Year of the Snake

Antelope Jerky

28 Antelope Jerky That smell, something like wet dog, stayed on our hands days after skinning the gutted meat shell of hollowedout antelope on the back lawn— alternately shearing through the opaque membrane of fat that held skin to flesh with a hunting knife, or pulling off larger sections of hide by punching down with a clenched fist to reveal the cool smooth lengths of sinewy purple meat. Finally, the hooves and head were sawed off, my father performing a sort of craniotomy to salvage the pronghorn antlers, boyish and pleased. On the mountains, quaking aspens were beginning to turn, and the chill settling in as the porch light 29 was turned on had the precision edge to etch out lacy frost flowers overnight on the window panes. Our fingers ached underneath the garden hose as we rinsed off knives, gristly bits of grainy bone caught in the saw’s teeth. The next day my mother honed her fierce cleaver, long boning knives, stainless steel shears, and butchered the antelope one limb at a time, my father performing tidy amputations in the garage and bringing in a new section when my mother called him to say she was ready. The meat was carved into steaks, chunked into stew meat— slivers and odd bits tossed into a metal bowl for jerky. My mother neatly wrapped everything in freezer paper and labeled 30 the packages in Japanese with black magic marker, English translations underneath to be polite. There was a special jerky recipe— brown sugar, soy sauce, black pepper and Worcestershire, onion powder. The leftover meat was fashioned into slitted strips, marinated overnight, then hung in rows over the wire oven racks. Low heat for a day, the house smoky, warm fragrance of teriyaki, everyone so impatient to taste—that same jerky still in storage today in my parents’ basement, in Rubbermaid bins, layered in snug wax-paper rows, briny and hard as rock, a kind of memento mori in case of blizzards, the meat having 31 now long outlived the antelope. I remember one year my mother sliced open her thumb, was rushed to the hospital for stitches, a tetanus shot. That doctor, he was so surprised I was cutting up an antelope, my mother said later with a strange kind of pride as she held up her thumb, bruised and swollen, the black ends of thread from the stitches wiry and poking up like twisted insect legs—her tiny thumb that, although without the hook of purple scar to interrupt the signature print’s swirl and whorl, I see with a startling flash is the same thumb that I now wear on my own hand, my very own. ...