The Commish talks most when he is on his way to a hunt. He will tell you things, such as why his state is so poor. “Farming methods have changed,” he says quite simply. “And the population declined as the farming methods changed from human hands to mechanized labor.” The young people leave, too, reducing the state income and increasing illiteracy and unemployment, leading inexorably to extreme poverty.
When we arrive, the other trucks are parked in a cluster on the outskirts of the field, all the boys and men stand in their camouflage, yawning and sluggish, and sucking in hot coffee. The Commish stops and rolls down his window to check on them, then continues on, along the dirt road, his truck tossing clay in its wake.
He finds a promising patch of land and sets up two small folding chairs in front of a field of dead sunflowers, facing the cotton—millions of milky white balls of it that begin to glow iridescently as the orange sun rises, turning the boys in the distance into black silhouettes.
We sit in silence and watch the sunrise and feel the orange heat on our faces and the bubbles of Diet Cokes on our tongues.
“You know what time it is?” the Commish says.
“What time?” I reply.
“Cigar time.”
I begin to smell the strands of sweet tobacco as the sun begins to tear through the field, and the doves begin to flutter in. They descend, silently, sparingly, toward the wheat that has been scattered by the farmers to sweeten the field. Killdeer weave in and out of the doves and I try not to mix them up as I swing my shotgun and slap the trigger.
Dove hunting centers around their feeding patterns: Doves feed in the morning at sunrise, and in the late afternoon, and because this marks the beginning of hunting season in many states, you will see many hunters out twice per day at first, satisfying their thirst after the eternal spring and summer drought.
“Do you remember your first hunt?” I ask, while we watch the sun rise.
“My first hunt was a dove hunt with my dad and his friends. I was probably five or six years old,” he says. The Commish talks about doves and hunting and life, in equal parts words and silence, in between the crisp report of his Benelli shotgun. He is one of the rare people who can say just as much with silence as with words.
“Any highway is like a buffet line for doves,” he finally says out loud, as Humphrey retrieves and drops a dove into his palm.
What he means is that all of the fields, now in their most fertile state, are a distraction for the doves, which draws them elsewhere and sometimes makes the sit-and-wait method less successful, as the doves dip in and out of the vast buffet of farmland sandwiched on either side of the thin line of blacktop cutting through southeast Arkansas. This season, though, is expected to be one of the best dove seasons ever.
“The dove population is up this year because of a dry spring and summer, which increased their nesting success,” he says. “We usually plant sunflowers, which doves love to feed on. Some harvested agricultural fields are great places to hunt during certain times of the season. Water holes are great afternoon spots, also.”
But for most hunters like the Commish, any hunt is about the experience itself, sitting here and watching the sun rise with his dog and his cigar, not really the amount of game they take.
“My wife has always viewed hunting as ‘the other woman,’” he eventually says.
We sit for hours, or maybe minutes, longer; time passes differently here. As the doves are fetched one at a time and added to the pile, this hunt feels strangely anticlimactic. It is beautiful here, it is peaceful (save for the blasts into the sky), but am I allowed to sit like this when I hunt? Don’t I have to experience a little pain? I think about this as tendrils of cigar smoke float by and the Commish asks me about the book I am writing, and about my father.
“He’s a vegan,” I say.
“A who?”
“A vegan.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone who doesn’t eat meat or dairy or other animal products.”
“I never heard of that,” he says, letting out another shot and sending Humphrey darting into the cotton field.
In the end, the sun casts shadows onto the theatrical faces of the fading sunflowers, as we fold up the chairs and carry our gear to the truck.
We congregate with the boys and men back where we left them and begin to clean the birds. The men puff on cigars and a few of the boys raise their eyebrows at me as I begin to pluck a dove. It is most common to breast the small birds and toss the rest. But when I tell them I am a bit of a purist, they pluck, too. And I show them how to gut the bird and cut off the gland at the tail and they watch intently and begin to pluck some more, and then we form an assembly line and soon have fourteen plucked doves among us.
