Girl Hunter

by Georgia Pellegrini

  When we return to the surface from the secret chamber, we sit for dinner in a well-paneled room, another grand fireplace warming our backs and a Texas-size chandelier reflecting the candlelight. We eat pork roast, cranberries, spicy butternut squash, and a chocolate soufflé with a sugar crust on top. The big Texas husband tells the story of hunting a “real pissed-off leopard” in Africa, which hunted him the whole time he hunted it, and how the African bushmen spoke in their language of clicks as they chased the leopard through the grass. He tells his stories in the presence of a gallery of bobcats and leopards watching us from the living room, their muscles poised taut for eternity.

  “When I’m sitting with men around a fire,” says the big Texas husband, “we often ask ourselves, what is it about this that we like so much? And the truth is that we’re going back. Even though we eat the nice food and wear the nice clothing now, it was only two or three generations ago that this is how we provided food for our families. Now we just have places like HEB Grocery. But with hunting there is still the camaraderie, a series of beautiful things that bonds you. The people you hunt with will always take your call.”

  Sitting here and listening, I realize there are as many ways to hunt the food as there are to cook it. It wasn’t long ago that American companies entertained their clients abroad in the United Kingdom on a traditional walk-up hunt, the European-style driven pheasant shoot, or on a fast-paced Continental shoot, in a quest to feel a part of old-world luxury.

  But in true capitalist style, Americans discovered they could experience similar luxury on their own soil for one-third of the price. And so a market was born in the United States. Hunting amid this kind of luxury was no longer just for the leisured class, but for people who had money but limited time; they could now spend a weekend at a place like this. Men could bond with one another and experience that special element of trust that comes with hunting together, more so than from playing a game of golf.

  “You’ll meet the greatest people in this business,” the big Texas husband says, sipping his whiskey. “Multimillion-dollar mergers happen here with men walking behind dogs.”

  In the morning, I walk the bowl of the Guadalupe River, through bluestem grass and live oaks. The reporter and I arrive at a field with a gamekeeper they call El Hefe. English setters and pointers and Brittany spaniels yelp from their cages in the back of a truck, eager to begin their daily task of finding and flushing birds. Lacy, a seven-year-old English cocker, walks along El Hefe’s side, waiting for Brittany spaniels Stan and Rock to point her in the right direction. When El Hefe says, “Hunt ’em up, Lacy,” she dashes forward, the nub of her tail wagging, and weaves in and out of the grass until the birds fly up and shots ring out.

  I bring a 28-gauge Beretta to my cheek again and again, as I make my way through my case of number six shot and the air begins to smell of smoking shells. Everyone is silent as Lacy weaves. I watch with my arms alert, and my heart beating just a little bit faster. I can hear the squishing sound of El Hefe’s chewing tobacco, as the reporter arbitrarily calls him Bob. But he doesn’t care, he just squirts and talks to his dogs. A large tin bath of water has been set in the field for the dogs to cool the Texas sun off their backs. Lacey jumps in and out in one fluid motion. The pointers follow suit, shake and spray without missing a step, and continue to sniff. Hawks fly above me, eyeing their competition. They have already broken up the coveys of birds, causing them to scatter, and the dogs now set out to find the birds individually. There are pheasants with their long tendril tails, and quail so small and fast my eyes mix them with the dragonflies, and when I shoot, sometimes one falls and sometimes one doesn’t. The chukar, though, is what I want—a native of southern Eurasia, brought from Pakistan to the United States to be a game bird. I have not tasted a chukar, and the one that appears in the corner of my eye, I miss.

  After a lunch of meat and peach cobbler and iced tea, a flusher named Tramp takes over for Lacy. She is black and seems almost shy and she weaves in and out and brings the birds up demurely. There are birds everywhere, so many birds now, but still no chukar appears.

  I walk the red rows with a swirl of dogs in front of me, their bodies embroidering the grass. My wool tweed jacket holds in all of the afternoon heat and wets my back, and the dogs continue to weave and stitch, their tongues hanging out in short breaths of expectation. I walk observing all the noises flowing in and out of the grasses, whirring, cackling, mysterious, and always real.

