The Building and the Buffalo
* Warning – There Will Be Blood – Warning *
-Whack-
-Whack-
-Whack-
The dull ax, blunted by what looks like decades of use, thuds wetly into the hide of the dead Buffalo. Half butchered, like an unzipped beanbag chair, spilling it’s insides onto a makeshift altar made from the wooden door to a destroyed home.
-Whack-
There are a lot of damaged homes in this village, which incidentally is why I find myself on this particular Nepalese mountainside, watching intently as this massive animal gets taken down to brass tacks.
The thud of the ax echos down the hillside and we can do nothing but stand dumbfounded by the sight and sound of it all.
I notice a small, elderly Nepalese man, one of five currently tending to the kill, rummaging inside wrist deep, searching for something – eyes up, feeling, as if he was about to deliver a baby.
The younger men give a pull and with a slosh the intestines pour out of the massive stomach cavity looking exactly like a giant string of sausages. The thought of sausages after weeks of veggie-ism raises a hunger in me tempered only by the knowledge that they are simply filled with poop.
Everyone assembled seems to have their job to do. Either hold the animal steady, do the cutting, or ferry the meat and entrails through the swarm of flies to the crowd of sari-clad women cooking feverishly at the back.
The old man, however, is on a mission.
His Kukri, the classic knife of the Nepalese, now sits covered in blood on the neck of the upturned buffalo. It’s curved blade and thick spine give it the heft and balance to cut swiftly through either sinew or bamboo.
Carried for generations it is at home in any Nepalese hand young or old, but for the time being – it rests.
The younger men are arranged around on all sides. They handily make use of medieval looking axes to cleave off large chunks of deep red flesh, apportioning them equally amongst themselves as payment for their work on behalf of the Village. All the while the elderly man’s Kukri rests quietly as he continues to delve, now elbow deep, into the mass of intestines.
A moment of pause.
His brow un-furrows ever so slightly. Success!
He nods to the other men who stop their work to assist him, and in concert they begin gently pulling from the deepest reaches of this animal a small green sack.
With the utmost care the animal’s gallbladder, about the size of a water balloon and the the color of pea soup, is surgically removed at the end of it’s connecting arteries. The acidic stomach bile contained inside would quickly spoil the meat should it rupture, and great care is taken to remove it cleanly.
Once safely away from the carcass the old man’s duty is fulfilled. His aged experience no longer needed, the strength of youth able to finish the task, he knots the artery, lobs it to the waiting dogs, and saunters back to the shade.
‘Is he really feeding that to the dogs? That is like, sooo gah-ross’.
The American volunteer sitting next to me looks like she’s on the verge of lifelong vegetarianism or vomiting – or both.
The two of us, along with another seven Aussies, Brits, Kiwis, and a Nepali, have hiked up a mountain to demolish a house, instead we have come upon a semi-demolished buffalo.
As the vultures and dogs fight over the discarded offal being tossed from the altar, we wait patiently, crowbars in hand, for the butchery to end. The home that we have been called in to destroy, a three story rock and mud behemoth, teeters precariously over the terraced hillside, right above the field-slaughterhouse making our work impossible.
The walls, when picked with crowbars, split with rock-bars, or simply pulled down with rope would certainly rain down the stepped fields and bury the buffalo to its upturned hooves along with the butchers, washer women, and assembled children. So we wait.
Patience in this job is more acute and necessary than most I’ve worked. In the past, action, even that which was not fully fleshed out, was often preferable to inaction.
But here, where emotions run high over destroyed homes and buried personal possessions, you quickly learn to be patient. Even the house whose demolition seems simple at first is deserving of a second look since even a minor mistake can mean being crushed under tons of unforgiving rock.
So we wait.
The walk from our camp has winded everyone. The sickly-sweet smell wafting up from the kill has put most of us into a daze, but preparatory work has begun – the strategizing, the planning, the reverse-Jenga game of bringing a half-fallen house safely down to earth.
The house in question is unusual for us. First off, it is a mansion.
Most of our houses have been modest two-story family affairs. This is three-stories and twice as wide, with ceiling beams the width of a refrigerator instead of the usual mailbox. The kind of heft that breaks bones when mishandled.
Second, it looms from one terrace up, tilting precariously over the neighbor’s house.
Normally this would not be an issue at noon. The fields require everyone that isn’t in short pants, generally leaving us to our work, but today is special – the buffalo has been slaughtered.
Lastly, there is the crowd. If the poor buffalo was dinner, we were certainly the going to be the show.
The first problem does not bother me so much, as a month on the job has shown the size of the building to be irrelevant to all but my aching muscles. The process is the same for one-story or twenty.
The second problem however, to quote Ned Flanders, was ‘one dilly of a pickle’.
One side of the upper floor and external wall had fallen away, leaving a gaping hole and half of the roof angled right over the family sleeping area. If ropes could be secured to it, the whole section could be sawed off and gently lowered to the ground between the houses. Difficult, but not impossible.
The third problem was the real one – the crowd.
Troublemaker.
As nice and well meaning as the people that inhabit these hills are, they seem to find their way into yours.
Tools left on the ground will instantly be picked up by curious children, only to be found later or not at all. High tension wires, frayed by months of use and capable of cutting a man clean in half, will inevitably attract a group of touchers, pokers, and those vying for the coolest place to sit. Combine it with dogs, toddlers, and the owners themselves, running back into a crumbling three-story house to retrieve a single chicken egg from a forgotten nest – it can become more complicated than the actual work we are there to do.
It is no surprise to me now that so many hundreds of Nepalese were tragically killed or injured after the earthquake simply working to fix or finish collapses that had already started. There seems to be a predisposition to unnecessary risk that would make a rodeo clown blush.
Our team, amateurs all, still somehow seemed more suited to the task than these imminently capable and hardy mountain folk for one simple reason – patience. So we wait.
Slowly, like ants carrying away a cookie, crumb by crumb, the huge animal disappears. The last crumb to be taken, the rear end, is unceremoniously picked up by it’s tail, scorched black by fire. Too much for one man to carry without dragging in the dirt, another man quickly plunges his Kukri into the thick yellow skin to create a handhold then lifts it with three fingers off the door.
A swarm of flies and the smell of blood lingers, but the vultures and dogs have soon moved on – time to get to work.
-Nick
