Entry Island(71)

But I also knew that if he saw me coming he would panic and try to get back on his feet. And if I got too close, those antlers could be lethal. I dropped to one knee and stayed stock-still. He hadn’t seen me, and I was still downwind.

Very slowly I approached him from the rear. One soft, careful step at a time I gained on him, until I saw the steam rising from his coat, and his stertorous breathing filled my ears. I laid down my crossbow and quiver and took out my father’s long hunting knife. I would have to be quick and accurate.

Close enough now to smell him, I was on him in a single move, my knee pushed hard into the back of his neck, pulling his antlers towards me with my left hand. I reached around under his chin with my knife to draw the blade across his throat, severing both the jugular vein and the carotid artery. What little life there was left in his heart pumped the last of his blood out on to the grass.

I slid off him, to lie in the hollow by his head and watch his big doe eyes cloud over, just as my father’s had done. He looked at me now, his life draining away, his pain dying with him. And all I could feel was guilt at the length of time it had taken me to find him.

When he was gone I got to my knees and rolled him on to his back. I grasped the skin of the scrotum and pulled it away from his body to cut it off, and remembered what my father always said when he performed this first, ritual act of the gralloch. You’ll no be needin’ these nae mair. And I ached again at his loss, and the loss too of this fine animal. I was sick of death.

But I forced myself to concentrate now, remembering how my father did this. It was vital, he always said, that the guts be removed intact. Any spillage would contaminate the meat.

I made a small incision and inserted two fingers, palm up, to stop the blade of my knife from catching the intestines, and slid it up towards the base of the sternum, opening up the abdominal wall. And so the gralloch began.

I worked in concentrated silence, with only the sound of my own breathing for company. It was hard, stomach-churning work, and I tried not to think too much about how this had once been a proud, sentient creature.

The fat of the deer was thick and soft when still warm, but it solidified in the cold. It covered my hands and forearms, gore from the cavity congealing in it so that it seemed as if I wore bright red gloves. I grabbed handfuls of sphagnum to try to clean it off, but it was an almost impossible task.

Finally the organs and intestines of the beast lay steaming in the grass and I rested for a while on my knees, leaning forward with my elbows planted in the peat, my forehead buried in the grass. I wanted to weep. But there was no time for self-pity. And just as I had seen my father do before me, I used mosses to wipe out the cavity, and rolled the creature over on to its back. I removed the coil of rope from my shoulder and tied it around the antlers, and along the top of the nose to loop around the jaws, hoping this would keep the head straight and stop the antlers catching on every rock and heather root as I dragged it.

But I had not anticipated just how weak I was. Even with all its insides removed, the beast was unimaginably heavy. I looped the rope around my chest beneath my armpits so that I could lean my whole body weight forward to pull it over the uneven ground, but I managed no more than two hundred yards before falling to my knees, physically and mentally spent. There was no way I could get the beast home.

Tears flowed then, and I gave full vent to my frustration and despair, knowing that both God and my father would be witness to my failure. My anguish echoed around the glen in the rain.

Ten minutes or more must have passed before I started to think what would my father have done. He would never have accepted defeat. Whatever the problem, he used to say, there was always an answer. And when the answer came to me it was simple. If I couldn’t take the whole animal, then I would take a part of it.

The best meat is at the rear. The haunches. And I realised that somehow I needed to separate them from the front end of the animal. So I steeled myself to do battle with the beast once more.

But even after I had cut through the flesh and skin and hair along the bottom edge of each of the last ribs, the two halves of the animal were still attached by the spinal ligaments. To expose them to my knife I was forced to twist the rear half in one direction and the front half in the other. Exhausting work, and it took me several minutes to recover before seeking out the ligaments with the tip of my knife to sever them. Then one final push, twisting the haunches through a full 360 degrees to completely disarticulate the spine. And at last, with sweat almost blinding me, I had separated them from the rest of the carcass. They were, of course, still connected at the pelvis, but I hoped that would allow me to use my back and shoulders to carry them, with one leg crooked over each shoulder.