This whole thing started because my wife has a friend who is
a vegetarian. When she mentioned eating tofu, I immediately thought of and
dredged up this great old Far Side cartoon about the “tofudebeest.” From then
on, both of them have always referred to tofu as tofudebeest and, as things
escalated, the girls decided I needed to write a story about the difficult and
dangerous hunt of the legendary tofudebeest.
After doing a little research, I was
surprised to find that this had already been done by none other than that he-man
writer, passionate hunter and just plain manly man…you gotta love a guy who
takes along his own personal Thompson submachine gun to go shark fishing…Ernest
Hemingway. So here, without further ado, is…
Ernest Hemingway’s
Heart of the Tofudebeest
He was an old man who hunted alone on
foot across the Great Plains and he had gone
eighty four days now without taking a shot. In the first forty days a boy had
been with him. But after forty days without a shot the boy’s parents had told
him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at
their orders.
But now, on
the eighty fifth day, he was close. Closer than he had ever been before. He had
followed the spoor, mostly tracks, but now and then a gelatinous blob of festering
curd marked where the tofudebeest had relieved itself. The tracks were fresh.
Fresher than he had ever seen. The old man paused to kneel by one. The wind
carried the first stray grain of dust into the otherwise perfect imprint. The
old man knew he was close.
So he followed
the spoor until it grew too dark to see. The tofudebeest would bed down for the
night as well. But not before it circled around on its backtrail and sniffed
the air. Only then would it find a high, prominent point to bed down warily upon.
A point that would offer a clear view of any pursuers. The wily tofudebeest
were not considered the most elusive of the North American game animals for no
reason. Or the most dangerous.
The old man made a dry camp beneath
the bare limbs of a lone, stunted juniper beneath the rimrock. He had no food.
Taking the cork from the neck of his big round canteen, the old man tilted it
back to his chapped lips. Only the faintest trickle of blood warm water
emerged, a few drops.
The next
morning, the sunrise was red as blood as the light spread across the jagged
hilltops to the east. He swallowed hard against the dryness of his tongue and
the stickiness in his throat. On the ground, he found a small, smooth pebble.
He put it into his mouth and summoned the salvia to suck on it. It would,
perhaps, distract him from his thirst. He rolled the pebble over with his
tongue and clicked it against his teeth.
The nearness
of his quarry, the closeness of it, gave the old man the strength to continue
his long pursuit. Today would be the day. The old man could feel it in his gut,
he simply knew, he could somehow tell. Today the old man and the tofudebeest
would finally meet and find their rendezvous with destiny, and only one could
hope to walk away.
The spoor
remained tantalizingly fresh. As the old man followed it up the broken rimrock
of the breaks, he heard a soft noise ahead, and glanced up in time to see the
last flick of the tofudebeest’s tail as it darted over the ledge above. The old
man scrambled over the shelf of weathered sandstone as best he could.
There, on the
very edge of the cliff, crouched low with its belly flat against the ground in
the last of the tall grass, lay the tofudebeest. Its ears were laid back, its
eyes narrow but alive with fire. The only movement came from the nervous twitch
at the very end of its tail. Then a tremor shivered across one half of an upper
lip. The eyes narrowed further. It was about to charge, and the old man knew
the most dangerous thing in the world was a trapped tofudebeest preparing to
charge.
The only
warning was the lips curling back to reveal the deadly set of smooth, slimy
gums as the beast sprang into action. One moment it had been perfectly still.
The next it was in full charge, coming for the old man hard and fast. Its
fearsome cry echoed across the landscape. It was running hard so that the old
man could see the pads of its rear feet as it dug in, like a charging grizzly.
The old man carried
his rifle ready. In an instant he raised it to his shoulder, but he was an old
man, and his movements seemed slow, as if he were moving underwater. Perhaps
too slow. Tofudebeesties were known for their lightning speed as much as their
ferocity. The old man briefly wondered if this would be his last hunt.
But then the
ivory bead of the front sight was aligned on the chest of the charging tofudebeest
as if of its own volition. The old man squeezed the trigger. The big Jeffries
double roared as loud as the tofudebeest, but in that moment of fast
approaching peril the old man noticed neither the blast nor the ferocious
recoil.
The old man had taken the advice of
another old white hunter, to whit, “Use enough gun.” The .600 Nitro Express was
enough gun. The 900-grain solid hit the tofudebeest square and full in the
chest. The sound of the impact was watery and mushy, like a ping pong paddle
whacking a big blob of jello. The tofudebeest’s front legs became lifeless and
the beast skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust. The body came to rest not three
inches from the toes of the old man’s boots.
The smell of
coagulating soy milk and mushy bean curds rose into the air. Buzzards that
would have hovered over another kill flapped away hastily in the opposite direction.
A coyote whined, pawing at his nose and rubbing it in the dirt. A half a mile
away, an adult boar grizzly raised his broad, dished face and tested with wind
with wet, black nostrils. With a snort, he too made tracks for the nearest
horizon as fast as his legs would carry him.
After taking a
moment to reload the Jeffries, the old man began field dressing his kill,
removing the innards of rotten milk. If you didn’t open up and start a tofudebeest
cooling down immediately, it would go bad quickly. Not that the old man, nor
any other human being for that matter, could actually tell when a tofudebeest
went bad. Field dressing was not the chore the old man had thought it would be,
for he could use a plastic spatula instead of his Nova Scotian Dean Russell belt
knife. Later, when he
returned to camp, he would cut it up into delicious hams and tenderloins and
roasts and backstraps and briskets.
And it would be good for him, too.
What, after all, could be better than soybeans? Genetically modified Monsanto
Roundup Ready Soybeans®? With both water and
a coagulant, the tofudebeest flesh would provide a tiny fraction of the
protein his body needed, as well as a passel of anti-nutrients like lectins and
saponins, oxalates, protease inhibitors and Phytates.
And the flatulence. Ah, sweet
flatulence.
He could not
wait. Knowing that the natives who had originally inhabited this land often ate
the heart of their kill to give thanks to the animal’s spirit and to gain its
strength and bravery, he searched through the festering sea of curds until he
found the heart of the tofudebeest.
The old man raised his lined face to
the sun, bit off a piece of his long-sought prize, and savored it on his
tongue. It was white and mushy, almost gelatinous, like snot, and apparently
had no actual taste of its own whatsoever.
“BLECH!”
The old man spat it out. For a
moment, he thought of his old hunting dog, Macomber, now dead and gone these
long five seasons past. Now, at last, he finally understood Macomber. The dog
could lick his own asshole, and probably did so to get such tastes out of his
mouth. No wonder Macomber never liked to hunt tofudebeest with him. And to
think, the old man had intended to go on a hummuslope hunt next.
“Fuck that,” said the old man. “I’m
going to go get a bacon double cheeseburger.”
