by Jim Harrison
1980
Bird Hunting
Many of our life-giving rituals are deeply private, whether their nature is sexual, religious, or involved in far simpler pleasures. I like, in May—perhaps love is a better word—to stand in a clearing near dark and watch the mating flight of the male woodcock, the sweeping contorted spiral, then the whirl back to earth. Not incidentally, this dance tells you where the birds will be in the fall during hunting season as they mate and breed in the vicinity of their singing grounds. And when migratory groups gather and accumulate they tend to favor these same clearings. The French philosopher Bachelard ascribed a peculiar magic to certain things and locations—attics, haylofts, seashells, a cabin in the dark with a window square of yellow light. Since the age of seven, when I began hunting, I've favored the bottoms of rivers and lakes and forest clearings.
Five months later, in early October, four men stand in such a clearing, perhaps fifteen miles from any human settlement. The October sun is thin and weak at this latitude in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, an area remote and charmless except to a few. The four men are planning the evening's menu and staring at the five bird dogs sprawled in a pool of sunlight. There are two yellow Labrador bitches, one owned by myself and the other by a French count I've been hunting with more than a dozen years. My neighbor, whom I think of as “Dogman,” has a German shorthair, an English setter and an English pointer. This lovely pile of animals would make a flawless painting if my bitch Sand, bred from the English Sandringham line, weren't making love to the males with punishing force. It is her way of celebrating the hunt and they cry out as she smothers them. It is hopeless to try to call her off—there is apparently no obedience training when it comes to sheer lust. The fourth hunter among us, an artist from Montana, is especially amused. He is unable to own a bird dog for reasons of temperament.
“Like me, she is a generic love,” the artist says. He is the most focused menu planner of the group. During the hunt he stops and stares a lot because he is fat, but also because he is an artist and likes to study the sere umbers, the siennas, the subdued Tuscan riot that is a Michigan October. He suggests for dinner that he quickly do some Hunanese pork backribs for an appetizer, then we can marinate chunks of grouse and sweetbreads in cream and Tabasco in order to stretch the grouse. After we've browned these chunks we'll add a cup of vastly reduced game stock and a cup of the marinade. We would have had more grouse but no one had the energy to brave the densest thickets where they seemed to be that day. Meanwhile the Dogman would grill ten of the plucked woodcock over a wood fire until medium rare, basting them with butter, lemon and pepper. The more elegant salmis de bécasses would be made by the Count later when we traveled south to my farmhouse. This evening as a last course the Count would offer two racks of lamb with some garlicky flageolet and a salad to tamp it all down. Three Montrachets and four Châteauneuf du Pape would be the rinse. I can't be disturbing my remaining great wines by travel. They would come later.
A minor regional novelist recently said that "cuisine minceur is the moral equivalent of the fox-trot.” Perhaps. In any event you simply can't hike through rugged territory for eight hours and be satisfied with three poached mussels and an asparagus mousse. It is another ritual, though never talked about as such, that the food go as well as the hunting, with each occasionally making up deficiencies in the other. When we're on the road together, say on the way to Montana to fish brown trout, the Count will polish off a plate of bad restaurant food, then hiss “filth” for anyone who cares to hear or not. This is also, not incidentally, his response to any political discussion.
The hunt had gone well for a day that had begun too warm for the dogs, but by late morning the wind had swung around to the northwest off Lake Superior. The artist and I formed the “B” team, in that Sand must be kept separate from the others as she tries to hog the good cover. There is something marvelous about a dog with a sure sense of function, and an intelligent, experienced animal recognizes cover. Good cover for grouse and woodcock, though not identical, is a practical matter of finding their main eating areas. In short, they both hang out where they eat: patches of aspen in clearings, edges of the forest with berry-bearing bushes, tag-alder swales along creeks, near pin cherry, chokecherry, thorn apple, beechnut, red and white dogwood. In other areas abandoned farms are good for reasons of fertility of undergrowth. In my region of the U.P. there are not abandoned farms because farms themselves are scarce—there's one about thirty miles south of here. The main local livelihood is logging, a positive influence on game quantity; as opposed to what most people think, a fully mature forest is relatively sterile in terms of mammalian and game-bird life.
