Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 1 - Chapter 3.1

Chapter 3: A Chef Trainee in Another World

1

“Perhaps you’re the embodiment of calamity itself, or something of that sort...”

By the time Ai Fa muttered that, she had done up her hair, slipped on her usual clothing, and gallantly tossed her fur cloak over her shoulders.

“Perhaps it is too great of an honor for someone so lowly as myself to ask for, but could you explain what you mean?”

“Normally, a giant madarama snake would never appear at the base of the mountain, but one got washed downstream, and then we were attacked by a giba wandering about the forest before the sun had even reached its peak. Nothing good seems to happen when you’re around.”

Hmph, I see...

Now that she mentioned it, I had also seen her unwed body in the nude. I wanted to bring that up, but considering my life had only just been saved, I thought better of it.

And apparently, that was the right decision to make. After all, when I instead just silently nodded back, Ai Fa made a face like she regretted what she’d just said.

“...Still, even though the situation had been entirely unexpected, it was my fault for letting my guard down and not noticing the madarama. And you ended up saving me in the aftermath, so for that at least, you have my gratitude.”

After that she cast her gaze down a bit, then looked at me with slightly upturned eyes and pointlessly fidgeted with her necklace, before finally muttering, “Thank you...” so quietly that it was barely within the audible range for a human being.

She almost seemed like a small child, somehow.

As my heart pounded fast for no reason at all, I forced out a stupid sounding, “Ah, no, it was nothing... And I mean, I didn’t even realize a giba had gotten that close to me. I mean, you saved my life, so... Thank you.”

Besides, I got the feeling that most everything had been forgiven thanks to Ai Fa’s mood having recovered.

If Ai Fa had been crushed to death by that massive snake... Just the thought of it made me want to keel over and die.

“Now then, regardless of the circumstances leading up to it, we’ve got a giba here. Shouldn’t we finish him off while he’s still nice and fresh?”

The giba whose head Ai Fa had busted in was still twitching at my feet.

It was a pretty small one compared to the giba I had encountered yesterday, but from eyeballing it I’d still say it was around 150 centimeters and 70 kilos. And its horns and tusks were still plenty impressive. It certainly was something, being able to take down such a sturdy looking animal with a single blow...

“Right. Well then, first comes chopping off the legs,” Ai Fa said, grabbing hold of her blade.

“Hold on a second!” I yelled out. “Bloodletting should come before dissection, right? Why are you going to chop it to bits right at the start?”

“Bloodletting...? What’s that?”

“What?! You’ve never even done it before? It’s only natural that the meat would have such a heavy stench in that case!” I cried out. Ai Fa, meanwhile, just looked back at me with a truly puzzled look on her face.

Still, I do love that blank look... But this was a pretty serious issue for the people of forest’s edge.

“Now listen, when meat stinks, it comes from the blood. If you perform bloodletting on it, even giba meat shouldn’t have much of a stench to it, right?”

“...I don’t really understand what you’re saying. Blood flows as it pleases, does it not?”

“I’m telling you, you can’t just leave it at that... Wait, now’s not the time to be casually talking about this! It’ll be too late once the giba’s heart stops. Okay, I’ll explain it all later, but for right now just lend me a small knife.”

Ai Fa handed me a knife with a look of doubt on her face, and then I leaned over the giba’s back.

Now then, I may have talked a big game, but I’d actually only ever seen a member of the hunting club perform a bloodletting. Plus there was no guarantee that a giba and a boar had the same inner workings, so it was pretty much down to luck whether or not this would succeed.

A boar’s heart and veins should be in roughly the same place as a human’s.

I bent over the giba’s large frame, remembering back on the hunter’s words.

I placed the tip up against where the giba’s thick neck met its body, then jabbed it in with a single stabbing motion.

And then... hardly any blood came gushing out.

Did I mess up?

Well, I guess things are never quite that easy.

And so having no other choice, I slid the knife down towards its chest.

The carotid artery, or the aorta... Cutting either would do.

I steadily moved the tip of the blade down bit by bit, struggling with the stiff fur all the while, until finally, fresh blood came spurting out. When I hurriedly pulled out the blade, even more of the dark red liquid came flowing forth.

I did it... probably. As long as I didn’t damage the heart directly, I mean.

“The heart is the organ that helps blood to circulate throughout the entire body. If you can cut one of the major arteries leading from it without damaging the heart itself, then you can effectively drain the body of all its blood.”

The carotid artery would be fine, too, but if I ended up messing up the organs in its throat, the giba could suffocate and its heart would stop. In other words, it would carry a definite risk.

