by Holly Hughes
First-deer rituals come in many forms, and usually involve some kind of eating or drinking. The movie Red Dawn popularized the ritual of downing a cup of blood dredged from the deer’s chest cavity. Others say you should bite out a hunk of raw heart. A friend of mine from Montana described being forced to eat a slice of raw liver topped with a sprig of sagebrush. In Scotland it’s a ritual to smear the hunter’s cheeks with the blood of his first deer. When I hunted there and killed a red deer, the guy I was hunting with smeared his hand with blood and reached toward my face. I explained that I’d killed many deer before. “Not in Scotland,” he said, and then gave me a swipe on each side of my face.
We didn’t have any particular ritual in my family, as my dad wasn’t big on symbolic acts of bravado. But he was big on eating deer hearts, the fresher the better, and when the heart came from my own first deer the meal was treated with even more respect than usual.
I killed it with a lever-action Winchester rifle, a year before I was old enough to do it legally. (Back then, you had to be twelve to hunt deer with a bow and fourteen to hunt them with a gun.) It was late in the morning, and we were doing something called a drive. Basically, a bunch of “pushers” head into an area where deer are known to bed during the day, and a “stander” positions himself where he thinks the deer will pass through as they run out. In this case, the bedding area was a deep ravine with a brushy creek bed at the bottom. My two brothers and a buddy of ours were the pushers who had to go down there and bust the deer out. I was the stander, and it was my job to hide on a hemlock-covered ridgeline that angled down into the ravine and provided a good vantage point to see what was going on below.
I saw the deer coming from way off. I expected it to pass below me as it followed the creek, but instead it broke away from the bottom and turned right up my ridgeline. It kept coming and coming, closer and closer. It didn’t even know I was there until it was so close that we could have conversed in whispers. It then stopped behind a bent-over tree. All I could see was its head and a bit of its throat. I aimed for the throat but hit the jaw. The deer fell hard and then scrambled down the side of the ridge in a somersaulting flurry of legs. I was right there behind it when it reached the bottom of the ravine. I kept expecting it to die, but suddenly it regained its feet and started to make some progress. I was carrying a Green River beaver skinning knife on my belt like the mountain men did. I pulled the knife and threw an arm around the deer’s neck and laid it down on its side like a cowboy in a roping competition. Then I put the tip of the knife into the deer’s neck and sliced its jugular. Only later, after my brother pointed it out to me, did I realize that I could have just shot the thing a second time.
I used that same knife to gut the deer, which weighed damn near what I did. When I was done I dug through the entrails to find the sac—it’s called a pericardium—that holds the heart. I could feel the warm firmness of the heart inside, about the size of a man’s fist. When I sliced through the sac the heart slid out into my hand as though something were being born rather than killed. It wasn’t until later that I would read about how some indigenous hunters fed the hearts of their quarry to their young children, so that the children would inherit the strengths and attributes of the animals they relied on. But I did know I was holding the core of a creature, the essence of its life, and that its life was far bigger and more meaningful than any squirrel’s. It was impossible not to see just how serious the business of killing was.
I took off my blaze-orange vest and wrapped the heart in it and put that into my day pack. My brothers then helped me drag the deer up out of the ravine and across a bunch of farm fields and through some windrows to where we’d parked that morning. At home my dad showed me how to take a thin-bladed fillet knife and carve out what are known as the great veins at the head of the heart. This left the heart looking deflated and a little hollowed out. I then started slicing the heart crosswise into slices about three-eighths of an inch thick, beginning at the narrow, pointy end. At first the slices were round and solid, like if you sliced a tree limb. But as I got deeper into the heart I began to hit the open pockets of the ventricles. These pockets started out small, just big enough for a pinky to fit through, but deeper into the heart they were so big that the slices looked as hollow as crosscut slices of a bell pepper.
My dad often deep-fried game in an electric fryer with a basket, but on this day we put a pan on the stove and filled it with a quarter-inch of oil. While the oil heated we spilled out some flour on a dinner plate and then dredged each of those slices through it. They sizzled when they hit the pan, and the oil came bubbling up through the holes of the ventricles, and the edges of the slices curled away from the heat. We took them off when they were crispy on the outside, though not so crispy that the juices didn’t still run with a little blood.
