how to skin a polar bear
Posted: December 10th, 2005, 1:20 pm
how david skins the bear
Dark, brooding the death of Mark, David skins the polar bear.
A polar bear is one of the last things he’d wanto kill.
A storm. The rain that’s coming hard. Clouds clash and there’s a faroff flash of lightning cut across the sky. Cloud to cloud. Rain that’s gonna come. Storm stirs the wind brisk. Type of storm you remember.
David takes the hatchet, bowie knife and sharpening stone from his pack. He sits on a log by the fire and hones his edges til they take the hair off his arm. He sharpens each blade of his pocketknife and replaces it.
He holds the stone in his left hand. He spits on the stone. With the knife in his right hand he spreads the spit on the stone in circular motions. He is careful to keep a consistent angle of blade to stone. To hone an edge requires the precision to make a line so thin it splits hairs. He doesn’t know the number exactly but has an angle of twelve degrees in his mind as he wipes steel away on a stone like paint on a pair of pants.
Branches of leaves tumble along across the clearing with the increasing wind.
David wraps the whetstone in its leather rag and puts it in the tent. He pockets the pocketknife, sheathes the bowie knife on his belt and carries the hatchet in his right hand.
Doris: What are you doing?
David: I’m going to skin the bear.
Doris: Don’t you think there’s about to be a storm?
David[looks at sky]: Sure is.
Doris: And you’re just going to pull all the skin off that animal and not worry about the rain?
David: Sure am.
David hones the bowie knife on this sharpening steel mostly for the schinking sound it creates.
The skin is an organ.
Doris: What about Mark?
David: What do you mean? You never liked Mark.
Doris: Well,… In retrospect…
David: Retrospect nothing. He’s dead.
Doris: He wasn’t that bad.
David[seething]: Fucking…. Ah… There was damn little bad in him.
Doris: He couldn’t pick a girl.
David: Maybe that’s cause they picked him. You can’t denigrate a dead man for people being in love with him.
David carries the stone to the tent and drops it in.
Doris: He did get eaten.
David: No denying that.
Doris: Shouldn’t you do something about him?
David: Bear took care of that. I’m doing something about her.
Doris: Didn’t that already happen?
David: It hasn’t ended yet.
Doris: He…
David[interrupts]: He’s free.
David makes bird gestures with head and body and moves his arms as if to take wing. David does a slow spin to gather his tools.
Knife in sheath, sharpener in belt, pocket in knife and hatchet in hand David flies to the bear. He comes to light a respectful distance away. He crouches there to see the bear.
Doris stands away.
David: She is big.
David screams or snarls and lashes out at an invisible antagonist. He lunges from squat to stand as a release for some of this built up energy. David quickly falls silent.
He leans into the hulking contours of the bear to find out he can’t budge the still warm carcass.
David: Well fuck.
David drops the hatchet and walks back to the tent. He emerges with a long thin rope like parachute cord. There are clearly hundreds of feet of it. It is Kevlar.
He returns to the bear.
There is a dogwood sapling four or five inches in diameter some fifty feet from the carcass in the clearing. It is a sturdy young tree that will work well as a pulley.
David runs a length of thick but hollow braid rope over the exterior of the parachute cord to the point where the rope meets the tree. The sheath of rope fiber produces less friction on the slender cord and minimizes the chances of fraying or breakage. Know the ropes.
David secures one end of his rope on the she-bear’s rear left ankle. The right rear leg is inaccessible for the bear’s bulk so the left leg sticks out slightly inviting a knot.
Doris sits by the fire and keeps trying not to watch David. The storm is kicking up. Doris has begun to think her demise is spelled by this dead bear and this storm in this cursed clearing.
David [yells across the clearing against the wind]: Looks like this is where I need your help.
David holds the free end of the rope. There’s still a lot of cord remaining coiled up. He has wrapped a sturdy bough in the rope to use as a yoke as the cord is so fine it hurts the hands to pull on it.
Doris: What?
David: Come over here and help me.
Doris walks to him. They line up on either side of the bough and either side of the rope like a team of draft horses.
David: H’yah mule.
Doris: You’re an ox.
David: This should be easy then. She ain’t on wheels.
In order to effectively skin the beast David needs her on her back where he can make the cuts in her soft underbelly.
They pull like the team of workers they are. They grunt and pull and battle gravity and weight and blubber.
Doris: Why are we doing this?
David: Pull harder.
Doris: This doesn’t make any sense.
