I once read an article about picky eaters, which I vaguely remember mentioned that a child’s palate changes so much while growing that she must taste a food at least seventeen times before knowing for sure whether she likes it. Though I’m fully grown, I wonder if I’ve given mushrooms a fair try. If I eat them twenty, thirty, forty times—will I start to appreciate them? On New Year’s Eve, I hatch a resolution: I will eat mushrooms at least once a week this year.
During some of the early meals, I almost resort to holding my nose while I chew. But over time, it gets easier. I find myself tossing mushrooms into my stir-fry or sprinkling them on pizza by choice, rather than a sense of obligation. And by the fall, I am eager to get out and pick mushrooms. I want to feel that thrill of finding a miraculous mushroom again. I also want to bring it home, cook it up and savor it the way it deserves.
The rush of finding a wild mushroom reminds me of what I felt after shooting my pheasant. It also reminds me of a camping trip that Scott and I took earlier that fall. We hiked miles into a wilderness area to fish in a remote pond that we’d spotted on a map. When we got there, the pond was surrounded by wild huckleberry bushes. I never even strung up my fly rod, just squatted down and began picking berries. Fortunately, I had a few large ziplock bags in my backpack. The minuscule fruit was dark purple and tangy sweet, as if a blueberry and a raspberry had a tiny, delicious baby. We froze most of the berries. Each month, we scooped out a small allotment to sprinkle on pancakes as they sizzled, or to cook into a sweet, sticky sauce to pour over ice cream.
Foraging for wild food gives me an almost religious feeling of serendipity: When I stumble upon a hillside of gleaming, ripe huckleberries, or unearth a fragrant mushroom, the universe is confirming that I am in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
CHAPTER 9
GOOD DOG, BAD WOLF
The same fall that Betsy takes us mushroom hunting, I continue to get out and hunt for birds. Of all the things I enjoy about hunting, my favorite is watching the dogs. I jump at any invitation to join an expedition that includes a trained dog. These animals are incredible, first because of their physical abilities: to sniff out a bird and then startle it and hold it still. Next, they astound me with how well they work with humans. They read their owners’ body language and anticipate their slightest movements. I notice their happiness in the field, their satisfaction while retrieving a bird their owner has shot. This makes me rethink my relationship with my own pet dog.
I adopted Sylvia three years ago in April. Like so many modern-day love affairs, ours began online. After browsing Petfinder.com for months, I stumbled across a profile for Missy, a one-year-old female who had been picked up as a stray and was thought to be a flat-coated retriever mix. I’d read that the breed was well mannered, playful and large enough to go running or skiing, but not as unruly as the hundred-pound Great Pyrenees whom Scott already owned when we met. One Saturday, we drove Scott’s dog, Bob, out to meet this mystery gal, and the two ignored each other completely. Even when we took the pooch home with us, and she and Bob rode together in the back of Scott’s car, they avoided all eye contact. The next morning, they finally acknowledged each other by playing wildly in our backyard.
Back then, I’d had no real interest in hunting. But in hindsight, if I had thought to expose her to birds right away, Sylvia probably could have become a fine hunting dog. Instead, we raised her with little access to non-human or canine animals—with one notable exception: fish.
Scott and I started taking Sylvia on fishing trips immediately after we rescued her. She was good company and, unlike Bob, she stayed close enough and obeyed commands well enough that she rarely caused trouble. I can’t imagine exactly what was going through Sylvia’s diminutive head the first time she watched Scott hook a fish, but I know that it was a life-changing event. We were standing on the bank of the Williamson River, next to a deep pool of crystal-clear water. The fish chomped Scott’s fly and leapt into the air. And Sylvia lost her head. She surged into the current, swimming in circles where the fish had breached a few moments earlier. Periodically, she plunged her entire head underwater to glimpse the fish. Sylvia’s ancestors may have been bred to find and retrieve birds, but from that moment on, Sylvia has seemed perfectly happy dedicating her life to fish.
She knows more about fly-fishing than most humans do. When fish are rising to feed off the surface of the water, she often notices before I do. If I’m fishing with a dry fly—an imitation of a floating bug such as a mayfly—she stands aquiver and stares as it drifts downstream. If I’m fishing with a nymph—a weighted, sunken fly—she watches the neon foam strike indicator that I attach to my line. And she goes bonkers when it pops underneath the surface. She can barely control herself when she hears the whir of a reel. And when I get my fly caught on a piece of submerged wood and reel in a stick instead of a fish, Sylvia cavorts around the bank with the “catch” (after I’ve unhooked it and handed it to her) in her mouth, triumphant. On the rare occasion that I do hook a fish, Sylvia watches rapt as I try to reel it in, occasionally becoming so impatient that she tries to swim out and greet it. When I let the fish go, she bounds over to the spot in the water where I last held it and plunges her head in, hoping to catch a whiff. After a few years of fishing, Sylvia knows where to stand to be close to the action when a fish is hooked and landed. When I’m nymphing, she knows at what point in the drift a fish is most likely to strike, and her excitement builds as the fly approaches.