  The guttural chirping sounds of the fields repeat in my mind and so do the images of the men I see fishing the Guadalupe River on my way through the fields—men stringing up the Guadalupe bass, bluegill, and catfish.

  And then at last, in the iridescent trickles of an afternoon sun, an olive brown figure rises from the left, only 10 yards in front, and crosses my path in a diagonal leap skyward. I swing my shotgun into the sky and squint into the sun, and with a slap of the trigger, my chukar gives unto me. Tramp retrieves it and I hold the bird in my hand. It has a buff-colored belly, bold black and chestnut barring on its flanks, and black lines circling the contours of its eyes, all flowing down its neck and into its chest toward a white throat, covering the span between a red bill and legs.

  The most knowledgeable outdoorsmen are often the El Hefes, who have spent a life as hunting guides and understand the nuances of nature better than all of the other humans around them. The El Hefes of the world won’t always share this knowledge with you because it is just a part of their existence, and quite honestly, they have a job to do at this type of hunting ranch, leading you through the dance of the glossy fields, guiding you and the dogs toward pirouetting pheasants. But sometimes when you inquire, the El Hefes teach you a bit more than is normally known.

  By the late afternoon we switch our prey. I now sit in a deer stand in a small forest with a twenty-year-old guide named Grady who could moonlight as a football player, except that he recites animal facts as a player would game stats. We are waiting for an axis deer, a reddish-haired native of Asia whose meat is fine grained and slightly sweet. Grady instructs me on the need for proper camouflage. “With big game, you always want to break up solid colors, and break up your outline; you don’t want to silhouette yourself,” he says, squatting on an overturned bucket and peering through a pair of binoculars.

  An armadillo and a porcupine waddle through the leaves below my deer stand, just the point of a leather tail and a coat of spikes showing through the dry leaves.

  The axis deer, like the pheasant and the chukar—like us—is also an immigrant. The famous Texas YO Ranch began bringing exotics into the United States in the 1950s and ’60s and today these include axis, fallow deer, blackbuck antelope, sika, audad, and addax, among others—all of which have naturalized and flourished in range and pasture where they can come and go as they please.

  “How do people justify going to Africa to kill a lion for sport?” I ask. “I don’t imagine they are eating lion meat for dinner,” I smirk.

  “Those Africa trips that wealthy men take are actually what keep the animals from going extinct,” Grady says matter-of-factly. “And the native tribes do eat the lion meat. For a single animal, thirty to forty thousand dollars goes back into the local economy, which incentivizes the governments to keep the animals healthy. The U.S. is now introducing certain breeds like the blackbuck back into their native African populations, where their conservation practices weren’t good enough and there is poaching.”

  The idea of an “exotic” in a sense becomes relative with time. After all, the white man was an exotic when he first stepped on the soil at Plymouth Rock.

  But the notion of importing exotics is far older than the United States. It is the stuff of myth and legend. After capturing the Golden Fleece, mythological Greek hero Jason and the Argonauts discovered pheasant on the return voyage on the Phasis River. (Pheasants derive their name from this river Phasis, now called the Rion.) There, they caught some and brought them home to Greece.

  While Grady talks, I
peer through the slit in the square wooden deer blind, and see the chalky nose of a young whitetail buck outside, chasing a three-year-old doe in heat, their cottony tails wagging like the spaniels’. But I am in the deer stand not for a whitetail but an axis, and so I wait.

  A gray-faced whitetail doe appears next, trailed by a parade of twenty-three wild turkeys, heads bobbing forward and backward, feet stepping purposefully on the pine-needled forest floor.

  “Axis deer vitals sit farther forward so you have to shoot really tight to the shoulder blade,” Grady says as I peer through the crack and into the flood of evening sunlight.

  “Axis deer don’t breed ’til they rub out the velvet in their horns and are full horned,” he continues in a heavy whisper.

