Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 1 - Chapter 3.2

2

A few hours later, we arrived back at Ai Fa’s house.

“Alright! Well then, let’s get started!” I yelled out, the giba’s huge corpse lying before me.

“Do as you please,” Ai Fa muttered in an annoyed tone, her legs crossed and her back leaning against the wall. She was actually probably simply tired rather than seriously upset. Heck, I was feeling pretty exhausted myself.

Just dragging the giba all the way back from the riverside was a huge undertaking, but after that we also had to make a u-turn and head back for our original goal of gathering pico leaves and firewood. There fortunately weren’t any incidents this time around, but by the time we were done, the sun was almost at its peak. In other words, we were working the entire time from early morning till nearly noon, excluding our “break” for our death battle with the giant madarama snake.

Since noontime on had been set aside for giba hunting, we suddenly found ourselves with an opening in our schedule. And so, I went ahead and got to work on preparing the giba.

I grabbed hold of the knife Ai Fa had loaned me, glancing over at her as I did so. After lighting the stove at my request, her job was done, so she simply plopped down and started chewing at her jerky, looking as if she didn’t care in the least what I was doing.

I had already done the bloodletting and organ removal, so naturally the next step was to skin the thing.

There had been a broken sliding door stowed away in the storage room, so I was using that as my workbench. I couldn’t find any desks or anything of the sort so I had to work on the ground but, well, there was no helping that. I turned the giba’s body face up, then placed some lumber I had prepared in advance on either side in order to hold it in place.

I’d be starting off with the hind legs.

I cut a single line around its ankle, beneath the tough hoof. Then I pulled my blade up from the inner part of its leg to its abdomen. Finally, I jammed the tip of the knife between the skin and the meat and started peeling it back.

Hmm, it sure is fatty. The area between the skin and meat was absolutely packed. It must have been around five centimeters...

That was definitely a good thing when it came to food, but it sure did make this whole process tougher. With a lean meat like venison, you could separate the meat from the skin in no time at all.

Well, it was all for the sake of a delicious meal, though. I angled the tip of the blade, taking care to not rip a hole in the pelt while also trying to leave as much of the fat on the meat as possible, then strongly pulled at the skin.

Before long, both of the legs were completely exposed. They stood tall, separated from the outer pelt, wrapped in a layer of pure white fat. It actually made for a pretty surreal sight.

By that point, the knife had become pretty dull thanks to all the fat clinging to it. The water in the pot was already boiling nicely, though, so I simply dunked the blade inside to wash it clean.

This was the reason it had been impossible to peel off the skin outside.

The inside of the house was already filling up with the smell of blood and meat.

At any rate, I wiped the knife on a cloth I had gotten from Ai Fa, then got right back to work.

Using the exact same procedure, I started peeling the front legs, too.

Now, this was a lot easier said than done, as an hour had already passed by this point. Still, this was still just the early stages of the process. Now that the legs were all done, I’d finally come to the torso.

I had already sliced its abdomen nice and wide open, so that made for a perfect starting point.

The basic gist of the process was the same as it was with the legs. In other words, I placed the blade between the skin and meat, and then peeled it back while cutting. The torso didn’t make for a nice even surface though, so pulling back the skin as I worked proved fairly difficult. Plus my fingers kept slipping, as I just couldn’t get a good grip on it.

To deal with that, I went ahead and opened up a hole on the edge of the pelt, then stuck my fingers right on through. It was a damn thick hide, so even if I pulled at full strength, it wouldn’t rip quite so easily. And besides, even if it did rip, I could just open a hole in a different place.

I also frequently needed to wash off the knife, but I just kept on intently tearing away at the pelt. As a result, I was completely coated in sweat by the time I had finished with the giba’s right half. By my estimate, it had been around two and a half hours. The light coming in through the windows was still pretty bright, though.

“Phew. Guess it’s about time for a bit of a break.”

I placed the knife by the giba’s head, then plopped down on the floor. For the first time in a while, I turned and faced the master of the house... Yup, Ai Fa still had that blank expression on her face, unsurprisingly.

It sure did warm my heart, the way that her childlike little eyes went all wide. Perhaps it was due to the way that her default expression was that thorny glare, but the difference was seriously striking.

“...You’re rather skilled with your hands, Asuta.”

“Yeah. Only when it comes to cooking, though.”

“You’re pretty serious about it, too.”

“Right. But again, that’s also only when it comes to cooking.”

“You can still heat up and eat giba meat, even without needing to go through all this hassle. Why are you so serious about undertaking such unnecessary work?”

I wasn’t petty enough to go and ruin the mood, so I went with a nice non-combative response of, “I just like eating delicious food and feeding it to others.”

Besides, I wanted to have her judge whether all my work was for naught after she tasted it.

“Alright! Back to work!”

During that break, a certain issue came to mind. Which is to say, there was something I needed to take care of before I set about dealing with the left side: I had to sever the neck.