In general we weren’t allowed to put catsup on deer meat. My dad said it ruined the flavor. But with heart he made an exception. The meat was a little rubbery but snapped like a good hot dog when I bit into it. The flavor was similar to liver, though it wasn’t as strong. And there was something kind of metallic about it, too, but in a pleasing way. In all, it was a strong and identifiable flavor that I would grow to love, and that I would enjoy for many years to come. Yet it would never become something that I’d want to eat every day or even every week. Why not? It’s kind of hard to say. It was too . . . something. Perhaps the best word is one that some Vietnamese used to describe a meal of dog meat that we were sharing. They called it a “hot” food. Not hot like temperature or spicy hot. But hot as in volatile, in that you could feel it burning into your soul.
AN AWFUL MERCY
By Hank Shaw
From Honest-Food.net
Former political reporter and ex-line cook Hank Shaw is not just a hunter, he’s also a forager and gardener, a recipe developer (check out his new cookbook Duck, Duck, Goose), and philosopher of living off the land, as “an omnivore who has solved his dilemma.” So what goes through such a hunter’s mind when he has a deer in his sights?
Nothing in this world is certain, except death. The Reaper comes for us all in the end. Sometimes that end is horrible, violent and cruel. Sometimes it is a lingering, painful path to rot and ruin, pockmarked with despair and regret. Most of us cannot bear to contemplate this. But in those secret moments when we do allow ourselves to envision our own departure from this world, we ache for it to come swiftly, cleanly. Such a death is the ultimate mercy, the ultimate kindness.
Three days ago, on a cold and rainy hillside in Wyoming, I delivered that ultimate kindness to a dying fawn. And in the hours since, I have been unable to shake the image of that young animal from my mind—nor have I been able to fathom the seeming courage with which it faced me, a handservant of the Reaper.
I’d come to Wyoming in search of antelope, one of my favorite game meats and one I’d not had the privilege of eating since I shot my last ‘lopes in 2006. My friend Sheamus and his friends Allen and Tad invited me along on their antelope hunt, and I eagerly accepted. Allen and Tad were old hands at hunting pronghorn, and were good enough to do it consistently on public land.
But when we went to buy our tags at the sporting goods store in Caspar, we found that the area where Allen had planned to hunt was sold out. So Sheamus and I had to buy tags for a neighboring region, one none of us had ever seen. Sheamus is a chef more interested in meat than horns, and since I already have the skull of a big buck antelope on my wall, we each bought tags that allowed us to kill an antelope doe or fawn instead of a buck.
Into the truck we went, full of hope. Antelope hunting in Northern Wyoming is not the toughest endeavor in the world. There’s probably a higher concentration of pronghorn there than in any other place in North America. They are everywhere. The trick, however, is finding them on land you have permission to hunt.
The country we were driving through was sweeping and stark. For starters, these are the high plains. They begin at 5000 feet and go up from there. The wind is constant. Re
d rock cliffs fade into scrubby shortgrass prairie. Deep coulees hold mule deer, creek bottoms whitetail deer and turkeys. Look around and you are overwhelmed with a sense of beige. Everything is beige: The grasses, the hillsides, the antelope.
And sure enough, we found antelope. Lots of them.
Tad checked a nifty GPS device he had that showed us which was public land and which was private. Again and again and again, the answer was the same: Private. Hours passed.
Finally, Sheamus spotted a lone pronghorn bedded down on the side of a grassy hillside. Tad checked his GPS. “Green light! We can shoot him!” I was up first, so I slipped out of the truck, rifle in hand.
I needed to cross a road and get over a fence before I was legal to shoot—all in plain view of the sitting antelope. My heart hammered against my chest, and only a little of it was because of the altitude. I knew this was probably my only chance to get an antelope and I did not want to mess it up.
