Cut a cow elk in half . . . with a dull ax . . . on the side of a busy interstate . . . in a blizzard . . . on New Years Eve.
New Years Eve, 1998. Sophmore in high school, hanging out with a couple buddies, drinking cheap nasty beer. Buddy's dad, who is a truck driver, calls and tells us he just hit a cow elk on the interstate, just a few miles up the road from the tiny town we live in. We're dumb ass country kids, we live to drink beer and shoot shit. It's coyote season, coyotes love to eat rotting dead things. We now have a mission. We load up in a little regular cab pickup. 3 dudes and the drivers psycho girlfriend. Head out to find the recently departed target of our endeavors. It's snowing. Not just a little, we're talking Colorado. Rocky mountains. End of december. It's a fucking blizzard. After a few slow passes up and down the highway, we finally find her. She made it a ways off the road and down an embankment before she did what most things do after being hit by a fucking Kenworth. The three of us manage to drag the body up to the road, with no small amount of slipping and falling in the mud and snow. This elk has been pretty well tenderized, but is intact. We try to load her into the back of the pickup. Elk are not small. This is a cow (female) but full grown and still pretty damn heavy. We try every possible way to get her in the back, all 3 pulling, 2 pulling 1 pushing, 1 in the bed 2 on the ground. It ain't happening. We're soaking wet, getting frostbite and running low on beer. Drivers psycho girlfriend hasn't left the cab of the pickup, but occasionally rolls a window down enough to call us all ignorant assholes. Things are looking hopeless, we are about to admit defeat, when I see it. The ax. A rusty dull old piece of shit ax. But it might as well have been Excalibur, and I a drunken frozen teenage Arthur. "Stand back, I got this," as I heft my trusty blade and get to work. I tear into her, hacking and slashing through hide and guts and bone. The late hour and oppressive blizzard have forced most mere mortals off the road by this point, so I'm able to do my gruesome work in relative peace. Then, headlights. I'm caught full on in the high beams of little black BMW. The drivers door opens and a middle aged blonde woman all dolled up for a party sticks her head out the door, I can only assume to offer assistance to these poor stranded souls. This modern day Samaritan is rewarded for her compassion with a scene straight out of Clive Barker's wet dreams. All I can do is stand there covered in blood and sinew and frozen chunks of elk flesh and wave, with my one non ax - wielding hand, as she slams her door and fishtails off into the blizzard, at a much higher rate of speed than is safe, given the conditions. I turn to my buddies and suggest that we might be wise to speed up our macabre little task. I finish up my chopping and we load the freshly bisected victim into the bed and haul ass for home. I guess it was a small blessing that the partially pulverized innards of this creature had been rendered pretty much odorless by the subzero temperatures. This was soon rectified by the pickups heater that we cranked up to high in order to thaw ourselves. And then the topper. We're driving along in putrid silence, except drivers girlfriend, who occasionally reminds us how much she fucking hates us all, in between violently dry heaving from the stench. Someone finally notices the clock on the dash. 11:59. We click on the FM and hear the final seconds of the countdown. 3 . . . 2. . . 1. . . Happy New Year!!! And then the glorious vocals of a sexy little man named Prince (or whatever the hell he was calling himself at that point) come grooving through the whiteout and into our very souls. "Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1999 . . ." I shit you not.