For those who’ve never tried being kidnapped at gunpoint, I say don’t, no matter how exciting meeting Possemen might seem. For one thing, they probably haven’t planned on kidnapping you, which means that you’ve showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time and they’ve had to recalculate. Possemen hate that. You’re a nuisance, and they’re not likely to look after you gently.
For another, Posse life is hard, and riding their trail is no easier with your hands tied. Posting on a dog-trotting mule exhausts your groin muscles if you’re not used to it, and without hands to keep you steady your muscles eventually give out and let you fall, again and again, until you just try to fall slow so you land on your battered shoulders instead of your face.
By the time we stopped I was tired and sore, but my friends—an Eastern reporter and a Denver Sad Betty—looked far worse than I felt. The Betty in particular. My reporter friend was just a little bruised and had a couple of cuts on one arm. My Betty friend had cracked on the side of her head on a tree root and what worried me wasn’t so much the lump she’d grown but that her eyes weren’t focusing right, and that instead of feeling pain she said she was nauseous.
We’d been captured on a kind of holiday, so instead of taking us to some nearby temporary camp the Posse rode us all the way to one of their permanent bases, an abandoned mine near a stream. (I don’t think I’m giving anything away, mainly because “abandoned mine near a stream” could describe hundreds of spots in that part of the Rockies.
The Feast of Future Peace, I learned, is a Posse tradition nearly as old as Occupation. None of the Possemen in camp seemed to know why it had started, or whether all Posses celebrate it on the same day, or celebrate it at all. But in any case the Posse Sheriff said that it’s very important for his men.
“It reminds us we’re fighting for something,” he said. “That someday we hope to go home and live free.”
It did surprise me that they only had a hazy picture of what their ideal future would look like, beyond bromides like these. I always thought Posses had a pretty good idea of what they wanted the West to be—and for all I know that may be true of every other Posse out there. With the men I met though, things aren’t any clearer than they are with the rest of us. They don’t like Occupation; they don’t like the Army; they especially hate settlers. Honestly, about half seemed to long for the end of Occupation simply because they were tired of being outlaws. They wanted to declare victory and have it all be over.
I might even say the Sheriff himself was one of those. He tried harder than any of them to explain what the “end of Occupation” meant in practical terms—amnesty for his men and some kind of radically free-market, deregulated version of the Western Territories (he calls it “original intent federalism”)—but I got the sense that in the end, he’d accept a lot less if he could find a way to get it by his pride.
I think he needed his goals partly because the other half of his men would have been content to stay in the forest forever, living their Robin Hood fantasy. A bunch of them were smoking pot, which bothered the Sheriff more than I would have expected. Later, after the feast, some of them started to joke about the fight they’d been in that day, and that also seemed to bother him. He got up from where he was sitting, leaving a conversation in the middle, and stood over them a minute, frowning. Then he led them and the rest of his men in a sing-along, of all things. And they actually enjoyed it. I guess life can get boring in the woods.
The first dish of the feast was made in front of us. The cooks had several live trout in pots of cold water and killed one the way Asian chefs do, with a pair of skewers rammed through the mouth into the brain-stem. They filleted it before it was done writhing—especially impressive since the two of them seemed to be those Possemen with war injuries too bad to ride or shoot. One had lost most of a leg, the other most of his left arm.
Each of us got a small bowl of venison broth—thin, parsley-flavored, and boiling—with three things in it: a red-hot pebble, a little bunch of watercress, and about two ounces of raw trout meat. The pebble kept the broth hot enough to cook the trout a little, and the smoky flavor of the fish went perfectly with the venison.
Next came a rabbit stew, sludgy with pounded acorn flour. It also had venison broth as a base, with chunks of lightly grilled rabbit meat, wild onions, ginger, garlic, trout roe, and new potatoes. It was served in hollowed bread put into in wooden bowls, each with its own cured rabbit-skin cozy. This was a more complicated dish than the last one. I could make out the salty trout roe, sharp ginger, tangy rabbit, and slightly bitter acorn.
The stew was heavy and we were already getting full, so it was a little scary when the cooks asked for men to help carry the next course and four of them went. I noticed the Sheriff watching my companions and me, and I started to think that maybe he was actually a little pleased to have an audience.