There were all sorts of organs in the neck and head, like the eyes and mouth and nose.

That was why it was easier to just sever the neck at the start and deal with it separately.

With that in mind, I got to work on chopping off the head.

As I thrust the knife in below its lower jaw, I looked at the giba with its shattered skull and the pathetic look on its face and thought to myself, Don’t worry, I’ll make you nice and tasty.

The rigor mortis had already started to set in, so it felt a good bit tougher than it had back when I did the bloodletting. Plus, when I was cutting it open, a pretty significant amount of blood oozed up.

Well, that was just how things were. It wasn’t as if bloodletting got rid of every last drop of blood in the body, and besides, I was just an amateur. I was nothing but a chef trainee timidly relying on knowledge from three years ago.

I only ever dissected a boar once. My only tool on hand was a single hunting knife. I was nothing but a chef in training without so much as a proper workspace, instead stuck on the ground as I struggled to hack the head off of this corpse.

I’m sure anyone but Ai Fa would be unable to hold themselves back from laughing.

Even so, I couldn’t help but enjoy myself.

I mean, it was just this experience of being surrounded by the smell of the animal’s blood and my own sweat!

I suppose that statement may be the kind of thing that could get me mistaken for someone with rather grotesque interests. But psychos who dissect animals for fun rather than food are lower than dirt.

I just love to cook.

For as long as I can remember I’d looked up in awe at my old man’s back, and by the time I hit elementary school I was already helping out around the shop. Maybe I hadn’t exactly chosen that path of my own volition, and I was just moving along the rails that had been laid out for me. Even so, I wasn’t exactly dissatisfied with the way that things were.

Plus, my pops was always telling me to keep looking for something I enjoyed even more than cooking. Then he’d add with a laugh that if I didn’t find anything, I could just give up and take over the shop. I figure that was probably part of the reason he had me go to high school, too.

But even so, each and every day of my life had been nothing but cooking.

Cooking was just so much fun, so why did I need to go out of my way to look for something else to do with my life? I was never able to see the necessity, really.

My goal was to someday make a dish that would make my old man ooh and aah, and that ended up becoming all I thought about.

I just plain love to cook.

“Phew. This sure is tiring...”

Having gotten about halfway through severing the neck, I helped myself to a cup of water from the jug. It wasn’t even cold or anything, but thanks to how hot and sweaty I was, it tasted incredibly delicious.

Now then, back to work.

The back of the knife was jagged like a saw, probably for the sake of cutting through horns and tusks, so I went ahead and used that to sever the neck bones.

When I finally finished making my way through the rest of it, the whole head fell down with a thunk and rolled along the top of the sliding door.

After thinking on it for a bit, I decided to just peel the skin back where necessary on the head, as I was just slicing off the meat around the neck and cheeks. There were surely other parts that were edible, and the tongue and the like definitely held some strong appeal to them. But even so, there was a limit to my current skill. If only the hunters had taught me a bit more thoroughly...

After that, I peeled back the skin on the left half, then flipped the giba on its side and set to work on the remaining pelt on its back. And with that, I was finally finished skinning the massive beast.

There were some holes left in it here and there, but I had managed to cut it off as a single connected pelt all the way from the neck on down. The thing had come from a 150 centimeter long, 70 kilo class beast, so when it was all laid out, it made for quite an impressive sight.

The body, meanwhile, was still coated in fat, making for a bundle of meat that glistened pure white all over. A beautiful, massive bundle of meat that was missing a head. It had already hit a point where it would be hard to tell just what animal it was from if you didn’t already know.

It was pretty stunning just to look at, but I didn’t have time to just stand and stare. After all, I was finally in the home stretch.

Now that I had finished with skinning it, my last task left was to actually pull it apart.

I started by turning the giba’s now completely naked body face up once again, then jamming the knife into a hip joint. Cutting between the thigh and rear leg allowed me to then twist the joint around backwards. It made a sort of dull ripping sound, and the tip of the femur ended up sticking out of the pelvis. The smooth, exposed bone was a beautiful shade of white.

Next up, I cut through the remaining muscles and tendons, turned it backwards again, then started tearing away at the meat. I ran the blade alongside it in parallel, then finally tore off the rear right leg.

It sure was a big one. Must be about 10 kilos per leg...

Once I finished with the right, I moved on to the left. Then after I was done with that, I tackled the front legs.

The front legs weren’t connected to a pelvis or anything of that sort, so I could just cut them loose.

Now for the climax!

I had completely lost track of time by this point, but the sunlight outside seemed to be taking on a bit of a yellowish tint. It may have been four or five hours since I’d started working...

“...Ah, that’s right. Ai Fa, where’s your saw?”

Even though it had been quite a while since I last looked her way, Ai Fa unfortunately still had the same old blank look on her face. Though with that said, she looked sort of surprised the instant that I turned to her, so it was impossible to tell what sort of expression she had been wearing previously.

