I have never eaten a beaver. Well, that’s not entirely true but let’s just say I have never eaten the largest rodent in North America…Castor canadensis (which sounds like a vaginal infection to me). Anyway, we have many beavers on our farm in Maine that are flooding our fields and they have become a true nuisance, hence the farm’s name, Bad Beaver Farm. I decided I would like to trap these beavers and eat them.
Since my decision to be a beaver eater, I have received a fair amount of criticism. One (former) Facebook friend even called me “Satanic” for wanting to eat these adorable, smart rodents. Here’s my reasoning: I don’t want to eat meat from the supermarkets anymore. The genetically modified “chickens” are a scientific horror story. These “birds” are featherless and, by 12 weeks of age, their breasts are so heavy that they can’t walk and they have to crawl to their food. Big fat globs of featherless, wingless poultry meat crawling on the floor for food. Horrifying. And now, with the expose’ of the “pink slime” engineered meat in all the news, this just reinforces my determination to try to provide as much protein by our own means as possible.
I told my self-righteous, judgmental Facebook critics that unless they were total vegans and didn’t support the US meat industry and if they didn’t wear leather shoes, belts or man-purses—to back off and never give me shit about this.
A week after I brought my little mink to be skinned, I went back to my new friend, Harris, to pick it up. I walked into Harris’s big workspace and there he was sitting on a little stool almost lost amidst all the hanging coyote and fox pelts. He was working on a beaver that was hanging from a large hook from the ceiling. He was busy with his knife skillfully removing the pelt from the carcass. He still had on his little pork-pie hat and the pipe was firmly clamped in his mouth.
I said, “Hi, Harris! Did you miss me?”
He looked up from his dangling carcass and gave me a huge checkered grin. I think he was truly glad to see me.
He said, “Well! If it isn’t the Hippie Girl!”
Harris is a little, wiry old guy and he was wearing an old grimy insulated long-underwear top underneath a brand new-looking turquoise Izod Lacoste sport shirt. Spotless. And it was about three sizes too big. This cracked me up.
“You’re looking good today, Harris.”
There was a little low wooden stool right next to the one he was sitting on. It looked like a little kid’s stool. I sat down next to him to watch him deftly cutting the fascia between muscle and skin.
He said, “Be careful. I think there’s blood on that stool.”
I said, “Harris, I think I’ve been sitting on bloody stools of one sort or another for over thirty-five years now.”
He laughed out loud at that. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot that blood wouldn’t really bother you.”
He told me that this was the peak of the beaver trapping season as it ended on April 10th. He said the trappers were bringing in between 30 and 40 beavers a day for him to skin. He charged $4.00 an animal. There were about 20 beavers lying on their backs on the floor. I asked him if the beaver he was working on was fresh. He said it had come in from Francistown the day before. I asked him if I could have it to eat. He grinned at me.
“Sho-ah!” He almost shouted he was so pleased. “I’ll just clean out the innards for you.”
Harris didn’t usually eviscerate the animals. He stretched the pelts on big wooden rounds and left the intact furless carcasses to pile up until they became a nuisance. Then he dragged them out to the top of a hill in back of his property for the coyotes and other scavengers to feast on. I was trying not to imagine what this place must smell like in the heat of summer. He said that every once in a while, the Health Department paid him a visit. I said, “I bet they do.”
My beaver was a medium size female, probably about forty pounds. Harris quickly pulled out all the glistening blue and white entrails. I couldn’t believe how huge they looked to me. The innards looked much bigger than a deer’s. He asked me if I wanted the liver and I said, “Sure.” The liver looked about the size of a dark crimson football. Harris removed the head and the tail and handed me the body. I put her in a new white garbage bag. The body was about three feet long and weighed a lot.
I was sitting on the tiny wooden stool next to Harris. I had the body-bagged beaver resting in my lap. He turned to me and said very gently, “I started reading your book the other night. It seems like you had some real pain in your younger years, that you’re no stranger to sorrow.”
My eyes welled up with tears at his empathy. “Yeah, I had a pretty rough go of it for a while there.” I sighed. Then the irony of me being consoled by a bloody little Leprechaun who was sitting in front of a dangling, naked beaver made me smile. “But I’m good now Harris, honest, my life is good.”