The artist and I are never disturbed over the idea that the others will overshoot us. To be good at bird hunting you need a combination of excellent dog work, an ability to shoot well, and a knowledge of cover. The Dogman's shorthair could find birds in a busy roller rink. I once saw this dog, Cochise by name, crawl beneath a brush pile in search of a wounded grouse, his tail pointing up at the heavens through a mat of cedar brush. I am mindful that the fine novelist, Hemingway, wasted an entire African hunt brooding over the idea that his partner was doing better. Frankly, everyone in his secret heart must know who is the best. I'm not letting Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Saul Bellow ruin my life as a novelist because they're better at it. If the Count and Dogman return garlanded with birds we will rejoice at the table.
We do have one advantage and that rests in the fact that I spend a lot of the summer locating birds, driving hundreds of miles on forest two-tracks. In the past five years I have pretty much covered a strip of land a hundred and fifty miles long by thirty miles wide bordering Lake Superior. Sand is upset that I don't shoot the birds off-season but if she finds a covey of grouse she'll become affectionate back in the car. I fight her off, telling her, “I'm not of your kind, I'm an American Poet.”
The artist has new boots and his feet hurt after the first half-hour aspen walk with two flushed birds and no hits. We drive to a tag-alder swale only a mile or so from the village. We are excited enough by this area to stop talking about food and love for a short while. Even the dog is beside herself when we pull to a stop beside the marsh. We each take a side with Sand casting back and forth in the improbably dark tag-alder thicket. Educated luck! Within a half hour a dozen woodcock have burst from cover and we have bagged five. The artist is beside himself and throws himself on the ground laughing and necking with the dog. “Sand, we are American Sportsmen,” he yells to the blue sky and a red-tailed hawk a thousand feet above us. On the way back to the car Sand flushes a grouse from a clump of goldenrod. The grouse falls to the artist's long shot. To maintain this state of grace we go to the bar for a few drinks then back to the cabin for lunch and a short midday nap. We envision the Count and Dogman on a forced march to bag the number of birds we have done effortlessly. We discuss the merits of a pasta dish I had devised in May with a sauce of wild leeks and morels, sweetbreads and cream. I have some dried morels and domestic leeks at the cabin. It will make a serviceable lunch, adding some julienned prosciutto.
In the state of post-nap grogginess our victories seem less specific. We jounce over a dozen miles of logging road to rendezvous with the Count and Dogman at a bend in the river. We are somewhat disappointed to see that they are drinking on the riverbank, and eating a pâté the Count had in his cooler made out of Hungarian grouse and teal he had shot in Montana. They have seven woodcock and two grouse. They are pleasantly surprised at our bag and head off to hunt another hour. When they're gone we finish the pâté and head off lazily down the road with neither of us willing to break brush. We shoot only one of five flushed birds, destroying the morning's invulnerability. Even the dog seems disappointed in us. Hearing distant shooting I climb to a bare hillock and look through my monocular (I'm blind in one eye so in a moment of brilliance gave up binoculars after thirty years). The Dogman and Count approach a swale perhaps a thousand yards distant. My monocular is a small round movie s
creen focused on the three pointers on tightly honored point. There is a flush and the Count swings left and right and two birds fall. Unlike the artist and I the Count and Dogman take turns. Now I see my own dog, Sand, streaking toward the real action as the Count's retriever fetches the birds. I turn with the monocular and focus on the artist dozing under an oak tree, his left hand brushing acorns from beneath his ample bottom. I am not exactly “one with the earth” but I'm feeling good. Simultaneous visions of a fashion model and a duck I had cooked with marrow and exactly thirty-three cloves of garlic sweep through my mind. It is our first day of hunting together, much like the Glorious Twelfth in England. I can feel my happiness emanating in bands to the hunters in the distance.