“Oh, were you asleep? Sorry for waking you.”

“Of course I wasn’t! Who sleeps when it’s still this bright out?!”

Why are you so angry at me, then...?

Anyway, Ai Fa stood up with a scowl on her face, then disappeared behind the middle of the three doors. I believe that was the room where she kept tools, lumber, and cooking utensils.

When Ai Fa came back out, she was holding a saw with a roughly 30 centimeter-long blade. Well, it was stored in a leather sheath so I couldn’t tell for sure, but once she drew it out, that’s indeed what it was.

The width of the thing was about five centimeters, and the thickness of the blade must have been around five millimeters. That was a bit thicker than the saw blades I was familiar with, but it would do. I mean, the people of the forest’s edge used these things to make such splendid houses, after all.

“I plan to finish up for now with this, so just hold on a little longer,” I said to Ai Fa when she handed it to me. Of course, Ai Fa just turned away and gave me a, “hmph” in response.

The female mind truly was a mystery.

At any rate, I went ahead and sterilized the saw in the pot.

It was time for the climax of the whole dissection process: slicing it down the back. In other words, I’d be cutting straight down the center of the spine. And not horizontally, but vertically. That was, the body would be split smoothly into a right and left half. That is how you dress a carcass.

Once this was out of the way, the rest of the process would be simple... Or at least that’s what the nice hunter told me.

Man, this thing is so big that I really wish I had a chainsaw to use for this part... It’s not like I could get the electricity for it around here anyway, though. And besides, I was ready to take on any amount of physical labor necessary for this.

And so, I went ahead and got to work.

As expected, this final task really did prove to be the most physically taxing part. But I just kept on sawing away at it, regretting all the while that I hadn’t been able to hoist it up to make the work easier.

As far as the cutting edge went, well, I had no complaints. Heck, if I was into home carpentry, I probably wouldn’t have much trouble with it. But I didn’t have any such hobby, of course, so it did prove to be a plenty difficult task. I mean, it put up a real fight. It was no minor task to vertically saw down a spine that was all slippery with fat.

Occasionally I had to stop to wash the fat off the blade, and I took some breaks here and there. All told, it must have been around an hour later by the time I was done.

I pulled out the split spine and went about removing the ribs one by one, then cut off nearly all of the meat from around the hips. With that, I had completely separated all the meat from the bone. And so finally...

“I’m done!” I yelled out and collapsed flat on the floor, only to shoot straight back up. I had finished the task itself, but that didn’t mean that I was done for the day. “Alright, now I’ve got to hurry up and pickle it in the pico. Can’t let any of this precious meat go bad!”

I only had Ai Fa help me here at the end, but we managed to safely submerge the mass of meat in the mountain of spice.

Considering it had been a 70 kilo giba, I estimated we should have gotten between 40 and 50 kilos of meat off of it. Honestly, I felt like I did pretty damn well considering I was just a trainee, and all of this was outside of my field of expertise anyway.

“Maaaaan, I’m wiped! I feel like I can’t even lift my arms!”

This time, I let myself stay there when I collapsed.

The sunshine coming in through the windows had now completely taken on a sunset hue.

So all the way from noon till sunset... That meant this whole thing must have taken around six hours or so. In the back of my exhausted mind, I wondered if a day was 24 hours in this world, too.

“...Hey. What do you intend to do with all that?” a voice called out.

When I turned to look, Ai Fa was standing imposingly next to the stove.

On top of the door by my feet, there was a large pelt folded in two, a head with the face shaved down on the left and right, and a mountain of bones.

“Ah, right. It’s a shame, but I guess I’ll just have to get rid of the rest of this. What do you normally do with pelts...? Even if you’re just using the legs, you still need to peel them off, right?”

“They’re generally thrown out after shaving off the fat still clinging to them.”

“So it just gets thrown out, huh? What a waste. There are other households that handle pelts, right? What about offering it to one of them?”

“Getting involved with me means making an enemy of the Suun family. No family around here would want a pelt badly enough to do that.”

“Tch. What a narrow-minded bunch... Ah, you use fat as fuel, right? But how do you get it off exactly?”

I tried to sit up as I said that, only for Ai Fa to coldly state, “Stay where you are” and push me back down. “If someone as exhausted as you tries to help out, it will only end up making more work. Just go to sleep.”

“But...”

“Collecting fat and removing the tusks and horns are my jobs. Your task is to prepare dinner, so rest up until then.”

She may have spoken in an incredibly blunt tone, but I was still unbelievably grateful to hear those words. I had been abusing my poor body since this morning, so by this point I had literally drained every last ounce of strength I had. Honestly, my eyelids had been feeling heavy for a bit now...

Unable to even remember if I said, “You really are kind” out loud or just thought it, I drifted off into dreamland.