He nodded and puffed on his pipe. We continued chatting. I think we wandered into a discussion about the widespread use of anti-depressants which he disdained. Our pleasant exchange was interrupted when a trapper came in to hire Harris’s services. I said goodbye to my talkative friend and pecked him on the cheek. I picked up my girl beaver and walked past the trapper to go out the door.
The trapper’s mouth was dropped open. “Jesus, what the hell was that?”
What I have since found out is, although many trappers claim that beaver meat is delicious—no one I spoke with had actually cooked one. Even the acclaimed wild game chef who wrote the cookbook Cook Wild New Hampshire for the Fish & Game Department had never actually butchered a beaver. I soon realized I was on my own.
So I did the most common-sense thing to do. I called my friend Kendall.
Kendall and I have a long history of foraging for wild food together—mushroom hunting, fishing, the occasional (still warm) road killed wild turkeys. I knew this would be perfectly understandable to her. I was right. Kendall brought over a half gallon of white wine and we dug right in.
Harris had already removed the castor glands from this beaver. He sells them for their scent. He cautioned me to remove the fat near the hind legs as there were two more, smaller scent glands in that fat that could taint the meat. Kendall and I set up a cleaning station outside in the driveway and began what turned out to be a fascinating anatomy lesson. We each had a skinning knife and we carefully explored our beaver to find the meat that was acceptable. We got in a rhythm of Kendall removing fat and me feeling for the fine textured red meat.
Here’s what we got: I got two long back-straps from both sides of the back bone which were wider at the shoulders and tapered to a point near the tail. Kendall wrestled a large amount of meat from the hams of both hind legs, these large muscles attesting to the powerful back legs and tail of our beaver. I found two tenderloins inside the body cavity in about the middle of the beaver and to either side of the back bone. The meat wasn’t pretty. It was obviously a hack job, but if the end, we had about five pounds of strips of fresh NH beaver.
I get such a kick out of Kendall. She’s the product of New England girl’s boarding schools—which she rejected heartily in the 1960s. Now we were sitting together, hunched over our first beaver, our fingers exploring. I grinned to see her sip from her glass of Chardonnay—with rivers of beaver blood trailing down her arm to her elbow. That’s true friendship right there, by god.
We were just finishing up when a young couple showed up for a visit. The young husband was looking for Tom, who had very conveniently left on a motorcycle outing with his brother, leaving Kendall and me on our own to do the dirty work. The couple looked very skeeged out and I realized this must be one of the most redneck things they had ever laid eyes on. We invited them to dinner but they politely declined.
I decided I wanted to cook the beaver without much additional seasonings as I wanted to get a real idea of what the unadorned meat tasted like. No marinating. I floured the beaver meat by putting a couple of cups of flour in a large Ziploc bag and added the meat and shook it. Then we simply cooked it in heated olive oil in a large skillet and stood around drinking wine as we watched it cook. It hadn’t cooked for very long before I thought it looked done and I had to try it.
I put the first morsel in my mouth. I could not believe the sensation in my mouth. It was more of an “experience” than a taste. SWEET BEAVER! It was absolutely incredible. It tasted fresh like spring and clean fresh water, a little minty like alders and poplar trees—not gamey at all. I was tasting the habitat of my wild beaver. It was delicious and tender and mild all at once. Actually, it didn’t taste like “meat”, certainly not the mealy crap they’re selling in the grocery stores.
Beavers are vegetarians, existing mostly on deciduous trees. In the right environment, they are living in fresh water away from pollutants and chemicals. The only way I could explain what it tastes like; when people asked if it was like chicken or pork, I’d say compare it to the difference between a store bought tomato and one straight from your garden. There is no way to compare the “experience” of the two tastes.
I bet that when the fur-traders came to North America and started trapping beavers for their pelts, they just threw the meat away, just like what happened to the buffalos. Buffalo hides were prized but the carcasses of the animals were left in huge mountains to rot. Wasted carnage. People assumed that the meat was inedible. Even today, beaver pelts are prized and are big sellers in China, but the meat is discarded. The Native Americans considered beaver to be a delicacy. Now I know they were right.
A little later after our test-tasting, Tom and his brother, Lee, returned from their motorcycle ride.
I asked his brother, “Hey, Lee, do you want to taste my beaver?”
He said, “Nope. No thanks. Nah, I’m good.”
SAVE A TREE … EAT A BEAVER!
~ Carol Leonard from Bad Beaver Tales, Volume II, Sumbitchin Barn, 2013