Sylvia loves fly-fishing more than most humans I know do, including me. We once took a long-weekend camping trip in which both Scott and I fished non-stop for three days and caught nothing. By the end of that kind of weekend, I was barely paying attention to my line anymore. The cast was automatic, mere background to my vivid daydreams. But Sylvia ran back and forth along the banks between us, checking our lines and watching, her muscles tense with optimism. She knew that any cast could be the one that resulted in a squirming fish.
Once, Scott and Sylvia were fly-fishing alone along a small, remote stream. Scott flogged the water all day and caught nothing. In late afternoon, they turned to hike back to the car. After a mile or so, Scott noticed that Sylvia had stopped a little way ahead of him. He could only see her tail and back end, as her head was thrust into some tall reeds on the river’s edge. As he tiptoed closer, he saw her whole body. She was standing on point, perfectly still and at peak attention. Scott peered past the reeds and into the water, which dropped off steeply from the bank. There, about six feet below, in a deep, calm pool, was a giant rainbow trout. Just as Scott spotted the fish, Sylvia torpedoed into the water, headfirst, with her mouth opened wide. She popped up, stunned and disoriented, with an empty jaw. When Scott came home, he looked as if he’d discovered time travel. His eyes were wild and he couldn’t wait to tell me, in perfect detail, about what Sylvia had done. He was amazed—first that she had somehow spotted the fish and, second, that she dove after it.
“What would you have done if she came up with that fish in her mouth?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” He shook his head, and I realized that Sylvia’s disappointment was no match for Scott’s. “I would have bonked it on the head, grilled it up and fed it to her. She earned it.”
When Scott pats Sylvia during a post-fishing slumber, he turns to me and says: “I’ll probably have a lot of dogs in my life. But none of them will be as interested in fishing, none will love to do what I love to do, as much as Sylvia.” He’s right; how often does a family pet share our own hobbies?
I love my mutt to an embarrassing degree. Scott and I have coined dozens of nicknames for her (Wiggles, Wigs, Sylvester and Peeps McGoo are just the beginning). And though she can’t speak for herself, all indications are that she loves me back. But her affection for me stems, I think, from my feeding her, walking her and playing ball or Frisbee with her. I am her caregiver. We are companions. Yet I wonder how much deeper our connection would be if we were also hunting partners, if I could draw out her
latent instincts and plumb the long-bred abilities she doesn’t know she has.
Wolves and dogs are the same species, and their genomes are almost impossible to distinguish. Even a Chihuahua is just one taxonomical subcategory away from a wolf. This bald, pint-size version of the wolf has simply been through an unnatural breeding process, carefully controlled by humans. This alone is what qualifies it as Canis lupus familiaris instead of C. lupus. And even though we created dogs, we don’t have good records of how we did it. It’s only in the last decade or so that scientists have turned serious about their studies of the history of the dog.
Other than humans, wolves were once the mammal with the most varied geographic distribution on earth. They were also one of our biggest predatory competitors, which is why we managed to wipe them out of so many different regions. But as this widespread annihilation was taking place, we were also taming some members of the same species into our best friends. Evidence suggests that humans domesticated wolves simultaneously in several places around the world. There are various theories about exactly how wolves were tamed. In one particularly odd theory, wolf pups were stolen from their dens at one or two days old, and lactating women nursed them from their own breasts. Regardless of the specifics, each theory rests on some level of consent from the wolves themselves. For example, some scientists believe that Siberian huskies stem from a population of semi-domesticated wolves who flocked to nomadic tribes of people when hunting became difficult during harsh winters. The people tied the dogs up and taught them to pull sleds. In return, they fed the dogs. Then, when the snow melted, the dogs went off and lived in the wild, again hunting on their own, until winter.
Although the “how” of domestication is still a mystery, researchers tend to agree on the “why.” Nearly every theory involves a symbiotic relationship that includes food and hunting. Humans and dogs have been hunting together for as long as forty thousand years, according to some estimates. Many of the dog breeds that we recognize today were developed much more recently to specialize in one category of game or one stage of the hunting process.
Thick-coated dogs such as Labrador retrievers, for example, are naturally equipped to brave icy waters while fetching downed waterfowl. Dogs who pursue upland birds—birds living on dry land, including chukar, grouse and pheasant—are usually either pointers or flushers. Pointers, such as German shorthairs, run way ahead of the hunter to track prey and then freeze, holding a bird in place until the hunter draws near. Flushing dogs, such as cocker spaniels, stay close to the hunters and scare birds into the air as they find them. Both categories of dogs are easily trained to retrieve birds who’ve been shot. Today the vast majority of American dog owners do not hunt. But their four-legged companions still have these hunting abilities coursing through their veins.
Armed with a couple of books, I try to teach Sylvia to retrieve birds. I drag feathered bird wings around our yard, then let her out and encourage her to sniff them out of hiding. But she’s not used to following her nose, and doesn’t notice anything different about the yard.
I tell her to sit and stay while I throw a duck decoy into the water. But after years of dashing madly after balls and Frisbees the moment they leave my hand, she struggles to wait. For a hunter, this is a liability. You don’t necessarily want a dog leaping into the water as soon as you down a duck: Other birds at whom you want to take aim might approach. My next pet, I resolve, will be a bird dog. For now, though, I am happy with my ball-chasing furry friend.