David[panting, straining, pulling]: Save your breath. Pull.
He looks at her soft face. She turns. They aren’t pulling now so much as leaning against the weight on the cord. Their eyes lock and narrow. The intensity of their gaze grows. They snarl animally at each other and push hard like they were struggling for life against all odds.
David: More.
They snarl anew and pull harder still and manage, comically, to turn the she-bear’s ass end over. The front end is easy in comparison. Much lighter.
The bear’s head is largely decimated from the hollowpoint rounds. at nearly half an inch in diameter a .45 does unimaginable damage in a living breathing body. All these things: flesh, muscles, nerves, tendons, bones and blood are the putty of the bullet’s palette. Hollowpoint rounds mushroom on impact like popcorn explodes from kernel to comparatively enormous flower. Copper-jacketed lead does not lend mercy like popcorn.
Once on her back the polar bear is ready for the knives.
David: You should grab a pancho and a tarp and find a thick pine grove maybe nexto an outcropping of some kind. [He gestures in a general direction.] This is a serious storm.
Doris: What about you?
David: I have work to do.
Doris: I don’t understand.
David: No. But I do.
Doris: I’ll be by those rocks halfway to the beaver pond.
David says nothing. They embrace. She holds fast to him. He feels her warm face and smells her soft hair. They kiss and she walks to the tent.
He turns to his work.
He begins with a lengthwise cut starting at the vent and extending up to the neck. Starting at the paws he cuts down the inside of each leg. He is careful to cut under the skin. Cutting too deep, though, causes excessive bleeding.
He takes steel to blade of his big knife and with a schinking sharpens it in the storm. The first drops of rain fall now. Small drops spatter and deflect from his knife as he sharpens it in swift metallic strokes. He slips the steel in his belt and surveys the prospect of removing the skin of the bear.
This great white pelt where there are two layers of hollow hair. It is already bloodstained. David takes it away from the machinery that drove it. Slowly he pulls the skin from the connective tissue that holds this body’s largest organ to its musculature.
It is important, when skinning, to avoid putting holes in the hide. You must cut deep enough. You must not cut too deep. It takes a delicate hand to do it well.
David has skinned any number of animals. More, certainly, than he has killed.
It is warm despite the building rain. It’s darker than it should be this time of day. David’s labor is very hard work. Wrestling with the carcass dead weight is hardest to move and Doris has gone off to hide from the storm and this skinning.
Tearing things apart to make use of them.
The rain washes the tears and sweat from David’s face as he separates the tough hide from fatty and muscled body beneath.
The largeness of the carcass leaves space for long strokes with his bowie knife.
The rain falls hard. It scours the clearing, the trees surrounding and the few within the clearing. The entire landscape is cleaned. The sky is purged.
Little blood is evident in the process of skinning the big beast. The blood from the fight washes out of her fur as the rain strengthens.
He skins the legs up to the paws. He stands back to survey the partially skinned murdering behemoth. He lifts the hatchet from the ground.
David uses the hatchet to hack his way through the wrist and ankle joints of the bear. Popping of ligaments, cartilage and bone. The joints are percussion for this sad beast’s song.
It is a numbing rain. Like the most powerful showerhead you’ve ever seen where everything is unfeelable and quickly made invisible by particles of obliterated air and water.
David removes the skin -–– the feeling –– from this former beast. This killer of his friend. this murderess.
David rends connective tissue in sweeping strokes. He’s not sure how you’d do the surface area exactly but suspects the easiest way would be submersion. But, that would be volume; a failing eureka.
David must use the rope and dogwood tree provided to move the bear sufficiently to skin the whole beast. He pulls on the rope. He falls in the slickering ground and is now covered in mud and blood. David is able to raise the polar bear’s shoulder from the mat. He is unable to gain access to the spine.
The skin of the bear weighs as much or more than David. It makes the carcass lighter but David needs more give.
He secures the rope to the sapling with several wraps and a double clove hitch. He has the bear pulled up as far toward the sapling as her bulk allows.
He spreads the hide he’s removed from this side out flat. He holds the hatchet by the head, blade up, and wipes as much of the rainwater and blood and bits of fat and flesh off the hide as he can. He then folds the hide skin to skin careful to keep hair off the sticky inside of the skin. He rolls the folded hide tight into the underest possibility of the carcass.
He releases the rope from the dogwood and pulls the whole thing over. There is another tree farther from the carcass in the opposite direction David wraps the rope around. It is an elm tree.
