2 cups hog stock (page 213) or antlered game stock (page 213)
3 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons paprika
2 teaspoons dried oregano
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon hot sauce
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1. In a large saucepan, brown the meat in the oil, breaking up the meat and stirring with a wooden spoon.
2. Add the garlic, onion, and pepper and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, continuing to break up the meat.
3. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well.
4. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, covered, for 2 hours.
5. Taste and adjust the seasoning to your liking, adding more hot sauce and salt and pepper as necessary.
Also try: wild boar, antlered game, turkey, ground or diced finely
Pulled Javelina
Serves 10 to 12
This is an ode to the cowboys in Alpine and the pulled pork truck that sits outside their saloon. The spices can be adjusted and experimented with, but the final product should always be paired with a tangy slaw and something spicy and pickled, for the real experience. Every smoker is different, so you may have to adjust the smoking time, depending on how your smoker operates. Javelina won’t shred quite as easily as domestic pork, but it should shred reasonably well when it is done.
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup kosher salt
1 quart water
2 shoulders (3 to 5 pounds total) of javelina
1 teaspoon cumin seed
1 teaspoon fennel seed
1 teaspoon coriander seed
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon mustard powder
1. Combine the molasses, salt, and water in a plastic brining bag or nonreactive container. Add the shoulders and let sit in the refrigerator for 12 hours.
2. Remove the meat from the brine and let rest on a rack in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour and up to 24.
3. Place the cumin, fennel, and coriander in a spice grinder and grind until fine. Transfer to a small mixing bowl and combine with the remaining ingredients.
4. Preheat a smoker to 210°F. Sprinkle the cumin mixture evenly over the shoulders and then pat onto the meat, making sure as much of the rub as possible adheres. Wearing latex gloves will help you to get more of the mixture to adhere to the meat.
5. Place the shoulders in the smoker and cook for 5 to 7 hours, maintaining a temperature of 210°F. Begin checking meat for doneness after 5 hours of cooking time. The meat is done when it falls apart easily when pulled with a fork. Once done, remove from the smoker and set aside to rest for at least 1 hour.
6. Pull meat apart with two forks and serve as a sandwich, with pickled jalapeños, coleslaw, and tangy dressing.
Also try: wild boar
When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying.
They are all different and they fly in different ways but the
sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
4
Grouse and Other Creatures
Montana seems like a logical, almost necessary stop. I think of this state as more entangled with nature than almost any other in the lower forty-eight, being as it is one of the last in the nation with more animals than people. If I want to experience raw nature, then this must be the place, and so I accept an invitation from a friend of a friend to go bird hunting—a “blind hunting date” of sorts. It begins in an airport full of camouflaged men whose bellies are very large and whose hair is very silver. They are clad in their favorite uniform for the fall and winter months, and they will wear it religiously as they carry the fruits of the hunt in their cars on the long drive home.
Montana is sky country, with hills and plains that glisten crimson and mustard in the light. Strong winds send the cars wobbling around the road kill and rotting carcasses, speeding past black velvet cows mingling on great green fields that seem to stretch forever onward until they meet the purple snow-capped mountains.
If there is no ceiling in the sky at night, the Milky Way is extravagant in Townsend—an ungentrified, undepressed town where the folks are regular. There is an ample supply of gas stations in Townsend, ice boating on Canyon Ferry Lake, and mule deer grazing on alfalfa like cattle.
In a board and batten cabin atop a hill, a thin sixty-year-old man named Wilbur listens to Italian lute music and sips a serious Cabernet in sixty-dollar stemware from which he refuses to sip standing up, for fear it will break.
There are bachelor-size things inside: a very small skillet; a small bowl of cashews on the slate counter; glass vases full of speckled pheasant feathers, each plume a token of his achievements; and a full bar of fine brandies, ports, and vermouth. Next to the bar are seven-dollar wineglasses from Ikea, should you wish to drink standing up.
He heats the cabin solely with a woodstove, often taking the temperature of the room to demonstrate how well he has insulated his house. He likes to write letters to politicians.
But Wilbur spends so much time with his fourteen-year-old English pointer that he generally interacts with people the same way he does with his dog—in single-word orders or replies. Except when he talks about hunting: “I imagine going bird hunting for the next decade. It’s endlessly interesting to me,” he says, pacing the room in wool moccasins and green corduroy. “It’s a lark. I’ll go fifty days a year. In the fields, you’re predatory, exploratory, interested. I think it’s sort of my roots showing in some ways and I think it’s the real thing.” He hides his small brown cigarette expertly as he talks, but the smell of cloves he exudes betrays him.
There was a time when he was a boy, that he lived in Montana. But he left it behind in the sixties to deal in fine art in Berkeley, when the university was in full dissident bloom. He walked in poet circles, went by his initials—like T. S. Eliot—always had good seats for the symphony, ate at Chez Panisse in the seventies when lunch was $3.50, and could tell a good Époisses cheese from a bad. Now in retirement, he is on a quest—trying to become a Montana man again.
