Duck Season

by David McAninch

  SOMETIME AFTER THREE, BY SOME unspoken consensus, the hunting resumed. A few more birds were bagged. More jokes were groaned at. More cigarettes were rolled. At around four thirty, another bon paquet of birds was spotted coming in from the north. Basso dispatched the volants. Maxime worked the appeaux.

  “Two big ones just landed!” Henri Michel whispered, peering through a peephole.

  Suddenly Basso pressed his twelve-gauge into my hands. “Vas-y! Vas-y!” he said. “Take my turn!”

  He nudged me alongside Henri Michel, who was already drawing a bead on his target through one of the holes.

  I heard Francis ask Basso, “Does he know what he’s doing?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Basso. “He goes hunting all the time.”

  “Actually, I—”

  But there was no time for clarifications. Basso had his hand on my shoulder and was pointing through a peephole.

  “You see them?” Basso whispered.

  I didn’t.

  “They’re right in front of you, nom de dieu!” he said. “In the dead oak!”

  There were a lot of dead-looking trees to choose from.

  “Hurry up!” Henri Michel wheezed, gun at the ready. “They’re not going to sit there forever!”

  Finally, I made out two dove-shaped silhouettes on a leafless branch. I took aim at the one on the left as best I could, but I couldn’t keep sight of the bird through the peephole while the barrel of the gun was occupying it. This was a rather major flaw in the design of the palombière, I thought.

  Francis counted to three. I pulled back gently on the trigger. A gun discharged. It wasn’t mine. I pulled the trigger a little further. Nothing. Then a bit further. Finally, ka-blam!

  A suffocating silence fell. Henri Michel collected his spent shell and, without uttering a word, went down to retrieve his bird.

  Basso took his gun back. “Don’t worry about it, mon brave.”

  Francis was scratching the side of his face and staring at his feet. His teeth were clenched, and his jaw muscles were bulging. He turned to Basso and unleashed a tirade. The Gasconized French came so fast and furious that I could catch only bursts of what he was saying: “Always playing the fool! . . . look like a bunch of amateurs! . . . isn’t a game! . . . you said he knew what he was doing!”

  Basso leaned an arm on the spotter’s platform, looking unperturbed. “Eh oh, Francis, calme-toi.”

  I flashed Maxime a confused look.

  “He’ll get over it,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

  “Get over what?” I said. “That I missed?”

  “You fired too late,” Maxime explained. “You both have to fire at the exact same time, on the count, or else the second bird will hear the first shot and take off. And it’s illegal to shoot a palombe when it’s flying.”

  So that’s why they fire on the count of three.

  I felt like an idiot.

  “It’s no big deal,” said Maxime after Francis had emptied himself of invective and retreated to the spotter’s perch to brood. “The only thing my dad cares about is his pals in the next blind overhearing two shots—pim! pam!—and thinking we’re up here getting drunk and shooting at whatever moves.”

  I didn’t say so, but that’s actually what I’d pictured pigeon hunting to be like.

  Later, as we were taking down the appeaux and getting ready to head home, I apologized to Francis. He looked more embarrassed than angry.

  “Pas de souci,” he said in a pinched voice—no worries.

  I felt a little sorry for him. He’d poured the entirety of his leisure time into a single hobby, but it didn’t seem to make him that happy.

  On the drive back to Plaisance, Basso was as upbeat as ever.

  I thanked him for taking the heat for my screwup.

  He slugged my shoulder with the back of his hand. “Twenty more days up in that tree, and you might get the hang of it!”

  I told him that after twenty days in a tree house I’d be as uptight as Francis.

  “Eh oh!”

  I realized just then that Francis had been right about one thing: Basso was never serious. At first I’d thought his nonstop bonhomie and wisecracking was an act. No one could naturally be like that all the time. But now I was convinced this was just his default setting.

  Out of the blue, I asked Basso if he had a family. He said he had a wife and kids and a lot of dogs. Then I asked him if he was from Plaisance.

  He shot me a wily look.

  “I’ll tell you my dark secret,” he said. “My family is originally from Italy!”

  I told him he seemed pretty Gascon to me.

