Girl Hunter

by Georgia Pellegrini

  Jim is young and grave, but will demonstrate bursts of vigor when you talk to him about ranching or cattle or hunting. “My dad had the biggest impact on my hunting experiences,” he says, eating a salad in a room full of steak.

  “When did you start hunting? I ask.

  He lists the big game animals at a man’s fingertips in West Texas and tells me the stories of his worldly hunts: “The first big game animal was an axis on the YO ranch and a black bear when I was nine. When I was eleven, my father took me to Africa. Our professional hunter was Tony Henley and you couldn’t have asked for a better teacher. He was a student of Africa; grew up in Kenya and knew every bird, antelope and bush across Botswana. And I can’t forget Jim Hancock and Jack Demetruck. Both gentlemen took me hunting countless times, west of Fort Worth, before I could drive. We spent many mornings in a duck blind together.”

  Jim went to ranching school in Texas and will tell you about his field trips to ranches around the country, which he likens to investment-bank field trips in business school. It was there that he learned how closely intertwined ranching and hunting really were, and that many ranches rely on both to earn money.

  I scrape the last grits from my plate, and we leave the warm room and step out into the waning light on the golden porch scattered with matching newly fallen leaves. I follow him by car on the dirt road to the 8,000-acre ranch that he calls “headquarters.” It is partitioned into patches that have been tamed and rendered livable, and patches that are simply managed by hired cowboys on horseback. Where the patches meet are metal gates to keep the two separate. Beyond the gated living quarters, mountain lions and mountain goats mingle; inside the gate, where the patches are prettied up with manicured sod and hammocks and blue slate walkways, a bit of civility is maintained.

  In the pebbled driveway, where my car skids to a halt, three semiblind javelina snort and root in the barrel cactus, their eyes little beads of light. The dry grass crunches under my feet outside the gate as I leave them snorting in the driveway. Gnats flicker across my eyelids as I walk through the gate and onto grass as smooth as silk.

  The guest rooms are appointed with glossy wood and more horse saddles and pictures of dignitaries and celebrity outdoorsmen that have slept here. The moths coat the screen door looking in. The air smells of burnt sugar, and the coyotes howl good night.

  The morning air is marked by the drifting scent of hazelnut coffee and breakfast burritos that Jim prepares in his fluorescently lit kitchen. We eat quietly in the shadows of the taxidermy perched in the rafters above. Everything else is inky—the sky, the mountains, and the silence.

  Down by the barn, we climb into the triangular dune buggy, and I cover my face with a cloth as the cold wind starts to whip. The motor labors as we move higher and higher into the canyon—stopping once at a pen to check on a single white goat left as a trap for the mountain lions—the black wind blanketing our faces in bitter cold. When the rocks and terrain become too unruly for the dune buggy, we leave it behind and continue on foot. We cross a creek fed from a natural spring, and as we do, the sky turns from black to a deep royal blue, and the smell of whitebrush, an aromatic Texas flower, gets stronger. So, too, does the burn on my ankles as the cactus stickers needle in through two layers of socks.

  Jim glides up like a long-legged Barbary sheep and I trail behind, gingerly picking my steps on uncertain ground. At the top of the canyon, a set of boulders, like neatly stacked bubbles, juts over the deep valley, 500 feet below. Jim sits and dangles his legs down, taking out his binoculars to watch. “This is the best it’s looked in a long time,” he says to himself. It has rained 30 inches this year from July to September, rendering the mountains a patchwork of green.

  He looks down at the base of the mountains where the javelina root and to the oak trees where they forage. He sees three deer instead, camouflaged in the rocks. “Look for white asses,” he whispers.

  The sky turns yellow, then red, and the light sharpens across our eyes. We wait for the black, short-haired javelina with their rodent pig features and their hot meaty smell, on their way to bed after a nocturnal feast. But they don’t come.

  The sun now high, we leave to climb back down the mountain, the cactus needles collecting on my ankles until I no longer feel them individually but as a widespread throb.