In the morning, as the moon is dying and the air smells of burning mountain mahogany, we drive together toward the Golden Triangle. It is a patch of land to the north blanketed in succulent wheat and tall cover grass that the birds enjoy.
“Do you remember your first hunt?” I ask.
“I started hunting in earnest at ten before I had a license or hunter safety, for which you had to be eleven,” he says, driving cautiously, sometimes mysteriously stopping short in the blue and orange morning “The first bird I ever shot was a prairie chicken while sitting on my uncle’s lap. By the age of fifteen when we were all driving, we all started hunting on our own including before school and after school all the way up until the end of duck season in early January. It is still an undiminished pleasure for me. And I would come back to Berkeley with all of this frozen game, and I’d have these dinner parties and everybody was just instantly converted. Even just your basic deer roast. I had a whole circle of people who just begged to get re-invited to that menu. And ditto the grouse and the pheasant.”
As the sun rises higher, we can begin to see the silhouettes of mule deer grazing on the roadside. There are sometimes hundreds leading to the fir trees in the distance.
“Wow. There are so many deer,” I say marveling at the herd on the planes.
“The deer problem has gotten really out of hand in states like Montana,” he says. “Right up against these mountains is just overrun. You’re driving down the streets and they’re just hanging out. It just takes about two years for them to completely adapt in the habit
at, and they have gone back and forth for the last decade on what to do about them.”
Game numbers overall are greater now than they were one hundred years ago. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no game licensing or game seasons. There was market hunting—a way for people to make money by selling their game to restaurants, which depleted game animal populations to very low numbers. Regulation began in about 1920. It became illegal to serve hunted wild game in restaurants, which means that any game meat on a restaurant menu today has been bred and farmed just like the cow, the pig, and the chicken.
The fish and game departments now closely monitor the wild animal populations, determining when and how long the seasons should be, asking hunters to supply tooth and blood samples, and monitoring the changing dynamics of sprawl—where urban landscapes interface with outdoor environments.
“I want to go on record that it’s a myth that whitetail are better tasting than mule deer,” Wilbur says, breaking the silence. “It’s not true.”
Wilbur’s friend Kurt waits for us at a crossroads in the parking lot of a boarded-up saloon, looking elegant and tall in his suspenders and shoulder-length silver hair. His dog, a French Griffon Fauve de Bretagne named Red Elvis, is urinating on a post. We consolidate the contents of our cars into one and drive farther north toward Canada, to meet a farmer named Sammy Field who will loan certain people his farmland to hunt on, in exchange for his favorite bottle of whiskey.
As we drive the whiskey toward Sammy, the great brown mountains turn liquid in the delicate morning sun. Farther north they become buttes, mountains with missing tops that the Native Americans once worshipped in their vision quests. Before the advent of steel-tipped arrows and lances, Indians on the high plains who hunted the bison for food and warmth enticed the herds to the edge of these buttes and instigated a stampede to force them over the edge.
Over time, as we drive, the land grows more arid and orange, and the sky seems to sink lower and lower until the cloud-filled canyon blends with the snowcaps in the Rocky Mountain front. High above an eagle flexes his wings and pushes them toward his back like a diver, dropping for a rodent into the great blank plane. There are flashes of black stripes as we drive past the perfect rows of wheat stubble, studded with the occasional pyramid stack of tightly wrought rolls of glossy hay.
Old Sammy Field, wearing overalls, with protruding whiskers and disheveled hair, meets us on the corner of a dirt road in his red pickup, 100 yards from his double-wide trailer home. He has the land wealth for something far greater, but he spends most of the days with his cows anyway, and regardless, what’s the point? Sammy Field cares more about being anti-ostentatious.
The truth about bird hunting in Montana is that it requires knocking on doors like a Bible salesman, to see if the owners will let you shoot on their land. The public owns the game, but the landowner controls access to it, heightening a certain discord. There are government incentive programs here to encourage landowners to share their land, but too many hunters abuse it. Bad hunters turn farmers off, and so they don’t maintain the habitat that supports the birds. The modern farmer plays an important role in the fate of so many wild game birds—whether a pheasant will be exposed to predators or not is determined by whether the farmer maintains its habitat or plows down the tall cover grass. In turn, the hunter plays an important role in influencing the farmer. Although he is caught between a growing human population and a shrinking resource, the hunter’s behavior and treatment of the farmer and his land is really what determines his access to the hunting grounds. Wilbur makes these connections religiously and delicately (“I don’t overextend my welcome here”), calling on his art house charm. He is meticulous about bringing farmers food and drink from Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto. But Sammy Field prefers whiskey.
Kurt and I walk in parallel through a field of numbered cows. Number ninety-six is a handsome white bull with red eyelids. Wilbur runs ahead and scrambles down the fingers of the hills. He runs rapidly with his dog Clyde, who dashes forward quietly sniffing the ground intently. Kurt and I walk above on the plain for 3 miles, through the tall brush grass and over the gray sinews of a dried-up creek. The bleached ribs of a dead cow jut through the grass, its remaining bones scattered down the ridge.