  Basso dropped me off just as the sun was sinking behind Plaisance’s rooftops. Henri Michel had given me four pigeons to take home. Feeling I hardly deserved them, I’d tried to refuse, but to no avail. Now I left the birds on the doorstep and went in to tell Charlotte and Michele I was home and unharmed. When I came back outside, there were only three. A cat from the village had dragged the fourth away and was making a bloody feast of it down by the stream. I snatched the remaining pigeons and took them into the kitchen.

  “Are those birds dead?” Charlotte asked.

  “Very,” I said.

  “You’re not keeping them in here, are you?” said Michele.

  “Well, I can’t keep them out there,” I said.

  Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. It dawned on me that I had no idea how to pluck, clean, and prepare freshly shot wood pigeons.

  “Maybe you should call Nadine,” said Michele.

  I was already reaching for my phone.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I FOUND myself hunched over Nadine’s kitchen counter with a plucked pigeon in my hands, trying with considerable difficulty to detach the digestive-tract membrane from the bird’s anus so that I could pull the pigeon’s guts out the neck hole in one piece without rupturing the intestines and spreading their contents all over the place. Nadine had demonstrated the procedure on the first bird and made it look as easy as peeling a banana. With a similarly breezy savoir faire, she had shown me how to locate the bird’s heart and liver amid the bloody viscera so that the organs could be washed and added to the sauce. She also demonstrated how to separate the jacket of usable tissue in the gizzard from the fibrous core. Notably, none of these delicate tasks were mentioned in Palay’s recipe, which began simply with the line “Clean the birds.”

  Nadine, predictably, had scoffed when I told her over the phone that I intended to make a salmis de palombes using the old Béarnais’s cookbook. With the calming authority of a nurse, she had instructed me to put the dead pigeons in a plastic bag in the bottom of my fridge and to bring them over promptly the next morning so that she could instruct me in the proper way to make the dish.

  Now, with the gutting and cleaning of the birds complete, Nadine and I proceeded with the rest of the preparation, which I found to be pleasurably straightforward. From a cursory examination of the birds, she had determined that they were young, and thus wouldn’t require a long cooking time. Young birds, she said, called for nothing more than a quick browning in the oven and then a low simmer in wine with a hash of vegetables and ham hock, enriched by the birds’ giblets and roasting juices, and darkened with a couple of caramel-extract pastilles. As a last step before letting the birds cook for a while, she slid the tough skin of the ham hock, which another cook might have discarded, into the bottom of the saucepan to infuse the sauce with extra flavor from the bottom up.

  “Nothing wasted,” Nadine said, and then winked, as she was wont to do when imparting a bit of wisdom.

  When the pigeons were done, Nadine transferred the birds to a baking dish. Then she puréed the hachis and strained it several times, producing an ink-black sauce so glossy it was almost luminous.

  After that, she poured the sauce over the birds, covered the dish in foil, and sent me on my way.

  We had the salmis de palombes for dinner that night. It is a dish that calls for, and indeed insists on, th
e companionship of a very rude tannat. Fortunately I had a bottle of old-vines Madiran on hand that could cut through anything. I poured a couple of glasses and sliced into one of the birds, cloaked in its dark, glimmering sauce. The flesh released a musky scent that caused Michele and Charlotte to wrinkle their noses. And yet the perfume disappeared the moment I took a bite, subsumed by the salmis’ all-enveloping richness.

  Before going to bed, I flipped through Palay’s book again, studying its many game-bird recipes. I hadn’t noticed it earlier, but there was actually a recipe for crow. It suggested cooking the bird in wine. No rock required.

  18

  Noble Spirits

  Here’s a factoid that visitors to Gascony are likely to hear eventually: The quantity of Armagnac produced in any given year is equivalent to the angel’s share—the volume of spirit lost to evaporation—of a year’s production of Cognac. I’ve never crunched the numbers, but have been assured by several Armagnac makers that this observation isn’t far off the mark. Whatever the exact ratio of this disparity between Armagnac and Cognac, the overall message to take from it is that the shadow cast across Gascony by that other white-grape brandy, which hails from the Charente, is very long.

  In fact, over the years many Gascons have gotten into the habit of defining Armagnac simply by listing the ways it is not like Cognac. For one thing, they’ll say, Armagnac is distilled only once, not twice, meaning it retains more of its aromatic character and terroir and, as a rule, requires longer aging to soften the rough edges. For another, Armagnac is produced in small quantities on family estates, not in massive industrial distilleries that have, in the eyes of Gascons at least, created a monstrous global thirst for cheap, young brandies. Also, Armagnac’s origins go farther back than Cognac’s by nearly 200 years, the spirit having been invented in the early Middle Ages, when it was valued as a cure for everything from tonsillitis to fistulas. (In the fourteenth century, Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, allegedly suffered a gruesome death when his bedclothes, soaked for medicinal purposes in eau-de-vie, caught fire.)