“Honestly, it’d be better to suspend it from a tree for this, but that would’ve been some pretty heavy labor. And this should be plenty fine, anyway.”

Since I didn’t hear a response I turned around to look, and sure enough Ai Fa had the same puzzled expression on her face as always.

“Why would we need to drain the whole body of blood when we’re only bringing the legs back?”

“Huh?”

“Even if we bring it all back with us, it will just end up going bad before we can eat all of it. Large families may bring a whole giba back in order to skin off its pelt, but for the most part people only take the rear legs.”

“That’s a huge waste! You seriously just throw away a feast like this and head on back?”

“If we simply leave it in the woods, then the mundt and other animals will feast on its corpse and clean things up nicely. And besides, to let food spoil without eating it is a sin.”

“Ah, I see. Well, that’s not a problem, then. But why is it that you bring the legs back? Thigh meat’s not bad, but there are plenty of tastier cuts.”

“That’s not true at all. Giba meat all stinks, but the part with the least stench is the rear legs.”

Oh, so that’s it. I suppose if you don’t know how to bloodlet, then the parts inside the torso really may have a worse stench about them than the legs. And when you cut off a leg you would be hacking through an artery too, which would let out plenty of blood.

Still, it almost felt like they were procrastinating here, hunting giba for 80 years but never stumbling upon the idea of bloodletting. When meat tastes bad, you should keep on studying and experimenting until you can make it tastier. That gluttony is precisely what drove the development of mankind’s great culinary culture!

As that thought ran through my head, the flow of blood finally came to a stop. The previously trembling giba also finally ceased all movement.

In other words, it was dead.

Rest in peace, I silently prayed.

Then, as I carefully washed off the grass, dirt, and excrement that dirtied the giba’s fur using the river water, I turned and looked back at Ai Fa.

“Alright. Now for the next step... Hey, would it be alright if I go ahead and stubbornly insist that we bring the whole thing back with us?”

“Do as you please. As long as the horns and tusks are intact, I don’t mind,” Ai Fa replied with a shrug of her shoulders and a complex expression on her face that made it hard to tell if she was apathetic or interested.

After shooting her a sidelong glance, I stabbed the knife into the giba’s torso. This thing seemed to have a far better cut than the knife I used back in farming camp, so I had to take care not to cut too deep as I opened up the belly of the beast.

What I was handling now was the removal of the innards.

This wasn’t all that difficult of a task, but there was one point to it that required particular attention: Making sure not to damage the large intestine, gallbladder, urinary bladder, and the like, as they all had a terrible stench. If that transferred into the meat itself, then the bloodletting would be for naught.

I inserted the tip of the blade into the diaphragm, then started to pull out all sorts of organs.

First up was the small intestine, then the large. Next up was the stomach. Then the liver, pancreas, lungs, and heart.

It was actually kind of fun, picking them out one after another.

Apparently a giba really wasn’t built all that differently than a boar after all.

The final hurdle waited for me at the bottom of the nearly empty abdominal cavity: the urinary bladder. I had to be really, really careful so that it didn’t burst...

Hm...?

There were still some sort of organs I didn’t recognize left below it. Were they something unique to the giba? At any rate, I went ahead and carefully removed them, too.

The two big, elliptical objects had been next to each other, and felt fairly firm.

...Ah.

These are testicles, aren’t they?

The boar I’d prepared in the past had been a female, so naturally it didn’t have these.

With great respect, I placed them on top of the rock as well.

With that, I’d finished removing its innards.

Naturally, when I turned around, Ai Fa still had the same blank expression.

“It’s like I’m watching one of those shamans I’ve heard tell of performing a ritual. Is it truly necessary to do all of that just to eat meat?”

“It is. Still, it just plain wouldn’t be possible to handle the rest here, sure enough. We’ll need to get it all the way back to the house, but... how?”

Ai Fa gave a little sigh then tossed out a “hold on for a moment” before disappearing into the forest.

In the meantime, I used water from the river to clean out the giba’s empty chest cavity, too.

Fortunately, ticks didn’t seem to exist it in this world. If they did, then they would surely waste no time in hopping from the giba’s chilling corpse to the warmth of my body.

“Here. This should do fine, right?”

Ai Fa had returned in less than five minutes, holding a wooden pole that was about as long as I was tall. It had a strangely jet black sort of color to it, and though I could spy spots where branches had clearly been removed, it was a perfectly straight pole. I’d guess it was about as thick as my wrist, too.

