Peaceful Cut and Butchering

From: Gary R Switzer <gswitzer_at_loop.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 00:27:42 -0800


I dug out my copy of The L.L. Bean Game & Fish Cookbook (Random House, 1983 ISBN 0-394-51191-3) by Angus Cameron to refresh my memory on the methods for butchering large game animals in the field, which techniques would be suitably Praxian, I would think. The key is to open the animal up and remove the innards without fouling the meat or making a mess of the edible and/or useful innards. The way I've always run RQ is that a die roll is a sort of "stress test" for doing something as quickly as possible or while being distracted, neither of which would really apply to the vast majority of herdbeasts being cut up since they would be getting "processed" in camp by or under the supervision of experienced Waha or Eiritha initiates or above. There are a couple of situations where your Praxian might need to Peaceful Cut and Butcher on the fly, as it were:

You are fighting Chaos or Darkness or some other non-Praxians and you have a wounded or lame herdbeast/mount on your hands. If you leave it behind not only does it risk dying without benefit of clergy it might even (in the case of broos) suffer a Fate Worse than Death which really hurts the tribe. So you take the weight of the animal's death on yourself. If you succeed, all well and good, fail and you can make it up later by fasting or raiding for a replacement. Fumble, and not only do you mess up the ritual but maybe your enemies are upon you, or your own mount gets away, or you hurt yourself, etc.

You are raiding (or at war with, same thing really) another tribe and one of THEIR mounts has come up lame or has been killed, you hold the field but you have to go either to retreat with your captured animals or to persue your foes, but you stop to perform the Peaceful Cut ritual so that the dead animal's rebirth goes on your tribe's account and not your enemy's. Your enemy may get to eat that sable but they will know with every bite that you sent it to be reborn a proper impala, you perhaps having left your sign on it or taken the tail. Gives the tribes another reason to raid each other, too. =)

Both the above are brave acts, in many ways braver than stopping to take a scalp or an enemy's weapon, because it helps to ensure the survival of your tribe in the long haul. (Not to mention being MGF.)

    "Those who have eaten of the herdbeasts of the Praxians as the savages themselves partake of it say (and rightfully so) that it is very nearly inedible for they do not hang their meat the way other folk do nor do they season their meat much, prefering it tough and gamey. But those same lean animals, fed on grain in the stockyards of New Pavis or Barbarian Town then hung and properly aged, proved to be most toothsome."

Gary R. Switzer
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