  On the dune buggy, we pass the ranch cattle; their white and yellow heads peer up from the matching switch grass. They look at us, young and curious, with white eyelashes set upon glossy eyes, and jump back as we drive through.

  This ranch gets its income by cultivating two kinds of meat, one that is hunted and one that is farmed. There are tax incentives for ranchers to keep these cattle. Jim used to keep as many as three thousand cattle on their ranches, but this fall he will ship only two hundred to the feedlot. He will get $1.10 per pound, and at 700 pounds per cow, it is still more money than they make from having hunters pay to hunt their ranch.

  Once shipped, the cows will put on 3 pounds per day by eating corn up in the Texas Panhandle, and in ninety days or less they will reach 1,200 pounds and be ready for slaughter. Before they go to the Texas Panhandle, the cows will be injected with multiple vaccines, because they are about to enter into a world they have never seen before—leaving the pink canyons of West Texas for a dry, teeming feedlot often housing more than eighty thousand head of cattle. Their immune systems have to be prepared. There, they will meet other cattle from Hawaii and Florida, cattle that have been on an even longer journey, because it is cheaper to bring the cattle to the feed than the feed to the cattle. These cattle will convert feed to meat at a rate of seven to one.

  If the cattle ate only grass, it would take longer to bring them to that weight, so long that they may not even be graded beyond hamburger status by the USDA—thirty months old is the cutoff.

  And so it begs the question I ask him next: “Why do they have to get to twelve hundred pounds?” And Jim answers with the simple facts—that we used to be much less efficient with them. We used to slaughter them at 700 pounds. But our feedlots also used to also be smaller, with more farmers running their own little operations. Now the feedlot is condensed, in a place where there is dry air and thus less disease. And because there is less space, more meat has to be mined from each animal. The simple laws of space, crossed with supply and demand, turn the cattle into nothing more than a meat-based commodity.

  He says that now even young calves are often sent to feedlots early and fed extra roughage with cornflakes, because the roughage makes them grow and the corn makes them fat.

  “The banks prefer it that way,” he says.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because it’s easier to count your inventory in a feedlot than in a pasture.” He smiles and shakes his head.

  And in that moment, I look to my right and see three black creatures lumber through the tall straw. I slide out of the dune buggy and pull back the bolt action on a high-velocity .22–250 caliber rifle (it can travel at 4,000 feet per second, according to Jim). I listen to the cartridge slip into the chamber, and walk sideways into the tall, cream grass. The javelina move right and stop, then start again, then stop to root once more. They are mostly blind, and one stops to stand there and stare. I stare back through the scope of the rifle into its little black eyes and realize I’ve never stared my food in the face before. I feel the metal of the trigger on the pad of my index finger and wonder if it is fair for me to press it. I wonder if I had to work hard enough for this. I wonder if I had to exert myself enough, whether my throbbing ankles are enough, and whether this scope and just a bit more pressure on the metal trigger is a fair match for the semiblind javelina. Then I wonder how javelina taste, and that unconscious desire to know and taste adds pressure to the trigger, and I hear a thunderous sound and feel an intense pounding in my upper chest and a sting in my throat. I automatically flush red and apologize for missing. Jim looks at me funny but a tad bored. It turns out I have very unceremoniously killed a javelina. Unceremonious for Jim, beca
use this is all business for him, but for me it is anything but unceremonious. It is immense, significant, and it is so much meat.

  It was an instant shot in the neck, so I didn’t ruin the meat. The black piglike creature is 40 pounds, fat and brown, and smells like mesquite. And almost as quickly as I shot it, we field dress it: I take a sharp knife and insert it just under the belly skin and pull up toward the rib cage, making sure not to puncture the bladder on the way, then pull out the guts, making sure not taint the meat by an accidental knick of the intestines, and leaving the remaining matter in the grass for the coyotes and mountain lions.