  The vocabulary deployed by writers and sommeliers to describe Armagnac’s aromas and flavors is vast and—as is the case with tasting notes of all kinds—occasionally ridiculous. An incomplete list of the descriptors I found in a book about Armagnac by the French restaurateur and wine expert Frédéric Lebel includes: pear, kirsch, fig, sloe, blackberry, violet, apple blossom, bracken, tree moss, hay, fennel, linden blossom, vanilla, cinnamon, gingerbread, cloves, licorice, civet, fur, leather, meat juice, musk, almond, peanuts, prunes, mandarin, grapefruit, lemon, coffee, cocoa, flint, toast, tar, rancio, oak, pine, ethyl acetate, butter, beeswax, hot sand.

  Similarly, enthusiasts have come up with colorful if not always illuminating metaphors to describe the distinction between Cognac and Armagnac. In the preface to Lebel’s book, the master sommelier Gérard Basset writes, “Armagnac is to Cognac what the Rolling Stones were to the Beatles.” Paula Wolfert quotes a Gascon friend of hers who characterized Cognac as “a pretty girl in a freshly laundered smock carrying a basket of wildflowers” and Armagnac as “a tempestuous woman of a ‘certain age,’ someone you don’t bring home to Mother . . .”

  I’ve been a lover of Armagnac, if not tempestuous women, since 2002. That’s the year Michele and I honeymooned in the Dordogne and, during a meandering drive one afternoon, dipped unknowingly into the northern fringes of Gascony’s Armagnac-making country. Small arrow-shaped signs started cropping up at crossroads, advertising Dégustation Armagnacs et Eaux-de-Vie, and we’d followed one of them down an unpaved road to a somber-looking gray house flanked by a few farm buildings that had seen better days. I rang a bell, and we waited a long time until an oldish woman wrapped in a shawl emerged from the house and led us, without a word, to a frigid, cement-floored room lined with shelves of bottles. There, in the company of the woman’s fidgety lap dog, we tasted a dozen Armagnacs, each of a different age. They were beguiling brandies, in hues of amber and topaz and old gold, fiery but soft, too, with all kinds of toasty and caramelized aromas, and flavors that shimmered weirdly around the edges with suggestions of fruit and spice. We bought three bottles for what seemed like an unjustifiably small sum and were offered, again with barely a word, a fourth as a parting gift.

  Sadly, though I remember perfectly well the name of the woman’s dog—Noisette—I have forgotten the name of the estate itself. But those first tastes of Armagnac made an impression, and as my Gascony infatuation flowered in the years that followed, I educated myself as best I could about the distilled spirit. I toured distilleries big and small (rather, small and smaller). I interviewed cellar-masters and barrel-makers. I had the workings of the copper column stills, known as alembics, explained to me in exhaustive and sometimes exhausting detail. I sat for marathon tastings. I carried home bottles in my suitcase so that I might spread the gospel of Armagnac to friends back home.

  The one thing I had never managed to do, though, was to witness the distillers in action. La distillation—which begins after the last of the fall harvest has been turned into weak distilling wine, and lasts anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months, depending on the size of the estate—is invoked by Gascons in reverent terms. The descriptions usually include stoic men standing vigil day and night in unheated sheds, tending to their chugging copper stills as eau-de-vie trickles into charred-oak casks, where the clear newborn brandy will mature to golden mellowness in moldy chais, as the aging sheds are called.

  In truth, what interested me more than the distilling itself were the meals that attended it. Because the alembics have to perform their work continuously until the last of the season’s petit vin is used up, the distillers eat where they work. And because this is Gascony, where you don’t just unwrap a sandwich on your lunch break, the circumstances have given rise to a distinguished tradition of feasting.

  ONE DOES NOT JUST SHOW up for a repas distillation as one might for a village cookout. One has to be invited. Knowing this, I cast a wide net, apprising everyone I knew of my desire to take part in such a meal. In the end I snagged three invitations.

