The Bison Harvest
There is a low lying depression and anxiety plaguing modern life. A symptom of an undiagnosed home sickness to feel a belonging to a greater ecosystem and know ourselves in relation rather than isolation.
Boyd Varty - A Lion Tracker's Guide to Life.
Tucker Max's post was the first time I heard about bison harvesting. I didn't know this was on my menu of options living in Austin. The next one was just a few weeks away. I didn't need any convincing.
An adventure in the Texas countryside and the chance to begin fulfilling my giant-meat-freezer-in-the-garage-fantasies were all I needed.
But I knew I was signing up for much more than that. I was signing up for a ritual my ancestors have been doing for thousands of years - killing, butchering, and eating wild animals. I wasn't just going to learn the mechanics, but experience everything else that came along with it.
My world is a comfortable matrix - a recently constructed reality with highly engineered buildings, smart phones, roads, cars, appliances and grocery stores.
Which is fucking cool.
My fridge is awesome. My bed is awesome. My house with central air conditioning is awesome. Grocery stores are awesome. I can have people deliver me fresh food with clicks!
But I sensed a hidden cost. I've never fully connected to the experiences of hunting and gathering my biology had formed around.
What was I missing? Practical skills, obviously. I knew nothing about turning a wild animal into dinner. I knew nothing about the terrain I lived on. I was fragile. I'd be fucked if the world went sideways. Learning where food came from seemed like a smart idea.
But was there something more? Was there a deeper bond with reality I was blind to?
I didn't know, but I suspected I'd meet the kind of people who did - Taylor Collins and Katie Forrest.
Taylor and Katie were once raw vegans who did what might be the most stunning diet reversal imaginable. They went full carnivore. Not only that, they started meat-bar company - EPIC bars. Yes, the bars you see in Whole Foods and gas stations all over the country. In 2016 they sold the company to General Mills.....for 100 million dollars.
One hundred MILLION dollars. <pinky-on-mouth-gesture>
They then bought a ton of land in Fredericksburg Texas, an hour and a half away from Austin, and created Roam Ranch - a regenerative farming operation.
Now I don't know what I would do with hundred million dollars. It suspect it would involve private jets, yachts, Victoria Secret models, Michelin starred restaurants, exclusive parties, and maybe the occasional jaunt to space.
I know what wouldn't be on high that list - working on a fucking ranch. Who were these people and what did they know that I didn't?
I wanted to find out. But I didn't want to find out alone, so I roped in my best friend Andrew so we could find out together.
Andrew and I drive out of Austin, Texas, into Texas, Austin, and then into Texas, Texas. Here space is measured in acres rather than square feet. Teslas became pickup trucks. Rainbow flags became flags warning about the perils of stepping on snakes. Paved roads became dirt.
Speaking of dirt roads in Texas. A certain anxiety arises when driving down one where PRIVATE PROPERTY signs hang all over. There's an implicit understanding that somewhere down the wrong road at at the wrong time will be a shotgun wielding Texan whose been fantasizing about exercising their property rights.
Luckily we didn't find out.
We get to the ranch and met the participants. There were the scruffy neck-bearded Oakly-wearing truck-driving country folk you'd expect. And some you wouldn't - University-of-California-sweater wearing city people. There were seniors, infants, this ethnicity, that ethnicity. Yada yada yada. Real diversity.
Then there's Taylor and Katie. Nothing about them says "worth-ungodly-amounts-of-money". They have the kind of genuine warmth so many people are surprised to find when they move to Texas. They're the kinds of people the phrase "down to earth" was made for. In their case the application was literal, not figurative.
Katie's safety run-down amounted to "don't do stupid shit". They explained how the "harvest" would go down. It's called a harvest rather than a hunt because bison don't run away from you. They just....stand there.
Basically one of the ranchers was going to shoot the bison between the eyes. That was the only way to ensure a quick and painless death. They pass around the bullet they were going to use.
But I could tell they were nervous. When you participate in an experience like this the implicit expectation is that everything is going to go well. But that's not the real world. Sometimes things go wrong.
What happens if you miss? someone asked.
They paused. I saw how uncomfortable the question made them. That's exactly what happened the day before. Things "went wrong". They didn't get too far into the details, but I could tell it was bad.
I later understood what "going wrong" meant. Basically, bison stampede a weakened herd member ruining it's meat and fur. Part of it is alpha-male bison eliminating rivals. Part of it is a herd survival mechanism to ensure the body doesn't attract predators. It sounded terrible.
Nature is beautiful. Nature is brutal.
Shooters rarely sleep well the night before a hunt, they told us. The pressure is immense.
We load up onto the trucks and make our way to the herd. There's over a hundred of these big-horned afro-haired lumbering fluff-cows roaming around.
How do you choose which one to kill? somebody asks.
They typically choose 3-year old males for smart ranchy reasons I didn't fully understand and almost never shoot lady-bison since they make baby bison.