“It’s from a grigee tree. They’re hardy, so it shouldn’t break easily.”

“Uh-huh. So what are we doing with it?”

Ai Fa silently leaned over the giba, then pulled out some leather straps from her cloak and started tying its limbs to the grigee pole.

“I see! So you’re used to doing this, huh?”

“I just learned from watching others. This is how the men of large families bring an entire giba home in order to skin it.”

“Huh. But you don’t skin off their pelts? Your cloak’s from a giba though, isn’t it?”

“It takes multiple people to peel a pelt, and besides, that’s woman’s work.”

I’m sure the fact that I was thinking but you’re a woman was clearly written on my face. I mean, even though I hadn’t said anything, Ai Fa was still shooting me an annoyed-looking scowl.

“It’s possible to offer up tusks in order to buy a pelt. That means it’s more efficient to just use the time it would take to skin a pelt to hunt instead, since if I fail to do so I’ll end up starving to death. And regardless... I don’t have any family left to do it with. Do you have some sort of problem with that?”

“Of course not. It’s just... I figured if you were saying that skinning pelts was woman’s work, then does that mean hunting giba is man’s work?”

“Naturally. There’s no such thing as a woman who hunts giba.”

“B-But you’re a woman, aren’t you?”

I ended up opening my big mouth after all.

Ai Fa looked away in a huff, then started to bind the front legs.

“I’m the head of the Fa household before I’m a woman. My father taught me how to hunt giba in order to survive, so it isn’t any inconvenience for me.”

“I see.”

Still, just what had Ai Fa’s father been thinking, teaching his daughter to be a master giba hunter? She hadn’t been isolated from the rest of the settlement until after his death, because she had earned the animosity of Diga Suun. As a result of that she couldn’t rely on anyone else and had to survive all on her own. The techniques her father had taught her saved her from that predicament, but there’s no way he could have predicted that his daughter would be isolated after his death.

Wait... This isn’t something I should be thinking so hard on.

I mean, my pops had pounded his cooking techniques into my head since I was a kid. And then he told me to go out and look for something I enjoyed even more than cooking.

Maybe that’s just how dads are.

Still, even so...

Unlike me, Ai Fa wasn’t given any choice. Her only option was to live like a man, by hunting giba. Even though she’s such a beautiful, kind woman...

“What’s with that weird look on your face?” Ai Fa asked, suddenly standing up. There was a blaze burning in her wildcat-like eyes, and her dark brown face had just a hint of red to it. “Now listen here. You committed a taboo. Normally someone in your position wouldn’t even be able to complain if they had one of their eyeballs scooped out. But you saved me from that attack, so I’m overlooking the matter. But if I were to change my mind, I could give you a real painful experience whenever I please.”

“Huh?” I questioned with a tilt of my head, and then I flew into a serious panic. “I-I wasn’t imagining you naked or anything! Just what do you take me for?! And hey, you just made me remember that sight even though I had stored it away in a treasure box in my memories!”

“Shut up! You’re making me think I should take away your tongue before one of your eyeballs!”

“Ugh, this is stupid, so let’s just stop already! Come on, we’re all prepared, right? So let’s hurry up and get to carrying this guy!”

Trying to flee from Ai Fa’s wrath, I leaned over towards the giba’s head. When I did that, I spied the heaping pile of innards I had left. “I really would like to bring these back to try cooking with, too. But considering my skill level and the fact that I don’t even have a refrigerator, that just wouldn’t be possible.”

“Are you actually being serious?”

“Of course. I figure every part of a giba but its cry is probably edible.”

People tended to say stuff like that about pigs rather than boars, but whatever.

When I went and placed the end of the pole on my shoulder, I felt an unbelievable weight pressing down on me. Yeah, this guy was definitely in the 70 kilo range.

“If I catch you whining, I’m leaving you then and there and heading back on my own.”

Suddenly the pole lifted up in the rear, lowering the load on my shoulder a bit.

“I’ll work hard for the sake of a delicious dinner. And hey, you just went through that horrible ordeal, so are you really feeling alright?”

“Quiet, you! Don’t bring that moment up ever again!”

Oh, my. Had that incident inflicted even greater damage to Ai Fa’s pride than I had thought? Well, even if she was a strong-minded giba hunter, she was still a young woman. Even if it weren’t for the taboo, it still would have been totally natural to be embarrassed.

But anyway, the real meat of preparing a proper dinner still lay ahead of me.

“Well then, let’s head off! I’ll be sure to make a dinner delicious enough to make up for the effort, so I’m counting on you!”