He pulls the rope using his legs against the leverage of the tree. It is his only hope of leverage. No traction remains in the steady hard rain’s deluge of the clearing.
David does himself some tuggin on the yoke. He pulls and pants and tugs and wishes for a winch and to wipe his brow, which the water does never dry. He is hot in the rain as he struggles.
A section of the skin is still connected to the carcass and remains unreachable even for all of David’s ropework and the Ellum’s sturdy root.
He wraps the line bout the bark and secures it there. He walks back to the beast. He plucks the rope as he walks along. It makes an odd wet vibration.
He has gained a few inches for his effort. He applies the cutting edge of his skinning knife for the slight advantage available. There is still the matter of getting the bear off the hide.
David uses the hatchet handle again to quickly clean the second hemisphere of the skin. He folds it as its typical mate: skin to skin. He rolls the hide up tight under the carcass as close as possible.
David walks away from the grotesque corpse, elm, rope and dogwood.
He goes to the tent. He turns to observe the scene obscured by rain. A great pink mound is visible. The rope is not visible and the great corpse is in an odd, unnatural position.
He unzips the door of the tent and slips in. He sits on a wool blanket by the door. He mops his head with his towel. He drags his backpack to him and grubs into it for a fresh pack of cigarettes. He packs the cigarette box against his hand a prime number of times, turns them the other direction and repeats.
He pulls the little red line around the rectangle to release the cellophane and grant him access to pull the foil which he wads with the cello and tosses across the tent’s interior –– strangely empty in the half-dark without Doris.
He raises the cigarette pack to his lips and snags a butt with his teeth. He draws the Bic from his pocket. When he tries it the flint won’t even spark. he throws the lighter across the tent. He extracts his dry Zippo from the small side pocket of his pack.
David lights the butt with a flourish for his own benefit. He enjoys the scent and taste of the poisonous lighter fluid as he inhales any number of chemicals and toxins; some of them make him feel alright for now.
He inhales the smoke deeply and exhales languidly from his nostrils filling the tent.
David smokes and thinks about physics. As the cigarette nears its end he pulls another butt from the pack with his teeth and lights it with the first.
He imagines Stephen Hawking narrating the dissection of a great galactic carnivore. The top of the universal food chain devours stars and whole herds of asteroids in the blowing fields of the savannah of space. This taker relishes any form of energy.
Lacking anything definite, David wrings a trickle of water from his pants leg like a faucet on the butt. He doesn’t want a hole in the floor of the tent.
He smokes this cigarette and thinks about synthetic fibers. Tent, cigarette filter, Kevlar rope holds polar bear corpse in clearing in downpour, his shoes.
Just when he thinks his smoke break is near completion he unzips the door to vent the air and not let too much water in.
He extracts and lights a third cigarette when he thinks of what he has to do out there.
He smokes this third cigarette. He thinks, this time, of fishing. The reason he’s in these woods to begin with. He wants to be turning spirals with a lure. He has been sequestered in the city and it has been a long time since he has fished.
They’ve only just gotten here. Dropped off yesterday by a crew of loggers who hung around to drain the keg and drove drunken off into the predawn dead dark and stars of wilderness.
He exhales at the ceiling of the tent.
He gathers himself as he gathers smoke in his lungs as the next drag. He exits through zippered doors.
Rain falls.
He takes a final drag from the butt sheltered in the tent of his left hand and flicks it into the rain. It is hit square by a drop of water and falls straight to the ground.
He closes the tent and turns around. He has not missed the scene in the clearing.
He walks back to the naked components of what once was a polar bear.
He looks at the edge on the hatchet. He finds the steel in the mud, wipes it on his soaked pants and gives a bunch of short strokes to both sides of the hatchet blade. He looks at the edge again and cannot see a change or really make any discernment in this weather.
Water spatters off everything.
He approaches the static hulk with the hatchet. He swings into the shoulder flesh of the bear. He strikes again and again. Again. Like felling lumber or pretending to be a beaver he removes the limbs of this rough beast.
A large and ever powerful muscle mass extends from the bear’s forearm to its back. The effect of such a muscle on the bear’s swiping motion is monumental.
David wants a drink.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Each forelimb is the thickness of a tree larger than either the dogwood or slippery elm. David cuts mostly muscle with each swing til there’s a thud and he’s struck gold like ivory.
Bone is one of the hardest things around in the arctic that does not melt.
The fortunate or un thing about this all is that this is not the arctic.
Nor especially near it.