But sometimes, they explained, the bison chooses itself.
While the shooting team went off to plan the kill, we got a quick lesson in regenerative farming. I wasn't going to learn everything in a few minutes, but here's what I absorbed.
Basically, the land Katie and Taylor bought was fucked from decades of chemical rich monocrop agriculture. Few things grew and lived.
Fixing that meant re-introducing wildlife. That's where Bison enter the scene. Wild seeds fly into the Bison's fur. The Bison poop, stomp poopy seeds into the earth and enrich the soil. Stuff grows. Insects come. Wildlife comes and predators follow suit. More stuff poops, more seeds get planted, the cycle continues and voilà the land is restored.
Circle of Life!
Takeaway 1. Stinky semi-sentient fluff cows are better gardeners than I am. They can restore an entire ecosystem by shitting and stomping everywhere.
Takeaway 2. Bison are awesome.
Takeaway 3. If our food system relies on mega monocrop agriculture that destroys the land.....that's no bueno. It should sound obvious. If the land we use to grow food can't make food anymore....where does all the food come from?
Takeaway 4: I began to understand Taylor and Katie. If their work was having the impact they said it was that meant they were literally saving the earth. I bet that felt good.
The lesson stopped. It was time to go silent.
Off in the distance we heard a loud POP.
Direct hit. Clean kill.
Bison aren't like people. They don't run around going crazy when their herd member gets gunned down.
But in other ways they are like people. It's hard to imagine anything other than us feeling sadness. But that's exactly what it looked like. They crowded around their dead friend wondering what the shit just happened.
The ranchers allowed the bison a few minutes to process, mourn, grieve, or whatever it was they were doing. They may be emotional creatures, but they are also hungry practical ones. A tractor hauling food out in the distance was enough to lure them away. They don't need as much time to process as we do it seems.
With the herd off lunching we circled the dead bison. It was the first time I got to see it up close. I shut my eyes, took a deep breath and tried connecting to how the shooter must have felt before and after he pulled the trigger.
The fear of missing. The relief of not. The grief and sadness from killing something you revere. The satisfaction of knowing the work will feed you and the people you love. The gratitude of having the opportunity.
I know if I were that Bison I wouldn't want a bullet scrambling my brain that day. But if I had choice in the matter a quick pop in the forehead while eating tasty grass with my bison homies might be the best way to go out.
The first thing I noticed was the bright morning sky jeweled over it's eyes amidst shades of fluffy brown fur. Then there was the pool of bright red blood and gore pooling beneath it's head.
This is when things get weird, the rancher said.
He slit it's neck, stuck his finger in and popsicled the bloody finger right into his mouth.
Fucking gnarly
Blood wasn't new to me. I'd happily stack my freezer with blood pudding, boudin noir and Argentinian morcilla. But this was something else. Sticking my finger into an animals neck whose heart was still beating was a whole new level.
But I wasn't afraid of weird. That's what I was here for.
I went in and stuck my finger right into it's neck. It was HOT, like steaming hot. I put the bloody finger it in my mouth.
In that moment the taste of the blood mixed with the scent of it's stinky fur and nearby piles of shit. It was a reminder that reconnecting with earth often meant smelling earth.
It took everything I had to not gag.
Don't get me wrong. The blood actually tasted good. It didn't have that band-aid taste blood typically had. Instead what I tasted was....bison. I don't know how else to put it. This was purest essence of what this creature was. It was warm grassy beefy earthy....and bloody. Andrew dove in right behind me.
We poked and prodded the bison to get to know it more. We touched it's seed-matted fur, it's tough horns, the non-shit-covered parts of it's hooves and felt it's heart beat it's final pumps.
Soon another tractor came and fork-lifted the bison back to be skinned and harvested.
We detoured on our way back to hang out with some wild turkeys. It was my first time ever doing so. I quickly learned two things about them.
Turkeys are stunningly gorgeous. Their plumage is something straight out of a late 19th century aristocratic French court.
Turkeys are hideous and terrifying. Their heads are mishmashes of bright blue and red saggy ballsack textured skin with soulless black orbs in place of eyes. They're something straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch hell scape.
And then there's the gobbling. One gobbling turkey is cute. Fifty is maddening. I had a dark revenge fantasy about locking my enemies in a room full of em.
Whatever primal mammalian bond I had with the bison did not translate to these satanic hell-birds.
By the time we returned the Bison was mostly skinned. They laid out it's hide and we got to poke and prod the bison again, but this time from the inside. It's was a bloody stinky fatty fluff blanket. Some day I will own one.
Now that the bison was...uh....naked....it was time to harvest it's organs. The first to go was it's giant stomach. The harvester was careful to make sure he didn't take a surprise shower in semi-digested-grass and stomach-bile.
Once that was out the rest was quick. The heart, kidneys, pancreas, liver, and yes, even the testicles all found their way to a tasting table.