But surely the pronghorn would run off if I got close to it? I decided to try something that’s always worked with other animals: I walked along the road away from it, not looking. For whatever reason, not looking directly at animals seems not to spook them when I do it. I crossed the fence a few yards down the road and jammed a few shells into my rifle. I glanced to my left, up the hillside. The antelope was still there. So far so good.
I looked at the antelope through my scope. My heart sank a bit: It was a little boy fawn, not a fat doe as I’d hoped. But some meat is better than none, I reckoned. I also realized that from where I was sitting, this would be a long shot. I don’t much like long shots, so I decided to walk away from the pronghorn again to get myself around a little knob, where he could not see me. I could get much closer to him by coming up from behind the knob and shooting down from the top.
I worked my way around while Sheamus and crew watched from the truck. As I got closer, I dropped to my knees. When I reached the lip, I crawled. The fawn should be just below me, I thought. But he wasn’t. Had he walked away while I was behind the knob? I could just imagine everyone laughing at me in the truck. Letting me belly crawl over cactus for nothing.
Where the hell had this antelope gone? I looked to the right, and there he was, this time much closer. He was still bedded down, looking at me, calmly chewing grass. I was stunned. No animal should be that calm with a predator so close. Why didn’t he get up? Then it dawned on me.
Something was wrong with this fawn. Something serious.
Was he sick? Injured? I looked through the scope again. There he was, looking for all the world like he was just chewing his lunch on any other Monday afternoon. And he was still looking at me.
For a moment I thought I ought to just walk up on this antelope to see what he would do. Maybe he was just young and foolish, maybe I could teach him to fear humans. But I didn’t. I didn’t do that because, quite frankly, I wanted the meat. If I don’t kill a deer or some other sort of venison each year, I don’t eat red meat. I’ve lived this way since 2004, and I am not about to stop.
So I did what I set out to do. I set the crosshairs of my rifle on the best target I had available: The spine at the base of his neck. My pounding heart bounced the crosshairs mercilessly until I took a long, deep breath to calm myself. The last image I had before the world exploded was that fawn looking directly at me.
I did not see the antelope die, but I heard the thud of the bullet hitting him. When I looked up, he was stone dead. I chambered another round just in case he got up, and walked towards him, about 100 yards away. As I drew closer, I saw an odd dark patch near his foreleg. What?! Had I just shot him in the leg? Then why is he dead?
Standing over the dead pronghorn, I was at first struck by how small he was. Probably born in June, he could not have weighed more than 50 pounds. Then I saw what the dark patch was. Something, probably a coyote, had almost completely torn off this poor fawn’s foreleg. It was hanging only by a small bit of muscle and skin. A horrible wound, a fatal wound.
The yearling had not run away because he couldn’t. But three-legged animals can certainly stand, and many can walk. So why had he not stood up and even tried to escape? Was he addled by his injury, which looked to be only a couple days old?
I knelt down and put a tuft of grass in his mouth as a sign of respect; it’s a German tradition, a final gift of food to the fallen.
By the time I stood up, Sheamus was walking up the hill to help me out. We carried the pronghorn in silence and carried him back toward the truck. I skinned and quartered him quickly. We remarked that he was almost the exact size and color of a baby goat. “That’s gonna be some good meat,” Tad said.
He’s right. Holly and I will probably get six meals from that little antelope. But I can’t stop thinking about its fate. I know in my heart I did the right thing. Not every hunter would have chosen to use his tag on such an animal. And had we left him, the yearling would have died of starvation or, more likely, have been torn to pieces by the coyotes when they returned for him in the night.
My brain tells me that this fawn did not know this, that he could not possibly look his death in the eye serene in the knowledge that with his leg in ruins, a bullet was the best of all possible ends. My heart says otherwise. And I can only hope to show such courage when the Reaper comes for me.
Home Cooking
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER
By Gabrielle Hamilton
From Bon Appétit
There are chefs who can write and writers who can cook, but Gabrielle Hamilton—chef-owner of New York City’s Prune restaurant and author of the memoir Blood, Bones and Butter (2011)–rocks the hyphen better than anyone: she’s won James Beard awards for both. A great companion for a culinary road trip . . .
