Scream Read Online Free PDF Page B

challenge, though.
    Schuyler County Salad
    1 lb. cooked macaroni
    1 2-lb. jar Miracle Whip Dressing
    1 shaker of salt
    The only things the men in the area actually enjoy, if they are true locals, are snowmobiling and hunting. The regional costume for men is trucker’s caps and greasy Carhartts and baggy Dickies, out of which protrude their proud guts. With everybody poor or unemployed the stores are always empty until—come fall—the hunting departments of the sporting goods stores are packed. The men turn into shoppers for guns, the latest in camouflage fashion, foot warmers, portable deer blinds, and expensive soaps to wash their clothes in, so they didn’t have any scent to scare off the deer.
    At Mom’s first nursing home there was a male nurse who told me, “I hunt for sustenance. To feed the family.” That’s what they all say—they are doing it for “sustenance.” No, they are not. By the time these men buy the guns and the ammo and the night vision goggles and the camouflage to hide themselves and the Day-Glo vests so the other hunters don’t shoot them, and buy gas for their pickups that get, I don’t know, ten, fifteen miles to the gallon, shoot a deer, lug it to the butcher, have it butchered—forget it! You are looking at meat that probably cost ten, twelve bucks a pound—and for what? Not only does nobody need to eat meat all the time, but venison jerky, venison burger, venison steak—that stuff doesn’t taste good! I don’t care if you add chili and cumin or if you put it in a slow cooker with red wine and onions, it is gamy and stringy and has a metallic taste of fear you can’t ever quite cover up.

an inhabitant of schuyler county
    I used to go to sleep every night and pray that when I woke I would have become vegan, or at least vegetarian. But life doesn’t necessarily turn out the way you want, and I would find myself at the stove, cooking bacon again.
    I can say that it is morally better to be a vegetarian since you are not making anything else suffer in order to keep your own suffering going. There are people like the Jains, in India, who eat nothing but leaves and leaf by-products and have to make sure there are no bugs on them. They avoid harming animals, even to the point of getting up to gently brush the streets before dawn so no one steps on an insect. There are Orthodox Jews so religious that all of Crown Heights was thrown into a tizzy when they realized the water contained organisms that were some kind of microscopic crustacean—not kosher.
    These philosophies may be too extreme, but what do I know? Since I eat meat, I cannot tell others what to do. I do know that a cow—or a sheep—is not going to survive by itself out in the wild. The types of cows we have now are not aurochs. They need silage, shelter, worm paste. They are feeble-minded, survival-wise, or we would see cows proud and free in the forest.
    Same with sheep. You can’t just take some sheep and say, I release you! You are free now! Run wild! The sheep is not going to survive out there. After it rains, it is just going to topple over from the weight of its own wet, unshorn fur. It’s going to get caught in barbed wire and bleat to death.
    The one thing—of course!—no one up here could tolerate was any suggestion that guns shouldn’t be legal. They would just about blow your head off at the very mention of the topic.
    At first, when I arrived in Schuyler County, I thought I should get to know a little bit about the place. I found an ad in the paper:

    What an interesting event to attend! I thought. Local culture.
    So I went.
    The Interlaken Sports Club was in a metal building, miles away from my house, in the middle of a field. People lined up to buy their tickets, and it was sold out by four thirty. Everyone waited at long tables until the command to get our food was given. Set up on long steam tables were approximately