  The first came from one of the Esbouhats. Luc Périssé was in his forties and sported longish hair and a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard. He made a habit of slapping me on the back and shouting “Whassuuuuuup!” whenever he saw me, perhaps (though I never confirmed this) because he mistakenly believed that this was how men of my generation greeted each other in America. Luc had, by his own account, been raised by the Esbouhats, to whom his dad, one of the club’s founding members, had entrusted his son’s care during long absences for work. Luc described himself as a négociant who traveled around the region to buy and sell wine and produits du terroir.

  Luc and a group of friends gathered each year at the estate of a young distiller named Jean-Christophe for what Luc characterized as a distillation dinner of Falstaffian dimensions. The meal, Luc said, went very late, was attended exclusively by men, was provisioned with nothing but meat, and was irrigated with great quantities of wine and Armagnac.

  I did not hesitate to accept the invitation, though I confess that I felt a certain apprehension at the prospect of being stranded in the hinterlands of the Gers at the mercy of hard-paryting Gascons.

  When Luc picked me up on the night of the dinner, I asked if we might take two cars.

  He shook his head and laughed. “You’d never find your way back.”

  Indeed, the domaine of Jean-Christophe was about as lost in the hills as one can get in the Gers. I remember quickly losing track of where we were as Luc drove us north out of Plaisance in the darkness along a series of ever narrower roads that cut through unfamiliar villages, the car’s headlights illuminating crumbling stone fences and snarled hedgerows.

  After a half hour or so, we arrived in an empty gravel courtyard surrounded by barn-like buildings. Light seeped from the entrance to one of them. I followed Luc inside and found myself in a cold, cinder-block-walled room gazing at a formidable assemblage of riveted c
opper that was belching smoke into a vent hood and shuddering rhythmically, ka-chug ka-chug ka-chug. This alembic—the first wood-fired one I’d seen—looked not unlike an old-fashioned train locomotive, and wasn’t that much smaller. Luc went to look for Jean-Christophe, which gave me a chance to study the contraption. One part of it consisted of an iron firebox attached to an oblong receptacle—which I took to be the boiler—topped with a five-foot sectioned column. To the right of that was a single, fatter, and much taller column made of smoother and shinier copper. The two columns were connected by two copper pipes, one of them straight, the other goosenecked. A thicket of rusty valves jutted from the middle of the big column. From one of those valves emerged a curving length of copper tubing. Clear liquid was trickling from the tube into an oak cask that had been propped on its side.

  Luc came back into the room with a gray-haired man in a flannel shirt and oval glasses: Monsieur Dutirou, the night-shift alembic-tender. The others hadn’t arrived yet.

  Dutirou slid a few pieces of wood into the firebox, dusted off his hands, and beckoned us over to the cask. He filled three plastic shot glasses from the end of the copper tube.

  “Santé,” said Dutirou, and we threw back the eau-de-vie. It left a trail of pure fire, with a trace of fruitiness fighting through the burn.

  Dutirou looked admiringly at the alembic, which, he said, had been made in Agen in 1945. “She’s a beauty, non?”

  While Luc kept checking his watch, Dutirou proceeded, with the earnestness of a science teacher, to describe how the alembic worked. Of the many tutorials on this subject I’d received over the years, his was by far the most lucid. Here is a distillation, if you will: To begin with, the season’s freshly fermented weak white wine—all Armagnac makers must first be winemakers, forcément—travels from a stainless-steel cuve into the taller of the alembic’s two columns. As the wine flows upward through the tall column, it passes around condensing coils. In an ingenious symbiosis, the cold wine from the cuve causes the warm vapors traveling down through the coils to condense as they descend, even as the heat from those same vapors warms the wine as it rises. The now-warm wine, having performed its condensing duties, passes from the tall column over to the shorter column, where it flows down through a series of platforms on its way to the boiler receptacle at the bottom, getting hotter as it goes. Once the wine boils, its vapors bubble back up through the platformed column, picking up fruity and floral aromas from the wine that’s flowing downward. (Here, Dutirou strayed into a discussion of esters and congeners; this was the only point at which he lost me.) Finally, the vapors migrate over to the taller column via the gooseneck pipe, travel down through the condensing coils, and become limpid, throat-scalding eau-de-vie, which trickles out of the spout and into the cask. The cask, in turn, will impart to the brandy, over the course of years and even decades, pleasing color, flavors, and aromas.