As we drive away, the air smells of burning rice straw, and the fields are a vision of black and gold stripes. I begin to notice that some people walk along the sides of the infinite roads because they don’t have cars. The Commish doesn’t react because it is such a familiar sight. He tells me about the time he met the Horse Whisperer, an Australian man who walked the roads all the way from Nashville and could tame a wild horse in an afternoon. But even an anomaly like that is commonplace here.
We go to breakfast at LJ’s, the only place to go, where the bathroom soap is thinned out with water, and the morning soap opera plays on mute; where an elderly couple sits side by side reading the paper, and a pair of curly-haired mother-daughter clones sit across from each other, eating their pancakes in silence.
Cassidy and Peter sit at the end of our table, eating a morning cheeseburger and talking about the best sausage maker in town, Jimmy Little.
The Commish extends his arm slowly to reveal his watch from under his sleeve, then brings it to his face and squints his dark eyes through rimless glasses. “Jimmy Little’s funeral is in ten minutes,” he says as if announcing the price of corn.
The table is silent again as we eat our western omelets and greasy, succulent hash.
The rest of the day in the Village consists of a deep afternoon nap and a visit with Roger Mancini in his antique workshop; and then the Commish heads over to his farmland, where one of his workers has a photographic memory and will recite the baseball scores from the last twenty years if you ask him to.
But then at night, the stage lights up again, the lake reflects the moonlight like one thousand angry diamonds, the glasses jingle, and the cigars smoke.
The walls of Roger Mancini’s smoking room resound with the sounds of Faulkner as he imparts his wisdom to the young people again, a kind of wisdom that will linger with them for days after. “If it’s not of substance, it will never be a success. Nothing in history has been,” and “Be happy with what you’re doing,” and “If the world can live without Winston Churchill, they can live without me,” and then howling laughter as someone says, “This wine is so good that if it was any better, God would have kept it for himself!”
We sit around the mahogany table again and eat dove putach, a traditional Italian stew filled with tomatoes and wine and whole doves. And then beer-battered fried dove breast, and then cold poached dove and pears in brandy.
“This meal makes me want to learn to shoot better,” someone says. “My plate looks like a biology class,” someone else says, chuckling as he wipes the vestiges of putach from his plate with a piece of Cassidy’s bread. “We’re suffering from extreme comfort.”
It is not recorded when this lake became a lake. Some suspect it was when the Mississippi River changed course and the forces of erosion cut the bend in her flow, forming a crescent-shaped lake. This is the place where it all began for me and the place I keep coming back to. It is where I missed my first turkey and where I tasted my first hog slowly smoking in a dome-shaped grill. It is a place of such sweet sadness, of nostalgia, of blues pioneers, and in some ways of hope for what could be. It is a place some people like to ignore because it doesn’t smack of success and commerce. But it is a place that can change the meaning of success for some
; where you can still find comfort in the simplest of things—in the wild tonic of the rain, and the salty crunch of a simple fried dove harvested with your own hands on an orange morning and consumed in the same night. It is a place where time moves differently, a place where you can settle into a deep vinous sleep.
It is all so easy, so deceptively easy, to hunt and gather and live well here if you have means. It is because this place, of all the places I’ve ever met, is untouched by time. It is easy to live off the land when you have no other choice. In a way it is choice that plagues our modern food system, our expectation that there will be seven kinds of peanut butter on the shelves of the grocery store, and twelve brands of boneless, skinless chicken breast in the refrigerated aisle. And I wonder if living off the land successfully is possible anywhere but in the Village.
Beer-Battered Fried Dove Breast
Serves 6 to 8
Doves are one of the easiest birds to pluck and so can easily be kept whole. But if you simply like to breast your dove, as many people do, this recipe is simple and requires only ingredients that are usually on hand anyway during a dove hunt—birds and beer. The beer and baking powder give the breast a puffiness and a crunch. It is the perfect complement to that rich liver flavor dove tends to have. I recommend a sweet-and-sour or barbecue dipping sauce (see pages 226 and 227), though the battered dove is also nice just as it is.
