Stan, and a former Army medic who now runs the physical plant at a large hospital. 1 can measure the coming of age oï my partner's two kids,

who were tykes the first time we butchered chickens ten years ago iimi who this go-round were well into puberty with an array of piereed bnd\ parts.

My mother, who was bnrn in 1907, belonged to the last generation for whom killing one's food was both a neces- sity and ;m ordinary event. Her family raised chickens for the purpose of eaiing them, iim! her father taught all his children to hiinl. My sur\i\al lines nol depend »HI killing chiekens. but in doing so I have found Ihat it fortifies my etniiieelion to her. It also allows me to cast a tenuous f'ila- nient back to my feral past. In 1914. Mel\in Gilmore. an

TUE SATURDAY EVENING POST

clhnobotanisi. wrote. "In savage and barbarous life the oc- cupaiion nf tlrNt importance is the quest of fwHl." Ha\ing butchered my own chickens. 1 now feel acquainted with llic savage lile.

As exhilarating u.s this may be, I do not thrill at the pros- pect tit beheading chickens. Several days before ihc iratis- acliim, I circle around ihc idea of what my friends and I will be doing. On the assigned morning, we are slow lo gel going. There are knives and cleavers lo sharpen, vats of wa- ter lo be boiled in the sauna house, tables and chairs to set up. apron!< und buckets to gather, an order of assembly to

establish. In their own ritual progression, these preparations are a way to gear ourselves up. I feel my shoulders hunch and m> focus narrow. Et is like putting on an invisible veil of resolve to do penance for a misdeed. I am too far gone in my rational western head to appropriate the ritual of cul- tures for whom the bloody business of hunting was a mat- ter of sur\ival. But butchering chickens has permitted me lo stand in ihe black night just outside the edge of their campfire. and trom that prospect I have inherited the most important lesson of all in the task of killing meat: I have teamed to say thank you and I'm sorry. >

Putting Chickens to Sleep—JFbr Good I haven't mei Suzanne Wjnckk-r. au-

thor of "A Savage Lite." but 1 would like to. Our son. Paul, sent me "A Sav- age Life" with a note thai read. "You will really appreciate this piece. It will remind you of your mniher."

Paul was recalling a Thanksgiving Day when he came home from :i hum and proudly pbced a pheasunt un my kitchen table. What impressed him was that his mother would know how to get the wild bird ready for the oven. Paul grew up as a city boy; his maternal grandnuilhcr and I did liiile lo educate him aboul countr>' life. He just SUKKI there. toi>kinp hungry after his first suc- ccssliil pheitsLinl shoot.

1 showed Paul hüw to pluck ihe leath- ers. You douse the bird in u pail of boil- ing walcr. and the feathers pull oui cus- ily. The small hairs thai remain tan be removed with a lighted mateh lo un old newspaper. By the lime the llames gci lo your fingers, the hairs can all be torched off. leaving a clean bird ready I'or evisvcrating.

We had the phcasani ready for the oven in minutes, and Paul, who had never bctn impressed with anything his mother did since he was in knee pants, actually ctmiplimented me on my speedy know-how

He later reminded me that my re- spt>nsc wa-s. "That's nothing! My moiher would have done it twice as fast."

.Suzanne Wincklcr is obviously u so- phisticated city girl. We share a common bond because our mothers taughi us abitui killing one's f«KxI when it was a twccssity and a most ordinary event.

Like Suzanne. I have cradled a chicken in my arms before beheading il. 1 like chickens as she d(»es.

M> sisier and 1 used to play games with Ihe pullets (young female chick-

ens). If we put lheir heads under lheir wings and rtxked ihem ever so gently. they would fall asleep and lie in the sun for what seemed tti us a very long linw before arousing.

Sometimes we wuuld have a whole assemblage of sleeping chickens lying in the grass. Il seemed to do them no harm. Afler a time, they would shake their feathers and go back to scratching for food.

I learned the lacts of life about and females by watching roosters chase hens. The hens. I ihought. gave up tiMi easily, .^fter the conquesi. the rwisters would quickly pursue oihers.

An interesting phenomenon in ihe chicken house was the "broody" hen. Wben she wi)utd lay a nesi full of eggs, she would wani to quit laying eggs and sil on Ihe batch lo hateh chicks. My mother taught us that this would cause a decrease in Ibe egg couni for tbe mar- ket. Her remedy was to take ihe hens from lheir nesis and place them in a cage thut wus hung from the rafters of a

"broody hen shed." The theory, as 1 re- call, was tbat Ihe gcnile movement of the cage of isolated would-be mother hens would cause them to lorgei moth- erhiKHl and get back lo laying a new batch of eggs.

As a ehild. I wanted to take this mat- ter into my own hands, and I talked my parents into giving me a moiher hen of my very own. I made a small dugoui under a hollow tree and let her batch her chicks up in the orchard, completely away fmm the henhouse. When ber eggs hatched, the chicks were all mine, and I felt Ihe joy of free enterprise.

The chicks roosted outdoors up in the trees. They perched in the irees at night, and I tbougbt they were more beauiifui than any that my mtuher had bought from the local halchery.

They must have been good chickens because when they were grown, my Unele Ben bought ihem all from me for what I thought was a small fortune. He claimed they were the hest-tasiing "spring fryers" he'd ever had.

Years later when I visiied my sister 111 Iowa, she adnumished me not to go near the chicken hou.se. This was a new. larger chicken house. "You would be de- pressed: don't look." she warned me. I think I knew; I suppose it was a chicken-and-egg factory where the eggs rolled away from the hen's feathers as >oon as she laid ibem. I >uppose the eggs dropped oui of her reach tbrougb some wire mesh. I'll never know be- cause I don't want to see those hens working that way and probably being fed witb all manner of nuirienls lo up their prtKiuctiviiy.

I would like lo be invited to Suzanne's chicken party in Minnesota nexi year. I have a theory aboul ihe chickens my mother killed in Iowa, as her

see Chickens an page 7H