Kira Córdova

For Mutton and High Hold 

“I’ve eaten those” is exactly what I couldn't say to the child at the Denver Museum of Nature of Science locking eyes with the stuffed guanaco in the Patagonia taxidermy diorama. But I wanted to, and if they were my child or my twin’s, I would have. Because I have. Eaten one, that is. 

The sign on the diorama says “wild South American camels,” but guanaco look like alpacas, all long-necked and legged and prairie clay red on their topsides. Their stomachs blend to cream, like reverse bronzer. They taste how they smell cooking in the twenty-square foot kitchen for staff and trade workers in Bahía Bustamante in Argentina on the Eastern Coast of Patagonia south of Puerto Madryn, 200 kilos from the nearest gas station–like a rack of game meat ribs raw roasting in a gas oven. Not unlike Wyoming pronghorn if the antelope didn’t eat sage. 

I came to the lodge at Bahía Bustamante to work in the supposed farm-to-table garden four hours a day in exchange for room and board, access to the beaches, and the occasional biologist-led excursion to penguin colonies with the lodge guests. I ended up serving mostly imported food to those guests because the owner—an Argentinian woman of proud British origin—liked the look of foreign anglophones in her restaurant better than the Porteños she had hired for the summer season. Although she didn’t count on some of us speaking Spanish and making friends with the Argentinians. My last name might have tipped her off. 

The bay, sometimes called the Bay of Flies because of decomposing marine flora, started as a seaweed-harvesting boom town for hair gel ingredients. But since they pulled all the seaweed off the beach every year, no spores could return to the bay and repopulate it, and the green gold disappeared. The current owners kept the old barns to make wine and store cars and the old concrete block houses for staff barracks and built bungalows and called it all an eco lodge. 

Guanaco is cheap meat to feed the the waiters and the cleaners and the gringo trade workers, and, even though the sheep I saw all around the access road illustrated the Denver museum’s point that ruminants have invaded and degraded most guanaco habitat, they still harvest a dozen or so a year. And even though I grew up field dressing mule deer on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, the owner’s husband and the lodge mechanic never let me hunt with them. 

So I looked at them, and ate them, instead, nose not pressed to glass in Colorado but flared into nonstop Patagonian wind on the steppe. And I wondered, if you are what you eat, if that makes me better suited for the desert or vulnerable to habitat loss.