The volunteers came back with a whole deer carcass on a spit. The cooks had them balance the spit on a pair of sawhorses, and put a plastic basin under its stomach. The Posse sat down in a semicircle on the floor, facing the deer, and the one-armed cook came forward with a scimitar. The Possemen cheered and started to chant: “Spill its guts! Spill its guts!”
The Sheriff leaned to my reporter friend and said, “The intestines only have rotting grass and leaves in them, so we leave them. You’re not a little squeamish city mouse are you? As long as you don’t think about the fact that you’re eating turd, it’s pretty good.”
He was playing “shock the Easterner,” but it was a heartless thing to say in front of my young Betty friend with the concussion. She was already so wobbly that she’d only been able to swallow the first course’s broth, plain. She turned paler and whispered, “Oh god. Gross.”
“Not at all,” the Sheriff said. “We cook it long and hot enough to kill all the nasty germy parts. It’s perfectly safe.”
Meanwhile the men were chanting louder and clapping in rhythm. The cook with the scimitar went up to the carcass, swung the blade over his head, and slashed open the belly. Out came the guts, the dark large intestine and the longer, lighter small intestine. Both were covered in black, tarry dung full of shredded leaves.
“Make sure you taste some meat from each end, by the way,” the Sheriff added. “The guts and the lights. They cook different.”
The cook with the scimitar scooped out the rest of the lower body cavity with his hand. Then he buried his arm up to the shoulders in it, working at something inside. In a moment he took out a lump of cooked flesh, and then two more, the heart, liver, and pancreas, or maybe the lungs. He reached inside one last time and tossed me something round, dark, and leathery, like no piece of an animal I’d ever seen. It took me almost half a minute to suss out what it was: a whole orange, stained and wet from its time inside the deer.
The “guts,” it turned out, were two kinds of sausages: the “small intestines” were ground deer offal and other scraps, garlic, salt, aniseed, pepper, coriander, and lemon; the “large intestines” were blood and bread crumbs, onion, pepper, thyme, and bay leaf. The “dung” in the surrounding body cavity was ground unsweetened chocolate wetted with strong, dark, yeasty beer, and the shredded vegetable fiber in it was fennel.
As for the “lights,” they were actually three cleaned pigeon carcasses, tied to the inner rib cage and packed in whole, pierced oranges. (I have no idea where they got real oranges.) They’d separated the upper chest cavity from the lower during cooking with a quadruple paper wall, two heavy paper shopping bags, each flattened to make a double ply and sewn where the diaphragm should have been.
The Sheriff was right, actually. The meat from around the “guts” did taste different from the meat around the “lights.” The first kind was sharp and nutty from the chocolate and the second, marinated in orange juice and bird fat, was sweeter.
The sausages were nothing special.
I did not eat the next course, two roasted bear paws cradling a whole raccoon with the tail and stuffed head sewn back on. I might have been able if I was starving, but by then I really wasn’t. Also, at the same time my Betty friend was nodding off, and I’d heard too much about how important it is to keep concussion victims awake. I wanted to give her my full attention.
The last course, dessert, was a sculpture. The cooks brought it out to look at while the Possemen were still eating their bits of raccoon. It was made of candy stuck together with an egg-white-and-sugar glaze, and represented a Bichon Frisé humping a bulldog. The bulldog’s body was built of Fun-Sized Snickers bars, except for the place where the bowed front legs sank into the powerful chest. There the body was darker plain Hershey’s chocolate. There were also pied white chocolate spots on the left flank and underbelly, drooping jowls and lower lips of prunes, and maraschino cherry eyes. The Bichon was a wad of Smarties with sugar-floss flying in all directions, its front paws clamped to the bulldog’s rear, Mike-and-Ike penis straining vainly in midair.
The camp dogs, incidentally, included both a bulldog and a Bichon. The Possemen thought it was very funny to show the sculpture to them. The bulldog was a sweet old girl who didn’t mind being moved about, although she kept trying to return to her table scraps with that patient, sad look bulldogs have. The Bichon spent its time trying to get at the plate of the Posseman holding him. The fur around his tea-saucer face was all matted with raccoon gravy.
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