  More than anything I don’t want to waste a single morsel. I even inquire about what I can do with the hide, as we drive my javelina to the barn and hang it on a hook by its Achilles tendons, and, each taking a side, begin to skin it with two small knives until we have made it to the head, which we twist off with one strong, opposing motion. Jim power washes it with a hose and we let it drip dry, leaving it to compose a pink puddle on the cement floor of the clapboard barn. The hide sits on the cement floor, too, looking like an outfit the javelina has just slipped out of. But a call with the local taxidermist determines that javelina are shedding their hair for the season and aren’t good candidates for a preserved hide. Even so, I conjure up recipes in my head, determined not to waste my first javelina, determined to show Jim and his family that it can taste good.

  While the javelina drips, I take the dirt road to town and find lunch and some local intrigue at a roadside saloon. Here there are bandanas of every kind, on the women, too; and long, silver mustaches that hang below the lower lip. There is denim and European taxidermy, and outside are picnic tables with lovers’ initials carved into the surface for all of eternity to see.

  A diesel whistle blows on the railroad tracks in the distance, and the inside of the saloon echoes it with a roar as the football game goes the right way. The cowboys at the picnic tables tap their cigarettes against the black trays and eat pulled pork sandwiches that have soaked through their bottom buns. An old man stares in between the particles of dust, past all of us to something else.

  A flaking pool table sits in the center of it all, its balls scattered into the webbed pockets. A cowboy scrawls on a postcard, peering over his brown paper bib, as he chews on his brisket. Another sits and rolls a cigarette, delicately licking the edges of the wrapper with focused precision. One man, with the red-lined skin of a Native American and stick-straight, shoulder-length hair, removes his cigarette pack from the rafters where he keeps it hidden.

  They talk to me about javelina and how they like to cook them. The pulled-pork maker says he likes to cook them in chili; the cigarette roller calls them “desert rats”; the red-skinned man says, “They look just like my ex-wife.” I listen to their low, rolling voices and watch their eternal staring through the smoke and dust of the picnic tables, and their mustaches of every kind, and the ashtrays and bandanas, and the slow sips of beer, and the denim and the spurs.

  When I return to the ranch, I walk through an orchard of pecan trees and old movie relics to the barn, where the javelina is now cooling inside a refrigerator. I stand with Jim at the butcher block and finish the work of taking the javelina apart, the motions of which are familiar to me from my professional kitchen days—first the tenderloins, then the legs and shoulders, then the backstraps, those luscious thick strips of meat on either side of the spine, then the ribs, which have to be sawed apart. It is an orderly affair, and I feel like I am a butcher shop pro, until I notice that I am unwittingly shod in flip-flops and my toes are speckled in blood.

  At night, the air smells like iris again, and the moon is just a thumbprint on the black sky. The air becomes hot and meaty while I cook the tenderloin and backstrap of the javelina for Jim and his mother. She is as sweet and comforting as a glass of warm milk in the evening, and I watch them eat javelina—for their first time—marinated and tangy and a bit chewy, too, and they actually like it.

  The next morning, I say good-bye with 20 pounds of frozen javelina in my suitcase. I drive on the dirt road and back through Alpine. I see the cowboys at their picnic tables, and the old man staring through the particles of dust. And soon, there is almost nothing again, just ranch after ranch, covered in ocotillo and yucca and capped with mountains so wide that it is as mesmerizing as seeing where the horizon meets the sea. It is land that is porous and vast, but full of odd images—like pronghorn antelope, or men crossing borders, or abandoned trailers that buckle like caterpillars in the desert grass. It is a time encapsulated, containing the essence of simplicity and pure freedom.

  The fate of the javelina in my suitcase is very much the same as the cattle I left behind at the ranch; it is also the same as my fate. But it is the journey to that place that is utterly different. Or perhaps more important, it is just that I stared into those small black eyes and understood fully what I was about to do. I paid the full karmic price of the meal. And now I am taking it through airport security with me on the way to the next hunt and the next meal.

