“Have you seen the butchering machete?”
Ten minutes later I´m holding on to the back of a trailer, gripping tightly because I´m balanced on one foot on a 4×2 inch piece of metal that juts out and the steep road that the tractor is descending is far from smooth. In the trailer stands Irene, with a bucket in her hand. The white plastic bucket contains a short brush and a little shovel. In her other hand she holds an orange handled machete.
Joe is on the front of the trailer, facing forwards, his arms wrapped around the metal bar behind him. No one talks as we bounce down the path. Apart from the engine, the only sound is the clicking of horse shoes against the trailer floor.
Once down the hill, we unload our cargo onto a space of grass. Past a small hedge of bushes the four ocelots prowl and further down the mountain, Pumara is howling. She is in heat and will do nothing but lie on a plank of wood, scratching her hind claws under her and crying out moans that male pumas apparently find irresistable in the wild. If we could see far enough, we could watch the four lions far below pacing their enclosure, back and forth, back and forth. At first glance you might think there were four females, but the large-muzzled maneless lion is actually a male who was castrated at a young age and lost the hormones neccesary for a mane. The other three lions are females. One has hypnotizingly large pupils. Forced to jump through hoops of fire, her retinas were destroyed and she is completely blind.
All the lions walk slightly strangely. Rescued from a circus, their front claws were ripped out and to avoid the agony, they learned to walk only on the back of their paws. The result of their maltreatment and their modified walking has also left them with damaged tendons and ligaments.
Down another path lives Brenda the jaguar. Kept as a freak show animal in a tiny cage and regularly abused by strangers, she hates humans. She is a beautiful animal, and her spotted coat really does shine, but her eyes are always angry.
Irene, Joe and I begin the morning by cleaning out the trap cage of one of the ocelot pairs. Crouching down, we pick up the remnants of their last feathered meal and any droppings. Joe makes the most of his supervisor status and earnestly claiming morning sickness, sits back and enjoys a cigarette. Once the ocelots have been taken care of, it is time to return to the grass.
Yesterday, a bull had run into a horse and killed it.
My very first job on my very first morning of my very first day was to butcher that horse.
Irene was in charge. Having worked at a wolf sanctuary, she was pretty much an expert at butchering deer. She started with a foreleg, following the muscles, Joe and I pulling on the leg to create tension and eventually pop the leg out of its joint. Irene finished cutting away the muscle and the hide and soon the leg lay a few feet away.
We worked steadily removing each of the legs in turn. Irene had some trouble findin the joint where the back leg met the hip and as she searched the intestines began to bulge out. Gigantic swollen balloons flopped out onto the grass, groaning and gurgling like the horse was still trying to digest its last meal.
After the legs, Joe began to cut down the centre of the horses belly. As Irene and I held the skin apart to give him better tension, Joe suddenly puncured the stomach. A wet gust of its contents sprayed over my face even as I instinctively turned away and shut my eyes. Irene and I finished the opening the chest as Joe hacked the head from the neck and the neck from the shoulders with the large machete.
We had the most trouble cutting the guts from the spine. Up to her elbows in blood, Irene fished about trying to organize the swollen intestines. I suggested that we lift the front part of the ribcage to let the blood and guts run down and make it easier to cut them away. Once the cold heap finally lay on the grass, the only task left was to split the ribcage into servable portions.
I had already done some knife work, but now I really had the chance to hack and saw my way through the hide, membrane, fat and muscle. As we were finishing the butchering, Joe was called away to lead a tour for the new volunteers who had just arrived. Irene and I were left to distribute the meat.
Although I had worn gloves during the butchering, it was a purely psychological aide. The gloves were old and full of holes and my hands were already covered in blood. From the force of the machete, flecks of blood and gore were speckled on my t-shirt, arms and hair. My jeans were soaked and the knees from kneeling by the carcus. If I thought the hardest part of the task was over, I was very very wrong.
The two young lions were the first to receive their meat. A brother and a sister, former circus animals who love eachother dearly and are ferociously protective of each other, they are known as the babies but are actually fully grown. I carried the horses neck in my arms as Irene dragged the rump by the tail along the rocky path, down the dirt steps and through the grass to the enclosure. Having succesfully moved the lions into one side of the cage, we dropped the door and placed the meat on the other side.
Each pair of ocelot received half or a third of a rib cage. These portions had to be carried ¨bloody hug¨style. With barely any hide left on my piece of ribs, as I held it to my body, I could feel the blood soaking into my t-shirt and skin. It felt like a cold, bloody hug.
The little ocelot received a third of a rib cage and Brenda had the head. (The ears make great handles.) The three pumas also had ribs, which left the guts and the legs. Four legs for four hungry lions.
There can be nothing more backbreaking than carrying a horse´s leg over your shoulder, up a steep and rocky mountain with the horse´s own liver draped over its ankle. But that´s what I had to do. I don´t mean a pony´s leg up a little path, this was a large horse´s leg up a mountain at an altitude of almost 3000 meters. Climbing one of the flights of stairs cut through the brush is hard enough empty handed, this was a whole new catagory of endurance. My muscles, lungs and heart soon proved utterly inadequate, only will power forced me and my horse´s limb and liver to the top.
The drama did not end once we made it to the lions. Having separated the blind lion from the three others we gave out the legs. Unfortunately, the blind lion carried her leg straight into the electric fence (vital for our safety) and dropped it in fright. The leg fell into a dip under the electric wire and she was too nervous to try and get it.
Now we had to find a way to get her back into the other half of the cage so that Joe could go into the cage and retrieve the leg. Once this was done , using the horse´s liver as encouragement, we opened the dividing door and instead of the blind lion going back, the other three silly lions all rushed through. As the blind one is clearly skinnier than the others, we just shut the door and allowed her to enjoy three legs unharrassed. Of course, we let the others back in later to have their fill, and as the horse meat was only a lucky bonus, all the carnivores also received their regular ration of chickens.
In comparison to my morning´s labour, my afternoon spent cleaning the small birds´cages was almost like a nap. Well, not quite. To clean the cages you have to first get in them. As the door to one of them is only 1×3/4 ft, it´s not that roomy and as only the wood slats can support your weight, you discover you can bend in ways that never seemed possible before.
After a rewarding first day, Ariana, Sophia and I cooked rice and bean sauce for dinner. Not understanding just how much a kilo of rice is when cooked, we put it all in the water and could have supplied the entire volunteer population with dinner. Luckily we were all starving and had fun trying to plan the next few dinner, all of which would clearly focus on rice.
Anyway, although I did my best, I was physically unable to write more than a couple papagraphs in my journal. I was tired, but it wasn´t that I was too tired to write, my arm, back and neck muscles were all too sore to permit me to properly control a pen. As a result, I´m finishing this Wednesday night. Despite the delay, I can remember every detail from that day because every single part was incredible. I really didn´t know what I had got myself into when I said yes to Dalma about being comfortable with cutting up a horse, but I´m so glad I did. The strangest things can change you. One day at Santa Martha and I´m not the person I was before.