  In the distance, beyond the clearing where the whitetails stand and feed, and the turkeys peck, I can hear the high pitched bark of an axis doe, then her soft-pitched mew, like a cow elk’s. But she doesn’t show herself. By now, the sun has grown murky, too murky to see, and as if to let me know, an axis buck lets out his screaming roar from the woods, telling me to go home.

  Grady and I climb down from the deer stand as the stars flicker on, and we begin to walk the twilight path toward the ranch house. Arriving, we find a stone fire pit, and a long table of roasted meats and very fine wine.

  “Next time, you’ll harvest an axis,” he says.

  “Why do you use the word harvest?” I ask.

  “In my mind, it is just like any other harvest because it is food for the table,” he says.

  In Texas, there are few public hunting sites, and few places that can be leased for less than ten thousand dollars per gun. Large companies are willing to pay large sums to entertain large clients. Experiences like these are hard to come by and are ones that you will remember fondly for the rest of your life. They are the kind you wish will stick like beer-battered pheasant to your ribs. As a result, they also present a moral dilemma. This sort of hunting isn’t sustainable as a way of life. It is a sporting event, an opportunity for leisure, even though all of the birds are used for food. Looking at the experience objectively, it isn’t where I can go regularly if I want to eat only meat that I’ve killed with my own hands. In a way, it is much like the aristocratic approach to hunting in the Old World, a way to put on woolen coats and experience what it must have felt to be Catherine the Great as she sat in a well-paneled banquet room, with platters of roasted pheasant and stuffed partridge dangled beneath her nose. This experience is escapist and luxurious, so far from the everyday, or rather, so far from my everyday. But it is something I will always recall fondly—the way that one remembers a warm, bright elusive dream.

  Braised Pheasant Legs with Cabbage and Grapes

  Serves 4

  Unlike a farmyard bird, wild birds have muscular legs, which lend them well to braising. Each bird will be different, depending on variety and age, but the key is to cook them low and slow until the meat is tender and falls off the bone. A good braising green or vegetable can be substituted for the cabbage.

  8 pheasant legs

  Salt and pepper

  2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  2 tablespoons butter

  1/4 cup diced onion

  2 cups finely sliced cabbage

  1 cup seedless grapes, crushed

  1/4 cup brandy

  2 cups game bird stock (page 212)

  2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

  2 tablespoons minced parsley

  1. Rinse and pat the legs dry, and season on both sides with salt and pepper. Dust both sides with the flour.

  2. In a sauté pan, melt the butter until it begins to bubble. Add the legs, skin side down, and cook until golden brown, about 4 minutes. Turn over, cook for about 1 minute, then transfer the meat to a platter.

  3. To the same pan, add the onion and cabbage and sauté until soft and brown, about 5 minutes.

  4. Add the grapes and stir. Add the legs, browned side up, and nestle them into the cabbage and onion.

  5. Add the brandy and light with a match. Let the alcohol burn off and reduce. Add the stock, cover partially with a lid, and cook at a very low simmer for about 1 hour, or until the meat falls off the bone.

  6. Finish with the lemon juice and parsley and more salt and pepper to taste.

  Also try: brant, coot, duck, gallinule, goose, grouse, prairie chicken, partridge, chukar, pigeon, ptarmigan, quail, rail, snipe, turkey, squirrel, rabbit

  Chukar Pie

  Serves 8

  A pie is perfect for a medley of game bird scraps that wouldn’t necessarily make a meal on their own. This recipe uses a double piecrust, the way you would in a traditional potpie, but you could also use leftover mashed potatoes as your top “crust.” This is sometimes referred to as Hunter’s Pie. A version of this was sent to me by one of my blog readers, who said his mother in McLeansville, North Carolina, often made it with pheasants, but any game bird or even other game meat will work well.