  Braised Javelina Haunch

  Serves 4 to 6

  Braising is a great technique for many cuts of meat with a lot of muscle tissue, which almost every game animal has because they roam freely. The process of slowly cooking the meat at a low temperature over a long period of time helps break down the muscle and collagen, making a tender and sometimes buttery texture. This kind of meal is best served with crusty bread or some other grain to help soak up the juices.

  2 haunches (4 to 6 pounds total) of javelina

  1 (750 ml) bottle red wine

  12 juniper berries

  16 peppercorns

  1 cup cider vinegar

  2 teaspoons salt

  4 bay leaves

  8 sprigs fresh thyme

  1 medium-size onion, peeled, cut in half, and stuck with 4 cloves, 2 on each half

  3 medium-size carrots, sliced thinly

  1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter

  1. Combine all of the ingredients except the butter in a large, nonreactive container and marinate for 48 to 72 hours in the refrigerator, turning the meat every 8 hours so it marinates evenly.

  2. Remove the meat and wipe it dry. Strain the marinade.

  3. Preheat the oven to 300°F. Meanwhile, in a Dutch oven or large, heavy-bottomed pot, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Brown the meat on all sides, about 10 minutes.

  4. Add the strained marinade to the pot and transfer the pot to the oven. Cover the meat and liquid with a piece of parchment paper or tinfoil and then with a lid.

  5. Cook for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, basting every 20 minutes with the remaining marinade, until the meat is tender and easily falls off the bone.

  6. Transfer the meat to a heated platter, cover with tinfoil, and let sit for 20 minutes so the juices retreat into the meat. Serve with the pan juices.

  Also try: wild boar, antlered game

  Adobo Javelina Backstrap

  Serves 4 to 6

  Javelina has a naturally smoky flavor, and there are ways to use that to your advantage. Adding more smoky flavor in the form of a marinade is one of them. All of the javelina is lean, even more so than wild boar, so when using an already lean cut like the tenderloin or backstrap, it is important to brine it first. The difference it makes is worth the wait.

  2 javelina backstraps or tenderloins, brined (see page 219)

  1 chipotle chile pepper in adobo sauce, finely chopped, with about 1 or 2 teaspoons of the sauce

  1/3 cup cider vinegar

  4 garlic cloves, minced

  1 tablespoon brown sugar

  1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

  1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

  4 tablespoons olive oil

  1. Place the loins in a resealable plastic food storage bag with all of the ingredients except 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Refrigerate for 1 hour and up to 4 hours.

  2. Remove the meat from the refrigerator and allow to come to room temperature for 20 minutes.

  3.
Tie the backstraps with kitchen twine so they are uniform in thickness, as you would a roast, wrapping the string around, making a loop, and pulling it through. If you are using tenderloins, tie them together using the same method.

  4. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Heat a large, ovenproof skillet and when hot, pour in the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Sear the tenderloins until golden brown on all sides, about 4 minutes. Transfer the skillet to the oven and roast for 12 to 15 minutes longer, until the backstraps reach an internal temperature of about 145°F.

  5. Remove from the heat and set on a plate. Cover with tinfoil and let sit for 20 minutes before slicing to serve.

  Also try: wild boar, antlered game (doesn’t require a brine)

  Javelina Chili

  Serves 6 to 8

  When butchering an animal, there are always meat scraps that don’t quite make it into any particular cut. This is especially true with the more muscular bits. Those can all be collected and frozen in plastic bags, well labeled. Once you have enough, you can put the frozen scraps through a meat grinder, or dice it finely and use it for chili. Any kind of meat will work in this recipe, but it is an especially good combination with javelina because of the natural mesquite flavor of the meat. This chili will taste even better the second day, and even better the day after that. It will also freeze well in smaller portions.

  4 tablespoons grape seed oil

  3 1/2 pounds javelina, ground

  4 garlic cloves, chopped finely

  1 cup finely chopped onion

  1 bell pepper, seeded and diced finely

  1 (15.5-ounce) can red kidney, pinto, or similar beans

  1 (8-ounce) can tomato sauce