You think road trip and you imagine a dog-eared atlas, a bag of Cheetos on the shifter, feet up on the dash—time and opportunity, both, ostentatiously yours. I’ve had that road trip. This one, though, starts at the airport at 5 a.m. to get my photographer friend Penny and me to Birmingham, Alabama, in time to “catch the light.” I’ve had to arrange babysitters, school backpacks, and restaurant staff issues to get this six-day stretch of open road. Penny, the one understandably most concerned with catching the light, is equally unrelaxed as we get in the rental car.
Ironically, we’re heading out on the road to get . . . “home.” Home cooking. Not the roadside diner kind, and most emphatically not the homey stuff that restaurant chefs are peddling these days, with their “house-made” salumi, bacon, pickles, bitters, honey, gin, charcoal, mead, candles, and aprons. Little exhausts me quicker. I’m looking for the habits and the eccentricities of the true amateur.
I’ve been working on a cookbook for Prune, my restaurant in New York, and the question of the home cook comes up often as I aim to be hospitable and useful to my perceived reader. So I’ve begun to wonder, who, exactly, is the home cook these days, and what and how is he or she cooking? If I ask readers to measure by weight rather than volume, to tackle something that feeds 30 and takes a whole weekend, or more simply, to season with nothing more exotic than salt and pepper, will my book quickly end up in the remainder bin?
The only way to discover the truth of this imagined home cook is to get into the home kitchen. And so I invited myself over for dinner in seven homes across five Southern states, all connected to friends, and all agreeing to ignore my chef self, the photographer with me, and the magazine I am writing for, and to just cook as they usually do.
Day 1: Birmingham, Alabama
Soon after we land, Penny and I are at the lake house of Nicky Barnes with what I’ve come to call—lovingly and with a wink—“the doctors’ wives.” It’s way more complicated than that, including the fact that one of the doctors’ wives is no longer married to “the doctor,” and that Jorja, the friend for life who invited me to dinner, isn’t cooking, isn’t married to a doctor, and we are not even in her home. What’s important is this: The women who are cooking, Nicky and Lisa, each have four children, cook in their homes
at least four nights a week, and have the means to buy whatever groceries they need.
When Penny and I arrive (plenty of daylight!), there is pimiento cheese. I read the handwritten recipe, admiring its awesome specificity of ingredients (Duke’s mayo, Kraft Monterey Jack, Mt. Olive brand pickles, but just for the juice), and the charming absence of specificity when it comes to how to make the stuff. There are no measurements, and the instructions are clumsily out of order; it’s a classic home “recipe,” attributed to a friend as simply “Margaret’s Pimento Cheese.” For the main course, we have excellent turnip greens from the Junior League of Birmingham cookbook, and a roast chicken dish with tomatoes, basil, and balsamic vinegar that Lisa cooks very well, with natural ease. It’s a relief to see she isn’t faking for this magazine or chef-ifying for the chef.
I’m struck by Nicky’s handwritten, scribbled-over, paper-clipped kitchen notebook, some equivalent version of which we will find in every home we visit. In Nicky’s case, it’s tidy, short yellow sheets, mapping out the week’s meals so that she knows exactly what to get at the store. I had wondered if mothers are still keeping these kinds of books, which—it sounds so archaic, and even antifeminist, to say—might someday be passed on to their daughters at their weddings. I am gladdened to see that they are, and even gladder, in Nicky’s case, that hers will be passed on to one of her four sons!
Day 2: Sullivan’s Island, SC, and Savannah, GA
In the very early morning, Penny and I slip out of the lake house where we’ve spent the night—each with our own guest room, bathroom, and fresh bar of Lever 2000—get the GPS programmed, and hit the road. By mid-afternoon (slanting golden sunlight!), we’re in South Carolina, arriving at the Sullivan’s Island home of Ginny Deerin to cook “joyfully for oneself,” as she put it to me in an e-mail. Ginny is a Katharine Hepburn-esque empty nester who cooks for herself so emphatically that she has conceived of, and been encouraged toward, a cooking-for-one television show. I am thrilled to meet a woman like her, since, as anyone who regularly cooks for oneself can attest, it is not that joyful a proposition.