He walks back to the tree and releases the rope. He walks back to the bear; checks to see and needs to take the rope back across to the dogwood.
David goes to hacking away the bear’s right rear leg. This is a thicker limb. He must hew this mountain of flesh.
Once he finally strikes the joint it takes a series of sturdy thwacks to break through.
He wishes he was in Toledo or even Akron under a yew tree in the suburbs by an ugly beige sears and roebuck house with a fresh bottle of forgetfulness.
He hacks away into the body of the beast as a warrior or broken king. He swings through and for fury well into the rain.
He reasoned, while in the tent, that the preferred method for reaching the small strip of unreachable hide would be to remove the weight of the bear’s limbs. Each of them none too light. The other major weight-reducing tactic would be to gut the beast. Something he finds distasteful in its mess and potential encounter with Mark. And why cover the bearskin with guts?
Grin and bear it doesn’t begin to describe this situation. Grit yer teeth and bury yer hatchet in the steadfast musculature of an endangered carnivore.
At the butcherings David has attended, usually livestock, the corpse has rarely just mauled and munched the butcher’s best friend. If meat isn’t food what are you doing with your hands in it? When it comes to butchering the fatted calf (a 700 pounder) there’s no ambiguity about it. It is a matter of course and survival. A tangible result of all that work out of doors that will fill the deep freeze.
David finishes hacking through the final mammoth hip joint and pulls the meat away from the carcass. His hatchet arm is tired. His hatchet self has floated away and dissipated like mist.
The rain revives David as if he’d walked out the door of his house on the way to the Laundromat and had a bucket of water dumped on him. The rain is a medium consistency.
David looks at the carnage he hath wrought. He moans, sighs and roars over his quarry. His grip on the hatchet tightens. He stands frozen in the warm rain.
David wants a drink.
David wedges the skin as far under on both sides as he can. He also wedges the severed limbs for leverage. He hopes this has solved his troubles. He has taken a couple hundred pounds off the beast.
He walks the rope back to the elm to yank on the single remaining limb. David wishes he was stranded in a snowstorm in Amarillo.
Now he pulls against the tree to move the grisly hill of pink. He wants that hide.
By the strength in his limbs David pulls the rope wrapped round this trunk, anchored to the final limb of his tormentor. He struggles. He feels the give of the mud and the reduction in weight. He believes it can be done and does it. He pulls hard enough to turn the beast far enough to free the slender section of hide held down by the dead weight of meat you can’t even eat.
The carcass is pulled by its single profane limb far enough to allow David to skin away the final portion and have the hide free of the meat.
Oh the simple triumph of delight.
He spreads the enormous pelt out on the ground in the rain away from the carcass. He walks over to the site of the fish fuck delight and nearby finds Mark’s trusty Machete. David walks back to the hide on the ground and gets to scraping the hide with Mark’s Machete. He removes the bits and chunks of meat, connective tissue and blubber from the hide scraping them all away.
Satisfied with his work David folds the hide skin to skin; rolls it from two directions to meet in the middle.
He gathers the rope. With a length of it he wraps a loop around each end of the rolled up hide. He carries it through the rain to a large tree with a low-hanging branch at the edge of the clearing.
He cuts a slender tree 10 or 12 feet tall down with the hatchet. He removes the branches. He attaches a foreleg of the skin to either end of the sapling. He throws the rope, weighted with a stick, over the bough. He ties one end of the rope to the sapling and hoists the hide into the air. Thunder and lightning cut into the night. The hide moves ominously in the wind and rain; a heavy curtain.
David leaves his tools in a pile beside the tent. He pulls off his boots and socks. He feels his toes in the mud. He strips out of his pants and shorts and abandons them on the ground. He returns to the pants for his pocketknife. He emptied his other pockets earlier. He shucks his shirt careless to the ground. He drops the knife in the tent.
The rain falls on his pale naked frame in the darkening clearing. He washes himself. He scrubs the water the length of his legs and arms and rejoices in their membership. He cleans himself as fully as can be done in a clearing in the rain. He will not feel clean for a long time.
He ducks into the tent and closes the door behind him. He uses the towel inside to dry himself as he kneels on the wool blanket inside the door. David finds a pair of pants with cargo pockets, shorts, socks and a white t-shirt.
He pulls the togs on and finds his cigarette pack. He lights one up quick and looks for some liquor. The cooler is not in the tent. Ah, the flask in the backpack will do nicely. Rye whisky.
He opens the flask, smells of the contents and takes a hefty swig.
