Scavengers

I'd found a dead dog on the road, a fat female Beagle, and I'd been reading about the eyesight of birds. Put it in a garbage bag and took it home. Thought about cooking the loins, using a recipe called "Dried Dog" which actually sounded rather good (a Chinese recipe), thin strips of meat, dredged in salt and spice, dried in the sun, then reconstituted in a stew, but she was a little ripe. I was interested in how scavenger birds found dead animals, so I built a crude shelter that hid the body from view. I didn't open up the carcass, which I usually do with roadkill, and just put the body under a scrap plywood roof, downwind. Interestingly, the vultures were on site within a day (smell?) but they couldn't find it. Within three days it was gone, no blood-print, a coyote (I could see the tracks) had hauled it back to her den. It's a good mom, I think, who takes her kits a dead Beagle. Stopped at the lake and picked a mess of cattail shoots, they're very good with mushroom gravy, you just peel them and steam the cores, salt and pepper; a quick sauce of morels in brown butter. I'm spoiled, when I think about it, the way I eat. Linda called, and commented on that very fact, that I ate very well, and didn't spend much money in the process. This, of course, is a product of not having much money and still wanting to eat. Contain your desires within the possible. Rice is good here, or a pot of grits, if you're Irish, a few pounds of boiled potatoes. Mixed greens cooked with salt-pork. Corn bread with cracklings. In a land-mark decision, snails cooked in sea water. It's a pain in the ass, eating barnacles with a straightened paper clip or a safety pin. The Pennsylvania Dutch call scrapple pawnhass, which has become my new favorite word. I made excellent scrapple for years and it was always in high demand. Sliced and fried it's a breakfast food of the highest rank. When I first made some for my friend Roy, in Mississippi, served with a little maple syrup, he swore it was the best thing he'd ever eaten. On one memorable occasion, he and I served it at a church fund-raiser in Babylon (the Black enclave of Duck Hill) and it became very popular. I was free-ranging hogs at the time, so when he got enough orders, whatever time of year, he'd come over and we'd kill one, skin it out (for the lucrative bonus of cracklings) and make 200 lbs of product (20 pounds of meat, 7 pounds of cornmeal, various herbs and spices), and we'd both make $100, which seemed like good money in that time and place. It was almost all profit, because he grew the corn and I had more pigs than you could shake a stick at. His friend, at the mill, ground the corn, Cecil, a black man in whiteface from the dust, after hours, did the grinding. We'd have to buy a small tank of gas, to fire the grill where we were making cracklings and lard, buy some salt and pepper, and we'd drink beer, very good beer that I'd brewed, and when Roy got a little drunk, we could talk about racial inequality. This was my Masters Degree in Sociology.