Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear Page A

“We got up on them blacks,” Belinda said. “What we did, we were on the trail of the blacks, and we got greedy. We kept picking.” When they looked up, they realized they didn’t know where they were. “It kept raining harder, getting darker and darker, so we bedded down for the night,” she said. Their lean-to collapsed in the storm. In the morning, it was still raining, and the Connes found that they were in the old growth, with no path out. Michael found a fallen tree, rotting and spacious enough for the three of them to sit inside; he hollowed a section of it clean with his knife, and they all crammed in, filling in the chinks with sticks and leaves so they wouldn’t get wet. When afternoon came, they pulled large pieces of bark across the opening.
    The last thing the Connes had eaten was a batch of peanut butter sandwiches on Sunday afternoon. In the tree, all night, they talked about food. Someone indelicately brought up the Donner Party. They watched big timber ants crawl along the inside of the log. “We thought about poppin’ the heads off and eating them that way,” Belinda said, adding that the wiggling of a live one would have been too much for her. “That’s a last resort. The worms I don’t think I could ever do.” As for mushrooms, white buttons from the grocery store were the only kind they ate. Dan tried a hedgehog and spat it out; it was his first taste of the delicacy that had lured his family to the woods, and he found it repulsive. “My husband said if we come down to starvin’ that we could eat them,” Belinda said. His other idea—eat Jesse—was overruled. “Michael and I said we would take one of our legs first,” Belinda said. “I would starve to death before I could eat a dog. A squirrel? Yes, I could. But a
dog
?” They placed all their hopes on rescue.
    Dan’s back hurt so badly that he couldn’t move. Michael fell in the creek while collecting water in a ziplock bag and developed hypothermia. The frostbite on his feet turned to trench. Belinda, who also had frostbite, watched her son grow weaker, and was sure that he was going to die. On Thursday, Dan turned to her and said, “Today’s the day when they’re going to start notifying the next of kin.” They listened to the helicopters overhead and tried in vain to signal them with the face of a dead cell phone and the blade of a buck knife. Still, for six days they didn’t eat a thing, until—on the day before the search mission would have changed from rescue to recovery—they were spotted and flown to a hospital. Grateful to have escaped with his life, Dan broke his fast with pepperoni sticks and Doritos.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    T he world Brett operates in, it’s a lot of backdoor bullshit and making deals,” an old Vegas hand and a friend of Ottolenghi’s said. Corruption is rampant. “You’ll have a food-and-beverage VP that goes with a certain purveyor because he says, ‘I’ll sell you crab legs for the buffet and write you a personal check for ten percent of whatever we do. You’ll make two hundred and fifty grand because you buy two and a half million in crab.’” Another chef told me about a couple of fast-talking local seafood venders, an Italian who looks Spanish and a Spaniard who looks Italian. “They have very raspy voices, like something out of a scene in a Mafia movie,” he said. “They do this bait-and-switch thing, telling you stories, and before you know it there’s a thousand pounds of tuna waiting at your back door.”
    Las Vegas’s Butter Man, Clint Arthur, says, “It’s very cutthroat.” He sells 85-percent-butterfat butter to the chefs at Aureole, Payard, Jean Georges Steakhouse, and Restaurant Guy Savoy, and once designed an extra-salty butter for David Werly, the executive chef at Le Cirque.