In the distance, Wilbur still runs up and down the fingers of the hill, his hands waving maniacally for us to keep up. Kurt doesn’t seem to notice. Instead he adjusts his red suspenders and pushes back his long strands of silver-white hair, looking skeptically at the sky and the cloudy western front through the orange tint of his shooting glasses that change color depending on the light.
We walk on through the old barns in the field, where the Hungarian partridge likes to linger. We scare a jackrabbit that speeds through the grass in an undulating sprint.
“Everything is so still,” I say looking at the shimmering vast land around us. “The sky feels so low.”
“It’s a really off year,” Kurt says, pausing to smell the air. “It just acts that way.”
High rains and late frost in Montana killed the chicks in a cold snap. The rain then grew thick, tall grass that makes the remaining birds hard to see.
It is a challenge even in the best of years. The partridge is an immigrant from Europe, the most abundant game bird in Montana. The pheasant is an immigrant from China, and makes you work and hunt harder than you ever have before; it is, in a sense, the last wild bird. Many animals, from the mule deer to the squirrel, adapt to humans, but the pheasant still has a distinctly wild spirit—it cackles as it hears you and runs off on its springy legs.
The breeze rises sharply and reddens our faces now, then drops low again, and the sky turns phosphorescent as a flash of color paints the wind. We weave in and out of grazing red and black Angus cattle shimmering in the light, beige strands of dried grass dangling from their mouths. They pause to watch us midchew, as if we’ve just delivered bad news.
In the distance there is a double shot that blows the trees full of life.
“Oh, there he goes,” Kurt says shaking his head and smiling. “I just can’t keep up with him, so I’ve stopped trying.”
And soon an orange cap rises up from the valley, hands raised high, with a speckled brown and white Hungarian partridge in each. Wilbur has a yellow smile of expectation on his face, as he walks toward us, and we smile and nod in silence.
“I like how animated shotgun shooting is! It’s an exploration of the elements,” he says, dropping the two Huns not into his game pocket, but into mine, the large pocket built into the back of my jacket and secured with a zipper.
We walk on to new pasture, stepping in puddles along the way. Kurt and I help each other over barbed fences held together by crooked old fence posts. Time passes slowly in a way that tires. The weight of the two Huns against my back gets heavier over time and the winds get higher and drier until I can taste the saliva in my mouth. My body cells begin to tingle. The two dog-man teams run ahead of me, the men relying on the dogs’ noses, and they look like the perfect companions. Hunting is in both species’ genes.
Many hours pass, and the patchwork of farming properties begin to blend together. The sun now centers itself in the low ceiling of the sky, and the sweet-and-sour smell of cow manure ripens the air. Upland bird hunting in Montana is a game of knowing the bird—knowing that the Hungarian partridge prefers field stubble and weed seeds, that the pheasant likes tall cover in cattails and fescue, that certain grouse will eat exclusively sage. It is also when you begin to see possibility in things you never have before, such as the beauty of a fanned-out half-pecked cornhusk lying in a plain. Up on the corner where the field meets the gravel driveway, Sammy Field is breathing heavily, letting out small puffs of vapor as he kicks a pile of steaming cow dung. It is then that I realize that he is tired, too, and that upland bird hunting is also a bit like a game of chicken. Nobody wants to give up first, admit that his back aches, his ankles itch, or that one of his socks is very wet.
Occasionally we break
to pick burrs off the dogs and ourselves, and to eat a boiled egg and a piece of chocolate, and have a drink of water before we try another line of tall grass along the pasture. But eventually there are signs of relief; the sun is covered by cumulus clouds now and I can feel the gentle prairie wind on my face, cooling the sweat on my neck.
We arrive at an improvised junkyard holding a rusted horse buggy, a few rubber tires, and the pale blue shell of a car. We come to a pool of water formed by a thin stream. The dogs stop inside the grass and point, then turn to stone and tremble. A brown hen pheasant flies up in the breeze and snaps to the right along a line of pines. Wilbur yells, “Hen!” to call us all off from shooting. If we only shoot roosters as the law usually requires, we do not harm the pheasant population; a single rooster can fertilize the eggs of twenty hens, in the same way a single rooster is all that is needed for a barnyard full of hens. In the field, sorting the hen from the rooster is a series of split-second decisions. Kurt seems to know almost intuitively what it is going to be and predicts it before it rises from the cover. In part, it is that hens prefer the tall, thick, wet grass, whereas roosters prefer the outer brush. But there is another difference, too.
There is a mystical quality in the rooster as he shoots into the air like a feathered arrow, in all his green and purple splendor. The long spike of his tail feathers taper for aerodynamic flight, and he banks to his side and paints the wind. I hesitate when I see the rooster, in awe of his faultless beauty. You must follow the bead of your shotgun just ahead of him with both eyes open until the bead is just ahead of his beak point, and that is when you slap the trigger.
Sometimes the rooster doesn’t fall. Sometimes he will keep flying because he is a rooster and he is mysterious. Sometimes he will leave only a single feather floating to the ground for you to ponder. That is why you hunt the rooster. You must earn him and be taunted by his cackle. You must walk sometimes for eight hours to earn him, and you must hurt a little, and sometimes you must hurt a lot.
Girl Hunter Page 6