In 2009, wolf hunts open in two Western states for the first time in decades. Personally, I can’t imagine shooting a wolf—it is too closely related to a dog, the animal with whom I have forged my deepest human-animal friendship. But I don’t entirely oppose wolf hunts, either, because they could build tolerance—among conservative ranchers, especially—for a self-sustaining wolf population. As I’ve mentioned, when hunters are allowed to pursue an animal, a constituency develops around that species. It reminds me of controversial, high-priced hunts in Africa and Asia for endangered animals. As a conservationist, it pains me to think of someone pulling the trigger on a rare tiger. But if the astronomical price tag for hunting one tiger raises enough money to protect hundreds of them, isn’t it doing more good than harm?
Wolf reintroduction raises ethical questions that I would not have considered before I started hunting. As an environmentalist, I believe in the principle of reintroduction. We should right the wrong that we committed by removing the species from giant swaths of North America more than sixty years ago. But this reintroduction comes with caveats to which the wolves cannot possibly agree. For example, state and federal management plans call for an individual wolf to be “fatally managed,” or killed, if it preys on multiple livestock animals. Wildlife managers assume that wolves are capable of quickly learning the difference between wild and domestic prey. Scientists who study wolf and dog behavior, on the other hand, aren’t sure that’s a realistic demand. Human activity, particularly ranching, now takes up the vast majority of wolves’ available habitat.
Wolves have no shortage of enemies. Ranchers seem to universally despise the animals for preying on their livestock. And hunters are surprisingly eager to join the wolf hatred, too. To combat all of this, some environmental groups have launched campaigns to discourage fear of this animal that humans have loaded with symbolism for millennia. Non-profits in Montana and New Mexico, for example, actually bring wolves into school classrooms. The message from such groups is that wolves are gentle creatures, not fierce ones, and so we should be kind to them. But wolves are not gentle, they’re wild animals. There is a real danger in demanding that animals be good, kind, friendly—or any other anthropomorphic trait—to deserve respect or protection.
Sadly, wildlife management is a political sport. Interest groups—including sportsmen and environmentalists, who often have opposing aims—wield power over the politicians who allocate funding for state agencies. This means the wildlife managers who set hunting seasons and quotas are beholden to politicians. Worse, they could permit irresponsible levels of hunting in an effort to collect the maximum number of fees, bolstering their short-term budget.
Many hunters, I’ve found, think about individual animals as members of a larger population. As long as the population is healthy and stable, a certain number of individuals can be ethically harvested for food. In some cases, these killings are actually beneficial to the health of a population. Well-managed hunts can cull a population that has outgrown an ecosystem and is causing damage to the land. Hunting discourages animals from becoming tame or moving into developed areas, reducing the number of human-wildlife conflicts. In a recent study, well-regulated hunts were found to help migratory animals adapt more quickly to habitat changes.
Occasionally, we even think of ourselves in such a way that the good of the population overrules the health of one individual. Take clinical medical trials, for example. Doctors willingly, and in some cases knowingly, administer placebos—substances that they know will not slow disease or save lives—to their patients with fatal diseases. But they do this with the hope that the one patient’s experience—even one that fails to slow death—will eventually save more lives.
Before I began to hunt, I thought of animals as individuals, with families and emotions and a whole slew of anthropomorphic traits. This strikes me as the environmentalist, vegetarian, animal lover’s approach: Any death of any individual being is painful and bad. The trouble is, I now think of animals both as members of a population and as individuals. It makes for a lot of hand-wringing. But maybe it’s a necessary paradox; it’s what makes me a responsible hunter.
When summer arrives, we add to our usual camping and fishing trips a new activity: scouting for birds. We look for small ponds and streams where ducks congregate. We peruse rocky river canyons for signs of an upland game bird called a chukar partridge. And then, in the fall, we camp in southeast Oregon and hike through steep canyons in search of these elusive birds. Before this trip, I have neve
r seen a chukar in person, and everything I know about the species I learned in books.
The chukar (Alectoris chukar) is native to Eurasia, and especially common in the western Himalayas. A chukar is about the size of a pigeon and mostly black and white, with a dark stripe around the eye and bright red legs, eyelids and beaks.
These avian homesteaders prefer habitat from which other game birds would flee: steep, rocky cliffs in harsh, arid climates. Because they live in such steep terrain, chukar hunting is grueling. This is especially true without a trained dog to sniff out the birds. Scott and I cover miles of steep ground before I see one lone chukar. It flies out of sight before I can recognize it and shoulder my gun. Because they live in areas with few trees, chukars spend most of their time on the ground. When startled or roused, they run or fly quickly uphill and over the canyon edge.
Despite my lack of traditional success—we come home with an empty cooler—I enjoy each day’s outing. I listen for the birds to call to each other—chukka chukka chukka—as if they’re cackling their name. I look for insects and seeds, including the small kernels of native Oregon bunchgrasses, that the birds might munch on.
Call of the Mild Page 13