Back at the cabin, while the artist is preparing his fiery ribs of the Orient, I inoculate the cracks of the log walls using a large marinade hypodermic and a solution of Tabasco and Canadian whiskey. This drives away bats which have been using the walls as both bedroom and toilet. They fly around drunkenly like poets on grants. I sip this concoction to feel life even more strongly. I am quickly losing the self-absorption that made me all the money in the first place, a self-absorption that paradoxically only regains its value after you lose it for a while. I am wearing a Texas tailored camouflage jump suit with which I sneak up on snowshoe rabbits for illegal summer-time French fricassees. I have also seen a curious female coyote five times but never before she has seen me first, wondering perhaps at this burly man creeping through the swamp in clumsy imitation of other beasts.
I turn from my bat chores and look at my friends busy in the kitchen, feeding dogs, dressing after a shower. We in the Midwest have to face up to the idea that no one on America's dream coasts will visit us except for very special occasions. True, we have the Great Lakes but they have the Atlantic and the Pacific. They also have restaurants. Tom McGuane, the novelist, said to me about the Midwest, “Mortimer Snerd must have bred five thousand times a day to build that heartland race.” True, but the land as I find it, and daily walk it, is virtually peopleless, with vast undifferentiated swamps, ridges, old circular logging roads; a region of cold fogs, monstrous weather changes, third-growth forests devoid of charm, models, and actresses, or ballerinas, but somehow superbly likable.
After the meal and a goblet of calvados we sit before the fire and watch the Count tease his teeth and upper lip with a thumb, a small piece of blanket on his shoulder. Technically speaking he is not "sucking his thumb.” He has reminded me that for years I have preferred to watch television through the tiny squares of an afghan thrown over my head. Pourquoi? Beats me. The artist becomes morose, commenting that after years of experience in the nearby village he is sure that if he wore a Dolly Parton wig he would be the most attractive woman in town. He has offered local ladies paintings for their favors and the paintings are worth thousands.
“They don't want paintings, they want a husband,” says the Dogman. “Besides, you're as ugly as we all are. I drink because I'm ugly. You don't try hard enough. Romania wasn't built in a day.”
It is easy to tire of this masculine nonsense, and after a week, when the supply of good wine runs out, we head south to my farm in Leelanau County, a rather spectacular area itself; a hilly landscape of cherry orchards jutting out as a peninsula into Lake Michigan. With a northern front the weather has turned cold and somber which will drive the woodcock south on their migratory route. For years we have found them arriving in our favorite areas between October sixth and tenth.
A Native American myth insists that the Great Spirit made the woodcock up last out of the leftover parts of other birds. Philohela minor is colored in shades of brown, black, and gray which says nothing until you envision the mottled shades of autumn—foliage burned by frost, wet leaves, bare earth. They smell musky and their breasts are plumper than a quail's. The French prefer their flavor over all other game birds, spreading their entrails on large croutons. Jeanne Moreau told me that as a young actress she would save a month to buy a brace of woodcock. The Count doesn't know yet but I've purchased two cases of Echêzeaux, his favorite. Childish surprises are still the best.
My farmhouse owns the still ample remains of my Warner Bros. Memorial Wine Cellar, though my oldest daughter has hidden a ‘49 Latour and some ‘61 Lafites against my excesses. She has made and brought from New York a goose confit. My agent has sent a pound of caviar. A bow-hunter friend has sent over a half of venison. I have ordered a quarter of prime veal and a freshly killed local lamb. The Dogman is taking a few days off from grouse and woodcock to get some wild ducks, hopefully teal and mallard. A farmer drops off the dozen barnyard chickens and ducks we called about in August. It's too early to get any fresh truffles from New York but we'll have to make do. We'll poach two local salmon for dinner to lighten up a bit, and I'll make gravlax out of a third. I bought seven pounds of garlic, my favorite number!
And so it goes. We hunt hard during the short Indian summer days and cook hard during the long evenings. I suspect this will strike some as primitive. Years ago we had to hunt much harder and the Count reminds me of how my wife and two daughters would hear the car and run out of the house to see the bag. One day, the best ever, we came home with nine grouse, seven woodcock, and a few rabbits. He says that ten years later whenever he sees a girl wearing braces he thinks of my daughter at thirteen, peering at the game birds with utter delight. Then she would set about plucking enough birds for dinner, and we would hang the others a few days, a desirable practice for flavor.