David: Fuck.
Dark, brooding the death of Mark, David skins the polar bear.
A polar bear is one of the last things he’d wanto kill.
A storm. The rain that’s coming hard. Clouds clash and there’s a faroff flash of lightning cut across the sky. Cloud to cloud. Rain that’s gonna come. Storm stirs the wind brisk. Type of storm you remember.
David takes the hatchet, bowie knife and sharpening stone from his pack. He sits on a log by the fire and hones his edges til they take the hair off his arm. He sharpens each blade of his pocketknife and replaces it.
He holds the stone in his left hand. He spits on the stone. With the knife in his right hand he spreads the spit on the stone in circular motions. He is careful to keep a consistent angle of blade to stone. To hone an edge requires the precision to make a line so thin it splits hairs. He doesn’t know the number exactly but has an angle of twelve degrees in his mind as he wipes steel away on a stone like paint on a pair of pants.
Branches of leaves tumble along across the clearing with the increasing wind.
David wraps the whetstone in its leather rag and puts it in the tent. He pockets the pocketknife, sheathes the bowie knife on his belt and carries the hatchet in his right hand.
Doris: What are you doing?
David: I’m going to skin the bear.
Doris: Don’t you think there’s about to be a storm?
David[looks at sky]: Sure is.
Doris: And you’re just going to pull all the skin off that animal and not worry about the rain?
David: Sure am.
David hones the bowie knife on this sharpening steel mostly for the schinking sound it creates.
The skin is an organ.
Doris: What about Mark?
David: What do you mean? You never liked Mark.
Doris: Well,… In retrospect…
David: Retrospect nothing. He’s dead.
Doris: He wasn’t that bad.
David[seething]: Fucking…. Ah… There was damn little bad in him.
Doris: He couldn’t pick a girl.
David: Maybe that’s cause they picked him. You can’t denigrate a dead man for people being in love with him.
David carries the stone to the tent and drops it in.
Doris: He did get eaten.
David: No denying that.
Doris: Shouldn’t you do something about him?
David: Bear took care of that. I’m doing something about her.
Doris: Didn’t that already happen?
David: It hasn’t ended yet.
Doris: He…
David[interrupts]: He’s free.
David makes bird gestures with head and body and moves his arms as if to take wing. David does a slow spin to gather his tools.
Knife in sheath, sharpener in belt, pocket in knife and hatchet in hand David flies to the bear. He comes to light a respectful distance away. He crouches there to see the bear.
Doris stands away.
David: She is big.
David screams or snarls and lashes out at an invisible antagonist. He lunges from squat to stand as a release for some of this built up energy. David quickly falls silent.
He leans into the hulking contours of the bear to find out he can’t budge the still warm carcass.
David: Well fuck.
David drops the hatchet and walks back to the tent. He emerges with a long thin rope like parachute cord. There are clearly hundreds of feet of it. It is Kevlar.
He returns to the bear.
There is a dogwood sapling four or five inches in diameter some fifty feet from the carcass in the clearing. It is a sturdy young tree that will work well as a pulley.
David runs a length of thick but hollow braid rope over the exterior of the parachute cord to the point where the rope meets the tree. The sheath of rope fiber produces less friction on the slender cord and minimizes the chances of fraying or breakage. Know the ropes.
David secures one end of his rope on the she-bear’s rear left ankle. The right rear leg is inaccessible for the bear’s bulk so the left leg sticks out slightly inviting a knot.
Doris sits by the fire and keeps trying not to watch David. The storm is kicking up. Doris has begun to think her demise is spelled by this dead bear and this storm in this cursed clearing.
David [yells across the clearing against the wind]: Looks like this is where I need your help.
David holds the free end of the rope. There’s still a lot of cord remaining coiled up. He has wrapped a sturdy bough in the rope to use as a yoke as the cord is so fine it hurts the hands to pull on it.
Doris: What?
David: Come over here and help me.
Doris walks to him. They line up on either side of the bough and either side of the rope like a team of draft horses.
David: H’yah mule.
Doris: You’re an ox.
David: This should be easy then. She ain’t on wheels.
In order to effectively skin the beast David needs her on her back where he can make the cuts in her soft underbelly.
They pull like the team of workers they are. They grunt and pull and battle gravity and weight and blubber.
Doris: Why are we doing this?
David: Pull harder.
Doris: This doesn’t make any sense.
David[panting, straining, pulling]: Save your breath. Pull.
