They Taste Like Chicken

They Taste Like Chicken Mario Milosevic

FIRST TIME I saw them was with my best friend Dan. It was hunting season and we were driving up north in the Giff. That’s the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, for those unfamiliar with Southwestern Washington State. We were looking to bag us a deer, maybe an elk, and we were tooling up Wind River Highway just before dawn with Mount Saint Helens in front of us like a princess in white. Dan’s headlights caught a couple of shapes and then two fawn-sized critters shot out from the woods right in front of us. Dan hollered: “What the fu—” but didn’t finish the phrase before we hit both of them— smack! splat!—with the front of Dan’s truck. We looked at each other. “What were those things?” I said. “Beats me,” said Dan. He stopped the truck a quarter mile past impact and put it into reverse. I listened to the engine strain and whine, like it didn’t want to go backwards that far. Two lumps on the side of the road were waiting for us. I got out of the truck before Dan stopped it completely. It was still cold and wet outside. Typical November in the Giff. I walked over to the roadkill and bent down to take a look. These two things, whatever they were, were nothing like anything I’d ever seen. For one thing, their blood wasn’t red. It had come out of their eyes and some of it dripped from the other end and it was this kind of golden color. Odd, to say the least. And their eyes, they were big, like owl eyes. Like they had been living somewhere so dark that they needed gigantic eyes just to get around. Their heads were kind of bear-like, but the snout was more elongated than a bear. Their paws were kind of cat-like, but again, longer than a cat’s would be. And their bodies were like roundish balls. I heard Dan come stand beside me. “What’s some smell they got,” he said. Dan was right. They exuded a sweet aroma. Like sugary donuts wafting honeyed air in our direction. Got my mouth watering like I was smelling bacon frying in the morning. “Any idea what these things are?” I said. Dan picked one up by the tail, which also was not like any tail I had ever seen on any animal. It was pointy, like a whittled stick, and it had no fur on it, unlike the rest of the thing, which was covered in this silky kind of golden fur, smooth as anything. Made me think of the softest leather when I touched it. Dan grabbed up the other one and tossed them both into the back of his truck. They made a nice thunking sound. It was weird. Everything about these critters made me feel good. I don’t know if that makes sense, but there it is. “Let’s go home,” said Dan. “I want to find out what these things taste like.” Dan and me, we don’t cut short a hunting trip for nothing. But I didn’t put up any objection. “Sounds good to me,” I said. ** Dan lived in the woods. A real mountain man, or as close to one as you could get in this day and age. His cabin was wood heated. No electricity. His bathroom was an outhouse behind the cabin, and he liked to talk about the coming collapse of, well, everything. I lived a few miles away on the Columbia River in Cedar Falls. We were from different worlds, but hunting season put us on the same map every year. We pulled into Dan’s driveway. “I’ll get the stove going,” he said. “You get these critters skinned and ready for the skillet.” “I’m on it,” I said. I went around back of the truck and lifted our trophies by their tails and carried them to the shed behind Dan’s cabin and slammed them down on the work table. I took a knife from the wall and started skinning one of them. I started noticing weird things right away. For example, I expected the skin to be soft, like a rabbit’s, but instead it was tougher than anything I had ever cut into. Made a bear’s hide seem like butter. I really had to grip the knife hard and saw at the hide. Once I got going, it peeled back pretty easy, but then I got more surprised. The muscles were gold. Crazy. What had gold-colored muscles? And the guts were all mixed up. I think I saw only one lung, if that’s what it was. Two hearts. Small ones, so I guess that’s why there were two. Then toward the intestines, I found a few globules of organs that I couldn’t guess what they were. I scooped all of that stuff out and dropped the mess into a bucket next to Dan’s work table. Dan came in. “You ready with that meat?” he said. His eyes were ablaze. I’d never seen him that way. “Still working on it,” I said. “I’ll get going on the other one,” he said, and took another knife and started gutting his animal. We worked feverishly, skinning and dressing the things. It was as if we couldn’t do anything else. We had to taste these things. Had to. Like our lives depended on it. The muscles came off the bones pretty easy. We got some little steaks from the hindquarters, and long strips of bacon-like stuff from the bellies and pretty nice lengths of muscles from the legs. “I’ve never been so hungry in my life,” said Dan. “Me neither,” I said. “What are these things?” “No idea,” said Dan. We took the meat into the kitchen, where Dan had gotten a big pot of water going, with onions, celery, and carrots, and we threw in chunks of the meat, which immediately turned a bright orange, almost fluorescent, then gradually migrated to a more gentle bright red.