Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

“My god,” Alan croaked, speaking for Amanda as well. “How do we get all of this back to the valley? He’s gotta be five hundred pounds!”

“Seven hunnerd, I’d bet,” Lum nodded. He reached under his jacket and pulled out a knife. It wasn’t one of those long-bladed combat knives like some of the others carried or even like Jake’s old-fashioned Ka-Bar. It was just a simple, deep-bellied bushcraft knife with a thick spine and a blade not much longer than the width of his palm. “We’ll quarter him with this and haul him out a piece at a time.”

“With that little thing? Shouldn’t we have an ax? Or a saw?”

Lum laughed and said, “Don’t worry. It’ll all make sense.”

He started with a dorsal cut running down the length of the animal’s spine, stopping just above the hips. He had to saw a bit at the neck and cautioned that it was best to start either with a knife that was sharp enough to shave or carry two knives, saying that the leather up there would dull a blade faster than anything. At the hind quarter, he cut a slit down the front of the thigh and then punched the tip of his knife through the thin membrane of skin at the hock between the thick tendon and bone. He put his hand through the hole and grabbed the tendon like it was a handle, lifted the leg up, and stepped it out of the hide through the slit he’d made like it was a pant leg. Lifting the leg higher, he cut around underneath it where it joined the body. He continued to cut while pushing up on the leg until he’d finally clipped the tendon at the hip.

“Fetch me one of them totes from the backpack,” Lum said.

Amanda pulled one of the canvas game bags from Rebecca’s forgotten backpack and walked over to where Lum stood. He continued to work away at the meat at the hip until it was all disconnected. He lifted, and the entire leg came up easily from the body. He panted as he held it out in front of him and nodded vigorously to Amanda, who bent to lift the bag up over the leg from the bottom. When it was in place, Lum allowed it to rest in the snow and began to gather the loose canvas of the bag’s opening up around the hoof.

He nodded at the backpack and said, “Let’s have that tape, now.” She retrieved the duct tape and handed it over. She held everything in place for Lum, who had let go, and waited while he wrapped the bag up tight between the knee and fetlock.

“You wrap ’em up in a tote mostly to keep the flies off but flies ain’t so much a problem in this weather,” he explained as he worked. “Even so, the better you do at keeping your meat from gettin’ all gaumed up with dirt and hair, the less you’ll have to work later when you butcher it all down back home.”

He carried the leg a few feet away to lie in the snow and returned to work on the hide.

“Best to pull the cape off all of a piece, an’ leave it attached to the head, at the neck there just under the jaw. Later on, we’ll be able to clip it, tan it, and have a nice winter blanket.” He had the skin of the animal rolled off from the center of the spine, along the flank, and down to the shoulder before the others knew what was happening, pointing at various parts and talking while he went.

“That pocket of meat runnin’ along the side of the spine up there is the backstrap. Up at the shoulders, there, is the brisket an’ all the grindin’ meat; your burgers and such. Back there at the hip, just under the ribs is the tenderloin. We’ll take it all.”

He slit the skin at the animal’s armpit, worried away at the knee joint with his knife until the foreleg came off, stepped the remainder out of the hide, and worked the blade around the shoulder just as he’d done at the hind quarter until the whole structure lifted away from the body. Rather than having him stop, Amanda and Alan stood by with another bag (a “tote”) to receive the leg.

He showed them how to fillet the backstrap off the animal, then how to clip the tenderloin from the hip and expose it for removal, being careful not to puncture the stomach, which squeezed out from behind the ribs as he dug around along the spine to get at the bright red muscle. Then he showed them how to clean as much material as could be salvaged from the chest, shoulder, and ribs until each rib was an isolated red bar enclosing the animal’s entrails. When that side was finished, Lum and Alan each took a leg and rolled the bull onto his opposite side to repeat the process. He finished by extracting the heart, liver, and kidneys.

“We’ll cook the heart an’ organs up tonight over the far,” Lum said. “Getcha some oil an’ fry it all up. Some of the best eatin’ you ever had.”

Amanda looked at all of the canvas bags lying around in the snow next to the stripped trunk and now-separated head (Lum had first clipped the spinal cord with his knife and then popped the head off the neck easily with a firm push of the antlers) and said, “This is still more than we can handle.”

“Yep,” Lum agreed. “It’ll be a few trips. We’ll hang what we can’t take with us from a tree an’ come back for it later. Might could make a little sled with a couple of branches to carry more, but it’ll still be a few trips no matter what we do. We’re up in these’ere mountains at least another couple of days getting him all the way down to the jeep.”

“Oh, man…” moaned Alan, who was not looking forward to carrying those heavy legs over any significant distance.

“Cheer up,” Lum said. “He’ll feed our people a good, long time. You’ll be surprised how far this’ll go. Feedin’ your people ain’t never a shame.”

He hefted up one of the hind legs and hung it over his shoulder. Whistling happily, he began the trip back down the slope to their camp. “Hang what you can’t carry!” he shouted back and disappeared around the copse at the bottom.

“Attempted to pin Jake down for a date and time again but no luck. I’m pretty sure he’s ducking me; don’t really understand why. He seemed supportive of the idea when George suggested it, but now it’s as though he always has someplace to be if I mention it. Spoke to George regarding the issue; he asked me to skip to interviewing some of the others and that he’d go talk with Jake about it. George seems pretty confident he can get Jake to play ball. I wish him luck…”

George Oliver’s experience suggested that as one got older, the body began to disregard such necessities as sleep and food. This progression came about through no conscious direction of will on his part; things seemed to just happen naturally as time went by. Summer tumbled into fall, fall decayed into winter, and George simply needed less of everything for his sustenance compared to his youth.

While George was not a man of science by any means, he liked to believe that he was a man of reason, and this gradual realization of the final progression through his twilight years was agreeable to him. It made sense, so to speak, in a new world where making good, reasonable sense appeared to be in some sort of decline. Or maybe the world was really just self-correcting back to its natural state… he wondered about that often. Maybe the brief window of reason, order, and prosperity previously enjoyed was only a hiccup in the long march of eons; a mistake that should never have manifested in a universe composed right-wise of chaos.

George was unsure which of these perspectives was true; didn’t particularly care. Whatever the answer happened to be, it meant that four AM was his new six thirty. Any attempt to press his body deeper into the mattress and reclaim sleep was pure vanity; his eyes popped open at the same time each morning and stayed that way. No matter what he actually wanted, the only realistic option he had was to grumble, stretch through about a hundred skeletal pops and cracks, clear his throat, and swing his legs out into the cold morning air.