He looks at her soft face. She turns. They aren’t pulling now so much as leaning against the weight on the cord. Their eyes lock and narrow. The intensity of their gaze grows. They snarl animally at each other and push hard like they were struggling for life against all odds.
David: More.
They snarl anew and pull harder still and manage, comically, to turn the she-bear’s ass end over. The front end is easy in comparison. Much lighter.
The bear’s head is largely decimated from the hollowpoint rounds. at nearly half an inch in diameter a .45 does unimaginable damage in a living breathing body. All these things: flesh, muscles, nerves, tendons, bones and blood are the putty of the bullet’s palette. Hollowpoint rounds mushroom on impact like popcorn explodes from kernel to comparatively enormous flower. Copper-jacketed lead does not lend mercy like popcorn.
Once on her back the polar bear is ready for the knives.
David: You should grab a pancho and a tarp and find a thick pine grove maybe nexto an outcropping of some kind. [He gestures in a general direction.] This is a serious storm.
Doris: What about you?
David: I have work to do.
Doris: I don’t understand.
David: No. But I do.
Doris: I’ll be by those rocks halfway to the beaver pond.
David says nothing. They embrace. She holds fast to him. He feels her warm face and smells her soft hair. They kiss and she walks to the tent.
He turns to his work.
He begins with a lengthwise cut starting at the vent and extending up to the neck. Starting at the paws he cuts down the inside of each leg. He is careful to cut under the skin. Cutting too deep, though, causes excessive bleeding.
He takes steel to blade of his big knife and with a schinking sharpens it in the storm. The first drops of rain fall now. Small drops spatter and deflect from his knife as he sharpens it in swift metallic strokes. He slips the steel in his belt and surveys the prospect of removing the skin of the bear.
This great white pelt where there are two layers of hollow hair. It is already bloodstained. David takes it away from the machinery that drove it. Slowly he pulls the skin from the connective tissue that holds this body’s largest organ to its musculature.
It is important, when skinning, to avoid putting holes in the hide. You must cut deep enough. You must not cut too deep. It takes a delicate hand to do it well.
David has skinned any number of animals. More, certainly, than he has killed.
It is warm despite the building rain. It’s darker than it should be this time of day. David’s labor is very hard work. Wrestling with the carcass dead weight is hardest to move and Doris has gone off to hide from the storm and this skinning.
Tearing things apart to make use of them.
The rain washes the tears and sweat from David’s face as he separates the tough hide from fatty and muscled body beneath.
The largeness of the carcass leaves space for long strokes with his bowie knife.
The rain falls hard. It scours the clearing, the trees surrounding and the few within the clearing. The entire landscape is cleaned. The sky is purged.
Little blood is evident in the process of skinning the big beast. The blood from the fight washes out of her fur as the rain strengthens.
He skins the legs up to the paws. He stands back to survey the partially skinned murdering behemoth. He lifts the hatchet from the ground.
David uses the hatchet to hack his way through the wrist and ankle joints of the bear. Popping of ligaments, cartilage and bone. The joints are percussion for this sad beast’s song.
It is a numbing rain. Like the most powerful showerhead you’ve ever seen where everything is unfeelable and quickly made invisible by particles of obliterated air and water.
David removes the skin -–– the feeling –– from this former beast. This killer of his friend. this murderess.
David rends connective tissue in sweeping strokes. He’s not sure how you’d do the surface area exactly but suspects the easiest way would be submersion. But, that would be volume; a failing eureka.
David must use the rope and dogwood tree provided to move the bear sufficiently to skin the whole beast. He pulls on the rope. He falls in the slickering ground and is now covered in mud and blood. David is able to raise the polar bear’s shoulder from the mat. He is unable to gain access to the spine.
The skin of the bear weighs as much or more than David. It makes the carcass lighter but David needs more give.
He secures the rope to the sapling with several wraps and a double clove hitch. He has the bear pulled up as far toward the sapling as her bulk allows.
He spreads the hide he’s removed from this side out flat. He holds the hatchet by the head, blade up, and wipes as much of the rainwater and blood and bits of fat and flesh off the hide as he can. He then folds the hide skin to skin careful to keep hair off the sticky inside of the skin. He rolls the folded hide tight into the underest possibility of the carcass.
He releases the rope from the dogwood and pulls the whole thing over. There is another tree farther from the carcass in the opposite direction David wraps the rope around. It is an elm tree.