  Crust: 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

  6 tablespoons lard (see page 187 to render your own)

  6 tablespoons cold butter, cubed

  1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg

  1/2 teaspoon salt

  About 4 tablespoons ice water

  1 egg white, lightly beaten

  Filling: 3 chukar, fully dressed, or the equivalent in game bird meat (see Note)

  2 cups game bird stock (page 212)

  1 medium-size onion, chopped

  2 cloves garlic, minced

  3 celery stalks, chopped

  1/2 cup white wine

  Salt and pepper

  1 tablespoon butter

  4 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  1/4 cup milk

  1 cup peas

  3 medium-size parsnips, peeled and chopped

  3 medium-size carrots, peeled and chopped

  2 cups spinach or other leafy greens

  1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves, picked from the stem

  For the Crust: 1. Combine the flour, lard, butter, nutmeg, and salt in a bowl and work it with your hands until sandy and lumpy. The lumps of fat should range from pea to walnut size, which will ensure a flaky crust.

  2. Add a few drops of water at a time until the dough comes together but is not too sticky. The amount of water you need will vary, based on humidity. If it is very hot, work quickly. Divide the dough into two disks. Wrap them in plastic and place them in the freezer for about 30 minutes.

  3. Remove one dough disk from the freezer, let rest for 10 minutes, then roll out on a cutting board, dusted with lots of flour, until the circle is slightly larger than the size of a 9-inch pie dish. Drape it over your pie dish. Trim as needed, and patch if need be, using a bit of water and extra dough scraps. Put the pie dish back into the freezer for at least 30 minutes, preferably longer.

  4. Once the bottom crust is frozen in the pie dish, preheat the oven to 425°F. Bake the crust for 20 to 25 minutes, until it is firm and golden brown. If the dough puffs up at all, simply pat it down with the back of a spoon. You won’t need pie weights here because you have frozen the crust. Remove from the oven and let cool.

  For the Filling: 1. Combine the chukar, stock, onion, garlic, celery, wine, and salt and pepper in a pot. Bring to a simmer and cook, partially covered, until the meat is loose, about 1 hour.

  2. Allow the filling to cool slightly and then remove the meat with a slotted spoon, pull it from the bones, and cut it into bite-size pieces. Set it aside on a plate.

  3. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, melt the butter and whisk in the flour until it bubbles, 1 minute. Add the milk and whisk until a paste forms, then add the paste to the pot containing the broth and bring to a boil. Stir until the broth has consistency of gravy, about 10 minutes, then remove from the heat.

  4. Add the meat and additional vegetables to the broth, along with the thyme. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  5. Add the filling to the prebaked crust. Remove the second dough disk from
the freezer, let rest for 10 minutes, then roll it out on a floured surface, until it is about an inch wider than the pie dish. Drape it over the filling. Trim the edges and tuck them under the top crust.

  6. With a pastry brush, brush some beaten egg white along the circumference, between the two crusts, and press down gently with your thumb or a fork.

  7. Brush the top of the pie with egg white. With a paring knife, cut small vent holes in the center and on the outer edges.

  8. Bake at 350°F for 35 minutes, until the crust is golden brown. Serve hot.

  Also try: brant, coot, duck, gallinule, goose, grouse, prairie chicken, partridge, pheasant, pigeon, ptarmigan, quail, rail, snipe, turkey, squirrel, rabbit, or a combination of those leftover scraps

  Note: To substitute other game birds, 3 chukar = 2 pheasants, 3 grouse, 6 quail, or 12 doves.

  Quail en Papillote

  Serves 4

  Cooking en papillote is a very traditional French technique that is designed to trap the flavor and the aroma until it reaches the diner. The protein, traditionally fish, is baked in a parchment envelope sealed with egg white, which puffs dramatically in the oven. French gastronome Brillat-Savarin described the quail as “everything that is most delightful and tempting. One of these plump little birds is pleasing equally for its taste, shape, and its color. It is unfortunate to serve it any other way but roasted or en papillote, because its aroma is extremely fleeting, and whenever the bird comes in contact with a liquid, this perfume dissolves, evaporates, and is lost.” This method is especially useful when the bird skin couldn’t be saved. The juices that develop in the bag serve as the sauce, but you can also serve a beurre blanc (page 228) or other sauce on the side.

  2 tablespoons grape seed oil plus additional oil or butter as needed