Grouse are pretty birds, I thought. Not pretty like a parakeet or majestic like an eagle, but pretty like the endless Iowa cornfields I had come to enjoy driving through over the previous year. I examined it closely, looking at the place where I had shot it and noticing how much it looked like raw chicken. This might seem like a pretty obvious thought to have, and it was obvious, but up close and in the moment, it seemed somehow interesting, like finding out that your mom had been pretty in high school. One of those things that makes you utter an audible “huh,” then move about your day. I turned it over, laying it in my left hand, my gun resting on my thighs, and spreading its wings. The creeped-out fear that moments before had kept me standing in one place was gone, replaced by no small measure of curiosity.
After a couple of minutes of examination, I stuffed the grouse into the chest entrance of my game bag and felt it slide down to rest just above my hip. I could feel its warmth through the vest, through my soft shell jacket, my shirt, and base layer. It was a strange feeling, to have the sensation of warmth passing out of one body and onto your own. I’m not one who puts a lot of stock in the notion, considered orthodoxy by many Native American tribes, that animals have spirits and by killing them you are releasing those spirits into the world. But feeling how that bird’s body heat radiated through my clothes and onto my skin, I understood how they came to believe it. I reloaded my gun, forgetting to go back and pick up my three spent shells, and walked for another twenty minutes in a halfhearted attempt to track down the other four grouse. My head just wasn’t in it. Had I not been alone, had I had someone to share the moment and more than a couple of high fives with, I might have gone on. But, alas, I was done. I gave a quick thought to going off in search of a rabbit, but dismissed it as quickly as it had come. I was calling it a day.
I unloaded my gun and walked back to my car, glad I had decided to leave it so close after dropping the stranded motorist off at home. I put my gun in the backseat and popped the trunk, where I had a large plastic bowl, paper towel, an aluminum bottle full of saltwater, latex gloves, and freezer bags waiting. I pulled off my vest and laid it on the ground, then switched my golflike hunting gloves for a pair of the disposable latex ones and pulled out the Boker bird knife I had ordered from L.L.Bean.
Now, all the videos I had watched and diagrams I had studied relating to the proper technique for field dressing and butchering upland game birds involve making a slit in the skin just above the poop shoot and creating an opening to reach in and pull out the guts. They also demonstrated how to make an incision just above the breast and cutting the skin around the neck so that you can pull the head back and remove everything but the breast. These were intact birds. Mine was like John Cleese’s character in the Harry Potter movies, nearly headless. Given that my bird was missing half its breast and that the head was liable to fall off with the slightest tug, I knew this was going to be difficult. I pulled it out of my vest and looked it over, trying to devise a strategy. I knew I had to get rid of the guts because the heat from them takes a while to dissipate and is the single biggest contributing factor to spoiling meat. I jammed the tip of the knife between the hips, feeling oddly perverted for doing so and made an incision, which I widened with my Italian sausage fingers until I could reach in and physically eviscerate the bird. I cut away the aforementioned poop shoot and considered my next move. Pulling the head back, I tried to remove the spine, but there wasn’t a whole lot there, so I ended up slipping the tip of my knife between the breast and the skin covering it, making a notch, then used my hands to pull it apart as delicately as possible. I then put one knee on the bird’s outstretched wing and sort of tugged and pulled until what remained of the breast pulled free.
I felt like a serial killer and half expected Frances McDormand’s cop from Fargo to come up and ask if it was my partner in the wood chipper. The legs were still intact, so I pondered for a minute or two what to do. I knew the skin would slip off like a sock if I were to remove the lower, scalier portion below the knees. A lifelong love of lobster did nothing to prepare me for the sensation of grasping the thigh in one hand and knife in lower leg in the other and bending back the knees until they snapped then running the connective tissue over my knife to remove the lower section of the leg. I did this twice, then tugged and pulled on the skin and feathers until the thighs came clean.
Right about the time I was promising to never again eat at KFC, I noticed the smell, a raw, acrid stench of gamy meat, blood, and internal organs. Not powerful, exactly, but pungent. I repeated Han Solo’s line from The Empire Strikes Back as he cut open the beast to make a warm bed for Luke Skywalker—“And I thought they smelled bad on the outside”—as I separated the salvageable meat from the nasty bits of bone, feather, skin, blood, and beak and threw the latter into the woods next to me. I rinsed the meat in the saltwater to help pull any remaining blood out and the water clouded immediately. I did my best to cut away any remaining chunks of skin, pull off any residual feathers or other indications of nastiness, then patted the meat dry with paper towel and put it into a gallon freezer bag to take home.
There was shockingly little in there.
Had I been able to salvage the whole breast, we could have gotten a meager meal out of a single bird. But combine my misplaced shots and amateur-at-best skills in the field of butchery and what I was left with was slightly more meat than what is on three or four buffalo wings. Paltry. But at least it was protein. I had gone out into the field and was coming home with meat. I would cook it and feed it to my family. Did it matter that it wasn’t exactly enough to tide us over from breakfast to lunch, let alone through an entire winter? Not to me, my friends, not to me. The only thing that mattered was that I had found, shot, killed, and cleaned an animal for my family to consume. Mission accomplished.