30 dove breasts, bone in
4 cups vegetable or grape seed oil
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 (12-ounce) can beer
Salt and pepper
1. Rinse the dove breasts under cold water until the water runs clear. Pat the breasts dry with paper towels and set aside on a plate.
2. In a medium-size pot wide enough to hold about eight dove breasts at a time, heat the oil over a medium flame. The wider your pot, the more vegetable oil you will need to completely submerge the dove breasts.
3. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Slowly whisk in the beer until the liquid is uniform and the consistency of thick syrup.
4. Using your fingers or a fork, dip one breast in the batter until it is uniformly covered. Dip one side of the breast in the hot oil to see if it immediately sizzles. If it doesn’t, wait for the oil to get hotter. Keep testing with the same dove breast, then add more battered breasts, enough to cover the bottom of the pot.
5. Once one side of the breast is golden brown, turn it over and cook the other side until golden brown, 5 to 7 minutes total.
6. Set a wire rack over a sheet tray. Remove the breasts from the pot with a slotted spoon and place them on the rack. Sprinkle all sides with salt and pepper to help retain the crispiness for serving.
7. Repeat until all the dove breasts are cooked, and serve immediately.
Also try: brant, coot, duck, gallinule, goose, grouse, prairie chicken, partridge, pheasant, pigeon, ptarmigan, quail, rail, snipe, turkey, squirrel, rabbit
Poached Dove and Pears in Brandy Sauce
Serves 4, as an appetizer
This starter is cool and light, but with a hint of fall, like Labor Day or an Indian summer. It is perfect when temperatures can still be hot, and the rich, heavy game recipes aren’t quite suitable yet. Brandy and vermouth round out these sweet and gamey flavors—the vermouth is subtle and rich and the brandy, which you light on fire, gives it all a caramel finish. The blue cheese adds the salty tang and the mint ensures that it is fresh and not too cloying. There wasn’t a speck left in the bowl after my fellow hunters and I sat down to dinner.
10 to 15 dove breasts, peeled from the breastbone
2 cups ripe pears, peeled, cored, and quartered
1 cup vermouth
1/2 cup brandy
1 tablespoon thinly sliced fresh mint
2 tablespoons crumbled blue cheese
Freshly ground black pepper
1. Place the dove and pears in a wide saucepan or sauté pan. Pour in the vermouth and poach, uncovered, at a low simmer for 10 minutes, turning over halfway through.
2. Add the brandy, light it with a match, and let the alcohol burn off.
3. With a slotted spoon, remove the pears and dove from the liquid and transfer to a bowl. Reduce the remaining liquid by half and pour it into the bowl.
4. Chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.
5. Before serving, add the mint, blue cheese, and pepper to taste. Toss and serve. Also try: brant, coot, duck, gallinule, goose, grouse, prairie chicken, partridge, pheasant, pigeon, ptarmigan, quail, rail, snipe, turkey, squirrel, rabbit
14-Dove Putach
Serves 8 to 10
This is my take on a very traditional Italian dish made frequently in the Mississippi Delta region. Most people there have memories of putach made by their mother, grandmother, or great-aunt. It works with many kinds of meat, but what makes it a true putach is the vinegar and rosemary base. People add their own elements from there—crushed tomatoes, potatoes—I have even seen the addition of Cajun sausage. My version on a warm September afternoon went like this:
2 tablespoons grape seed oil
14 whole doves, plucked, gutted, feet trimmed, and wings cut at first joint
2 cups red wine
2 large onions, chopped
3 cups button mushrooms, quartered
10 to 12 gloves garlic, crushed
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1/2 cup fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1 (6-ounce) can tomato paste
3/4 cup diced tomatoes
1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
4 cups water
2 tablespoons red pepper flakes
1 cup peeled and chopped carrots (optional)
4 cups potatoes that have been sliced 1/2 inch thick and quartered (optional)
1. Preheat the oven to 250°F.
2. Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed oven-safe pot. Brown the doves on all sides and then deglaze with the wine, scraping up the bottom of the pot with a spatula. Add all the remaining ingredients except for the potatoes.
