Just Another Jim's

Alaska Journal

Ch. 7: Butchering Bear

Posted September 1, 2006 by James E. Nelson

Early one morning the local game warden called and asked if I could butcher a bear for the commodities program. Having nothing else pressing on my schedule, I said I would be glad to help. This was in my job description after all. We kept meat for distribution to needy people in our freezer. The local pastor’s fellowship provided funds to buy plastic wrap and butcher paper. The hungry knew to call the Presbyterian Church. It was all a part of the grand scheme of things.

This was a particularly easy job too. The bear had already been gutted and skinned out on some mountainside under the watchful eye of the game warden. All I had to do was debone and package the meat. The bear was illegally shot and the hunters had the misfortune of being observed in the act by the warden. The warden showed up at the clandestine hunting site and made the hunters finish the job of field dressing and skinning the animal. He then wrote them a hefty ticket and confiscated the animal. The hide was kept by Fish and Game to be later sold at the Anchorage Fur Rendevous (a significant source of income for Fish and Game) and I was asked to pick up the meat.

It was a Saturday morning and that meant the Korean Presbyterian Choir had gathered for their weekly practice session. Word spread like wildfire among the Koreans that I was butchering clandestine bear. Over the next couple of hours a veritable parade of Korean women came by the window of the library, watching me butcher the bear.

At this point a word of explanation is in order. Every respectable Presbyterian Church has a church library. Presbyterians are intellectual and educated folk after all, and it just wouldn’t be Presbyterian not to have a library. Delta Presbyterian Church therefore had a library with three long tables stretched end to end across the room. Being a rural Alaskan community where everyone spent all their time hunting, fishing, boating, cross-country skiing, drinking coffee at the coffee shop, and attending high school hockey games, there was not a lot of time left over for reading. Being a poor congregation, it could barely afford to pay its pastor, much less afford to buy books. There were therefore no actual books in the library, except for stacks of worn-out hymnals printed in previous centuries that congregations in the lower 48 had sent to poor Alaskan congregations as part of their mission outreach and boxes of A.A. brochures. The library was where the local A.A. group met, after all. The stark character of the room and the three long tables therefore made it an ideal place to butcher meat. All I had to do was push aside the A.A. ashtrays and line the chairs along the wall. (Of course, Brenda disinfected the tables first.)

But I found it disconcerting on this particular Saturday morning to have all these Korean ladies parading in front of the window. I had already butchered a number of animals, most of them road kill (but that’s for another chapter) and prior to this, meat recovery for the food pantry had never been a spectator sport. Later that morning Bob Carpenter, retired Presbyterian pastor, stopped by to visit. Eventually I discovered that, true to form, he had an agenda. It started with an offhand comment.

“I suppose the warden kept the guts.”

Actually I hadn’t thought about it; I guess I assumed they were left on the side of the mountain and had now been consumed by the wolves and ravens.

“Soon Ae [that was Bob’s wife, a Korean] wanted me to stop over and find out if you had the gall bladder.”

Suddenly this whole thing was beginning to make sense; light was dawning on my darkened brain, and I couldn’t help myself, I made some snide comment about Bob’s manhood. You see, according to the popular Korean medical lore, dried bear gall bladder (preferably brown bear gall bladder, but black bear will do in a pinch) and ground up elk antler will cure pretty much whatever ails you, but it’s especially revered as an aphrodisiac. All these Korean ladies were stopping around the library hoping to get the gall bladder. But it wasn’t meant to be because the game warden, wise in the ways of the local population, had already confiscated it. (At least that’s what Bob assumed.)

Instead, at the end of the day, the bear meat was stacked in the freezer while Bob and the Koreans went home empty-handed.

One of the unspoken rules of the meat recovery program was rooted in the Old Testament law about not muzzling the ox while treading the grain. Not all the meat went into the freezer. That night we partook of first-fruits, as it were, and had black bear. It was edible, but not particularly good. Over time we discovered that it was best in stew, where all the vegetables and spices offset the wildness of the meat and the meat provided some richness to the stew.

Quite some time later we were over at Bob and Soon Ae’s house. On the porch I saw a bear gall bladder hanging out to dry. It was a shriveled black thing that was far closer to disgusting than appetizing. When Bob and I were alone I asked him if he was going to eat some of the gall bladder after it was ground up. All I got was a wry smile and non-committal grunt. I don’t know if Bob ever took his medicine or not. But looking at that gall bladder, it gave me a whole new appreciation for the bear meat safely frozen and packed away in our freezer.