He pulls the rope using his legs against the leverage of the tree. It is his only hope of leverage. No traction remains in the steady hard rain’s deluge of the clearing.
David does himself some tuggin on the yoke. He pulls and pants and tugs and wishes for a winch and to wipe his brow, which the water does never dry. He is hot in the rain as he struggles.
A section of the skin is still connected to the carcass and remains unreachable even for all of David’s ropework and the Ellum’s sturdy root.
He wraps the line bout the bark and secures it there. He walks back to the beast. He plucks the rope as he walks along. It makes an odd wet vibration.
He has gained a few inches for his effort. He applies the cutting edge of his skinning knife for the slight advantage available. There is still the matter of getting the bear off the hide.
David uses the hatchet handle again to quickly clean the second hemisphere of the skin. He folds it as its typical mate: skin to skin. He rolls the hide up tight under the carcass as close as possible.
David walks away from the grotesque corpse, elm, rope and dogwood.
He goes to the tent. He turns to observe the scene obscured by rain. A great pink mound is visible. The rope is not visible and the great corpse is in an odd, unnatural position.
He unzips the door of the tent and slips in. He sits on a wool blanket by the door. He mops his head with his towel. He drags his backpack to him and grubs into it for a fresh pack of cigarettes. He packs the cigarette box against his hand a prime number of times, turns them the other direction and repeats.
He pulls the little red line around the rectangle to release the cellophane and grant him access to pull the foil which he wads with the cello and tosses across the tent’s interior –– strangely empty in the half-dark without Doris.
He raises the cigarette pack to his lips and snags a butt with his teeth. He draws the Bic from his pocket. When he tries it the flint won’t even spark. he throws the lighter across the tent. He extracts his dry Zippo from the small side pocket of his pack.
David lights the butt with a flourish for his own benefit. He enjoys the scent and taste of the poisonous lighter fluid as he inhales any number of chemicals and toxins; some of them make him feel alright for now.
He inhales the smoke deeply and exhales languidly from his nostrils filling the tent.
David smokes and thinks about physics. As the cigarette nears its end he pulls another butt from the pack with his teeth and lights it with the first.
He imagines Stephen Hawking narrating the dissection of a great galactic carnivore. The top of the universal food chain devours stars and whole herds of asteroids in the blowing fields of the savannah of space. This taker relishes any form of energy.
Lacking anything definite, David wrings a trickle of water from his pants leg like a faucet on the butt. He doesn’t want a hole in the floor of the tent.
He smokes this cigarette and thinks about synthetic fibers. Tent, cigarette filter, Kevlar rope holds polar bear corpse in clearing in downpour, his shoes.
Just when he thinks his smoke break is near completion he unzips the door to vent the air and not let too much water in.
He extracts and lights a third cigarette when he thinks of what he has to do out there.
He smokes this third cigarette. He thinks, this time, of fishing. The reason he’s in these woods to begin with. He wants to be turning spirals with a lure. He has been sequestered in the city and it has been a long time since he has fished.
They’ve only just gotten here. Dropped off yesterday by a crew of loggers who hung around to drain the keg and drove drunken off into the predawn dead dark and stars of wilderness.
He exhales at the ceiling of the tent.
He gathers himself as he gathers smoke in his lungs as the next drag. He exits through zippered doors.
Rain falls.
He takes a final drag from the butt sheltered in the tent of his left hand and flicks it into the rain. It is hit square by a drop of water and falls straight to the ground.
He closes the tent and turns around. He has not missed the scene in the clearing.
He walks back to the naked components of what once was a polar bear.
He looks at the edge on the hatchet. He finds the steel in the mud, wipes it on his soaked pants and gives a bunch of short strokes to both sides of the hatchet blade. He looks at the edge again and cannot see a change or really make any discernment in this weather.
Water spatters off everything.
He approaches the static hulk with the hatchet. He swings into the shoulder flesh of the bear. He strikes again and again. Again. Like felling lumber or pretending to be a beaver he removes the limbs of this rough beast.
A large and ever powerful muscle mass extends from the bear’s forearm to its back. The effect of such a muscle on the bear’s swiping motion is monumental.
David wants a drink.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Each forelimb is the thickness of a tree larger than either the dogwood or slippery elm. David cuts mostly muscle with each swing til there’s a thud and he’s struck gold like ivory.
Bone is one of the hardest things around in the arctic that does not melt.
The fortunate or un thing about this all is that this is not the arctic.
Nor especially near it.
He walks back to the tree and releases the rope. He walks back to the bear; checks to see and needs to take the rope back across to the dogwood.