3. Cover the liquid with parchment or tinfoil so that the surfaces are touching. Then cover the pot with a lid. Place the pot in the oven and braise it for 2 hours, then raise the oven temperature to 300°F and braise for 2 more hours. This time will vary depending on your meat, so keep checking it to see if the meat is falling off the bone. That is when it is ready.
4. At the 3 1/2-hour point, add the potatoes and cook until tender. Remove from the oven and let cool slightly before serving. Serve over pasta, rice, or good bread to lap up all of the juices. It will taste even better the second day.
Also try: pigeon, quail, squirrel, rabbit, and many other meats
Just let me live my life as I’ve begun!
And give me work that’s open to the sky;
Make me a partner of the wind and sun
And I won’t ask a life that’s soft and high.
—BADGER CLARK, cowboy prayer
3
Hunting the Big Quiet
The remote places that have fewer food choices tend to be the same places that create choice for the rest of the country. The people raise the cattle and the corn and ship it off, and in their free time, these men can almost always be found in a deer stand. Not many places are as far removed as the Village, but I know of at least one more: the home of a ranching family in West Texas who, after reading my website, sent me a note inviting me to taste a local delicacy called javelina. Javelina were named jebeli (Arabic-Spanish for “wild boar”) or jabalina (Spanish for “spear,” due to their spearlike teeth) by early Spanish explorers because of their similar appearance to the swine of the Old World. The only native piglike animal in the United States, javelina, technically speaking, are not pigs—they are peccaries. If I can manage to hunt one, the ranchers said, the challenge is to make it actually taste good. They aren’t sure it can be done.
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sp; And so I go to West Texas, where the air presses down heavily over hay fields and railroad tracks, so that I can hear the pressure of the silence. The canyons turn pink and then orange to the east and to the west, and the twinkle of the railroad shines brighter, offering to take you out of here and dump you onto the streets of Los Angeles in sixteen hours or less. West Texas has a way of making you feel like a runaway. It is a place where the javelina run wild, along the edges of America.
But as the pink sky darkens over that perpetual iron streak of rail leading off to the horizon, and things turn gray, West Texas becomes pure romance. The landscape uncovers a powder blue trailer and a blaze orange truck cab lying in the grass. The silence is so loud it begins to hurt, and reality becomes heightened.
The town of Alpine appears after a long, unvarying canvas. It is where people go to escape the light and find the stars; where the bricks of the buildings glow and the strip of Main Street resembles the set of a western. The old hotel with its peeling pillars emits a yellow stored-up light, while the cars glide by and their lights wink red. The air is inky and it smells like iris.
Around a dark corner and through a dim sidewalk, Jim McMillan waits under the golden porch light of his restaurant. The restaurant is one of many arms of his father’s enterprise that Jim now oversees. His family got their start in silicone, made their way south by way of Michigan, and arrived in Texas, where they bought ranches. Then they opened restaurants just because they needed a place to eat. And they kept making silicone.
Inside the restaurant, the wooden paddles of the ceiling fan spin slowly, stirring up the quiet. Dried-out chaps hang on the wall next to signed movie posters from the Streets of Laredo and Rough Rider, two of the many westerns filmed at Jim’s ranch. Horse saddles adorn the corners of the room. Sweet women in aprons sweep in and out with platters of jalapeño grits and rare meat arrayed along their arms. A couple whispers in a corner; a cowboy cuts into his rib eye in another.
Girl Hunter Page 4