It's time to get weird again!, Taylor called out. Whose comin?!
I was here to get weird. So I came. Our raw organ charcuterie board was ready to sample.
Here's my raw organ ranking in reverse order.
5) Pancreas: It was a flat purple overly chewy protein matter absent much flavor. Not much to see here.
4) Liver: I actually like liver in a non-ironic way. I like it's gamey flavor and soft texture. Raw liver is a tad different though. The flavor was great, but it had the texture of crunchy apples which I didn't like. I'd eat it again though.
3) Testicles: Let me get this out of the way. I'm comfortable enough in my masculinity to put raw balls in my mouth. Protein is protein. There's two sack layers to go through before getting to the squishy edible parts. They had a soft orange color and a mild, but approachable flavor. The texture was great. It reminded me of raw salmon. Testicles would make a great addition to a Hawaiian poke rice.
2) Kidney: Kidney was surprisingly pleasant. It had a similar organy-flavor of the liver, but with much more palatable texture. I would have this any day.
1) Heart. It's not even close. Raw heart doesn't even taste....raw. It's almost like eating rare steak in both flavor and texture. Heart can go toe-to-toe (or hoof to hoof in thic case) against any cut of meat on the animal.
But there was one slight problem.
Taylor was using some janky ass salt that could have been at the bottom of a McDonalds fry bag.
Out here I was functionally useless. I knew nothing about bison, ranching, terrain, water retention, turkeys...or anything relevant to the world around me.
But this was one, and probably the only area where I could command relative and relevant domain expertise.
I know cooking. I know food. I know salt. I would not leave without contributing my singular nugget of salty intellectual superiority.
Taylor! Have you ever heard of.....Maldon Sea Salt? I asked.
If you don't know, Maldon is a flaky French salt used by world class chefs the world over. It works great on steak, chocolate chip cookies, and most relevantly, raw organs. If you don’t have some. Get some.
No, I haven't. he said.
Taylor was salt-of-the-earth people who needed better salt.
Dude! Go go get a tub of some Maldon! The best meat deserves the best salt! Some day he'll sprinkle this magically flaky salt onto some raw testicles and thank me.
All organs aside it was time to butcher the remaining meat. Everybody in the group, even the kids helped chop, slice, cut or grind. We got bloody hairy and sweaty. It was awesome.
I got some loin thinking it would be a cakewalk. I know how to cut things! I have fancy knives and a fancy cutting board!
But of course, I live in a simulation. My meat comes pre-cut and pre-packaged. This meat did not.
I had to cut imperfect chunks of meat bearing large straps of tough unchewable silverskin. If you've ever spent way too long chewing flank steak, it's because somebody likely did a bad job cutting the silverskin.
I was back to being an idiot. Andrew carved his meat with style and grace. I hacked and sliced my way to nowhere. It's a miracle I didn't cut myself. Somewhere I owe someone's jaw muscles an apology.
The crazy part was watching something go from roaming the land to something I was stuffing in my cooler. It all happened so fast.
The harvest only lasted a few hours, but it was all I needed. I got to peek outside my comfortable matrix of paved roads, grocery stores and remote controlled air conditioning and into the real world where nothing was taken for granted. Filling my freezer with something that was alive a few hours ago was cool too.
I sensed a big the gap in my consciousness. I knew so little about life and the world I lived in. I got to feel the outdoors, the fresh air, the morning sun, the taste of blood and the smell of shit. I felt sadness, grief, joy, satisfaction and gratitude. What I felt was the beautifully mundane and ordinary experience of being alive.
My gap shrunk that day, if only a little. I had a lot of ground to cover. This was one animal on one piece of land. There was lots of land, lot's of earth, and lot's of myself waiting to be explored. If was anything as fun as this, closing that gap will be an exciting part of my life.
I didn't get enough time with Taylor and Katie, but I suspect they didn't had have that gap. They know where their food coms from. They know hard work and the transformation it brings. They know the land. They know the unsolvably complex emotions that come with killing something they love.
They had all the money in the world, but whatever it was they felt wasn't on sale. I'm not sure I know what that feeling is though.
I am sure whatever it was, it was on the other side of doing what they knew they were supposed to be doing. Some words come to mind - purpose, calling, connection, aliveness, satisfaction, love, gratitude, sublime, peace. But I know these words are - at best - vague approximations of the truth.
Where was that feeling in my life? What was my "ranch"? Did it exist? How would I find it? If I saw it would I have the courage to pursue it?
I don't know. But I knew now was a good time to start finding out.
The first moments in the car ride back were silent as Andrew and I began processing what just happened.
He broke the silence. Let's buy a ranch, he said.
I knew he was joking.
I also knew he wasn't.
Resources
If you live in Austin and want to sign up for future events on the Roam Ranch Website. If you don't you can buy some of their meat on their website. And no, I don't get paid for any of this.