David goes to hacking away the bear’s right rear leg. This is a thicker limb. He must hew this mountain of flesh.
Once he finally strikes the joint it takes a series of sturdy thwacks to break through.
He wishes he was in Toledo or even Akron under a yew tree in the suburbs by an ugly beige sears and roebuck house with a fresh bottle of forgetfulness.
He hacks away into the body of the beast as a warrior or broken king. He swings through and for fury well into the rain.
He reasoned, while in the tent, that the preferred method for reaching the small strip of unreachable hide would be to remove the weight of the bear’s limbs. Each of them none too light. The other major weight-reducing tactic would be to gut the beast. Something he finds distasteful in its mess and potential encounter with Mark. And why cover the bearskin with guts?
Grin and bear it doesn’t begin to describe this situation. Grit yer teeth and bury yer hatchet in the steadfast musculature of an endangered carnivore.
At the butcherings David has attended, usually livestock, the corpse has rarely just mauled and munched the butcher’s best friend. If meat isn’t food what are you doing with your hands in it? When it comes to butchering the fatted calf (a 700 pounder) there’s no ambiguity about it. It is a matter of course and survival. A tangible result of all that work out of doors that will fill the deep freeze.
David finishes hacking through the final mammoth hip joint and pulls the meat away from the carcass. His hatchet arm is tired. His hatchet self has floated away and dissipated like mist.
The rain revives David as if he’d walked out the door of his house on the way to the Laundromat and had a bucket of water dumped on him. The rain is a medium consistency.
David looks at the carnage he hath wrought. He moans, sighs and roars over his quarry. His grip on the hatchet tightens. He stands frozen in the warm rain.
David wants a drink.
David wedges the skin as far under on both sides as he can. He also wedges the severed limbs for leverage. He hopes this has solved his troubles. He has taken a couple hundred pounds off the beast.
He walks the rope back to the elm to yank on the single remaining limb. David wishes he was stranded in a snowstorm in Amarillo.
Now he pulls against the tree to move the grisly hill of pink. He wants that hide.
By the strength in his limbs David pulls the rope wrapped round this trunk, anchored to the final limb of his tormentor. He struggles. He feels the give of the mud and the reduction in weight. He believes it can be done and does it. He pulls hard enough to turn the beast far enough to free the slender section of hide held down by the dead weight of meat you can’t even eat.
The carcass is pulled by its single profane limb far enough to allow David to skin away the final portion and have the hide free of the meat.
Oh the simple triumph of delight.
He spreads the enormous pelt out on the ground in the rain away from the carcass. He walks over to the site of the fish fuck delight and nearby finds Mark’s trusty Machete. David walks back to the hide on the ground and gets to scraping the hide with Mark’s Machete. He removes the bits and chunks of meat, connective tissue and blubber from the hide scraping them all away.
Satisfied with his work David folds the hide skin to skin; rolls it from two directions to meet in the middle.
He gathers the rope. With a length of it he wraps a loop around each end of the rolled up hide. He carries it through the rain to a large tree with a low-hanging branch at the edge of the clearing.
He cuts a slender tree 10 or 12 feet tall down with the hatchet. He removes the branches. He attaches a foreleg of the skin to either end of the sapling. He throws the rope, weighted with a stick, over the bough. He ties one end of the rope to the sapling and hoists the hide into the air. Thunder and lightning cut into the night. The hide moves ominously in the wind and rain; a heavy curtain.
David leaves his tools in a pile beside the tent. He pulls off his boots and socks. He feels his toes in the mud. He strips out of his pants and shorts and abandons them on the ground. He returns to the pants for his pocketknife. He emptied his other pockets earlier. He shucks his shirt careless to the ground. He drops the knife in the tent.
The rain falls on his pale naked frame in the darkening clearing. He washes himself. He scrubs the water the length of his legs and arms and rejoices in their membership. He cleans himself as fully as can be done in a clearing in the rain. He will not feel clean for a long time.
He ducks into the tent and closes the door behind him. He uses the towel inside to dry himself as he kneels on the wool blanket inside the door. David finds a pair of pants with cargo pockets, shorts, socks and a white t-shirt.
He pulls the togs on and finds his cigarette pack. He lights one up quick and looks for some liquor. The cooler is not in the tent. Ah, the flask in the backpack will do nicely. Rye whisky.
He opens the flask, smells of the contents and takes a hefty swig.
David: Fuck.