A week of the local hunting leaves us with a caloric load that we can't quite walk off in our daily hunting. I would like to say that somehow our genes are issuing messages to store up for the coming winter but this is ardent nonsense. In times past certain of the deadly sins achieved a certain spirituality when taken far enough. I resolve to make notes on the spirituality of gluttony but the idea is a bit too remote to attract anything more than thoughts of Rasputin's talents for sex and drink, Nixon's for fibbing, Rabelais's, Toulouse-Lautrec's, and Curnonsky's for food. Before we leave for the austerity of the north we watch the Count working deep into the night. He is assembling a rough pâté in a clear glass tureen made out of gorgeous layers of ground veal flavored with apples and calvados, duck, venison, woodcock and grouse. This little dish is being made as a precaution against our living too simply back in the U.P. That evening the Count had made an enormous salmis it bécasses, the most exacting of woodcock dishes, and one would think exhaustion would have driven him to bed, but he lacks our very American cheap resolve to eat nothing to purge too much. During eating, the French discuss future eating. After the dinner we had decided that Sand should lick the platter, a traditional reward for a dog that has done well in the field. When the platter was put down on the rug with its dark freight of extra sauce she had approached wiggling, her eyes closed in pleasure, and limping with fatigue. After two long, tentative laps the hunger became generalized and she flopped on the platter, rolling in the juices. It was comic and touching. A dog is entitled to a favorite time of year just as we are.
Once I fell down just as a dog came on point in thick cover. I was a little worried as years before I had spent a month in traction from a fall during bird season. Two setters honored the first dog's point, skidding to full attention behind the first dog. It was a rainy day in late season and I watched it all from ground level, having come suddenly to the point where I didn't want to shoot any more birds that year. The grouse wild-flushed off into the mist, free to die during the harsh winter, or live another year.
The season is over and my heart is as full as Neruda's interminable artichoke. Everyone is gone and I draft a novel, further taxing my overused system. I go to a Mexican health farm for two weeks but am terribly embarrassed when I catch a few local workers staring at me at some exercises. Twenty years ago I was a laborer building small buildings as they are now. We were very poor then and a half a venison meant a great deal. I skip the exercises and walk alone every day in the mountains. I hunt rattlesnakes without harm
ing them. After flushing coveys of quail I begin to devise ways of snaring a few to enhance the expensive vegetarian diet at the spa. In New York and Los Angeles, or anywhere in the world, I mostly hunt good restaurants.
My own hunting and fishing are largely misunderstood activities cataloged under the banal notion of “macho,” whereas I tend to view them as a continuation of my birthright. The forest, after all, isn't my Louvre. The Louvre is my Louvre. I walk there from my rooms at the Lotti. There are ideas currently afoot about the positive effects of “male bonding,” inferring there might be something to such activities as they have had a regular place in the male life since prehistory. There is a studied silliness in responding to old ideas brought up in new dime store frocks by newspaper feature editors. Hemingway went for record kudu and marlin in public, while Faulkner in self-designed obscurity hunted and fished with friends, played polo, chased foxes, sailed, and drank a bit.
Just the other night, in the middle of August while I was writing this, I went calling coyotes with a friend. In the right mood coyotes will respond to our imitation of their call, also to a loon's call which is more difficult to imitate. Despite what taxonomists say, these creatures are related, if only spiritually. To the east the moon was full and enormous at midnight; to the north there was the pale green fluttering sheen of aurora borealis, the northern lights; in the west a large thunderstorm and line squall was forming and bolts of lightning cracked the sky in the forms of undersea coral. We were in a thousand-acre clearing with a thousand huge, gray white pine stumps, cut a century ago. My friend called and the coyotes responded in this mythological landscape with breathless abandon intermingled with the thunder. On the long ride back in the rain one sensed the sky was full of black anti-rainbows. Around a puddle in the trail three woodcock preened and fed. I eased out of the car and stooped quite close to them, their eyes fiery and blinded by the headlights. I spoke to the birds a few minutes, then watched them flush through the glittery beads of rain into the darkness. A wonderful hunt.