I was a hunter.
20
Vindication
Hunting became a weekend ritual for me. Every Saturday and Sunday through December, I got up before dawn, pulled on my L.L.Bean clothes and gear—which were starting to feel less shiny and new with every use—and headed north toward the public grounds that were becoming familiar. Most days, I didn’t see anything. Other days I didn’t look all that hard and simply enjoyed being out in the woods or walking purposefully through a field of overgrown scrub brush. Six or seven times I went out and six or seven times I came home empty-handed. Every once in a while, I would come across another hunter who would tell me how the DNR had released more than a thousand pheasant into the area where we were and had I only been there the day before I most certainly would have gotten something. I’d thank them, shoot the shit for a moment or two, then move on.
At first these little interactions made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like the idea of an armed stranger approaching me, but in time I realized I was armed too and that most hunters are actually friendly, approachable people.
I hadn’t so much as seen a pheasant since Iowa and after looking through my pictures a week or two later, I realized the bird I had shot was not a ruffed grouse as I thought it was, but a bobwhite quail. The two species look almost nothing alike, which is testament to my inexperience and, had I recognized the quail, I might have realized that the season for hunting them had ended three days before I pulled the trigger.
Christmas was approaching, just days away, and Rebecca took Jack, Dylan, and Molly up to Cleveland to spend time with family. I would join them in a couple of days. I had work to do, had, actually, to be at work since I’d burned through my vacation days on trips to Iowa, North Carolina, Maine, Iowa, and, sadly, Pittsburgh. We do this every year. She takes the kids and goes to see her family for most of the break from school, and I join them when I can. By this time, I had felt my yearlong adventure was coming to a close, but there was still something that eluded me. I’d been hunting with family, I’d been hunting on my own. I’d taken the classes, read the books, and confronted the NRA, but I still didn’t have my pheasant; that unchecked item on
my to-do list was pulling at me, poking me like an annoying reminder of unfinished business. My family had left on Wednesday. Christmas was Sunday. I had to work Thursday and Friday and had planned to drive up to join Rebecca and the kids Friday night. It didn’t leave much time.
I checked my schedule and realized that if I were to squeeze one more trip in before the end of the year, it would have to be Thursday before work.
I got up long before dawn, dressed, and poured a cup of coffee in my travel mug before setting out north toward Valhalla. I hadn’t so much as heard any of the pheasants others told me had been released there, but I didn’t have a lot of time to hunt before work and going someplace new was out of the question. I needed to go someplace familiar to get the most out of my limited time. I arrived just as the sun was turning the sky from black to purple and parked my car in a circular gravel drive, next to where the remains of a deer had been left by a hunter back in November. They were still there, though most of the meat had been picked over, leaving an eerie set of bones and teeth. I assembled my gun quickly and waited for the sun to come up a bit more before setting off. I wanted there to be enough light, should I come across something, to distinguish between an out-of-season quail and anything else that might fly by. Truth be told, I knew the effort was futile. I had the same feeling I did that second day back in Iowa and had resigned myself to not getting a bird this season.
“That’s okay,” I told myself through chattering teeth in the early morning cold. “There’s always next year.”
Ten minutes later, the sun had risen enough to begin walking. I set out along the now-familiar path of millet, walking away from my car, generally north toward the woods where I had gotten my unidentified quail. I got maybe twenty-five yards away from the car, walking slowly and pausing every few feet to listen for rustling among the sounds of mourning doves and other birds waking up, when I decided I needed another pair of gloves. I couldn’t feel my fingers, the tips were well beyond numb, and I remembered a pair of light wool gloves, the kind you buy from a freestanding kiosk in gas station convenient stores, in my trunk. So I turned back and had nearly reached my car when something stopped me in my tracks.
Thinking back, I have no idea what it was that made me stop. I don’t remember hearing anything or seeing anything. I don’t remember anything grabbing my attention, but for some reason, my senses were heightened. I was suddenly aware of the sound of my own breath, the beating of my heart. My head turned as if guided by someone standing behind me with hands on both my ears, toward the trees on the other side of the gravel drive. I had never paid much attention to the woods at Valhalla, believing, as I had read, that pheasant tend to avoid the woods for fear of predatory species that live in the taller branches. But something drew my eye in that direction regardless of what I had read.
It took me a minute to make it out, to distinguish it from the dark shadows of the woods, but there, walking among the trunks of oak and elm, was a rooster. I did a double take, but there it was. It was walking slowly through the clear forest floor, seemingly unaware of my presence. Fifteen yards. Maybe sixteen, but close. It was big, much bigger than I would have thought. I didn’t have a lot of time to see the one in Iowa. It got up and flew so fast and by the time I examined the body after the hunt, I wasn’t paying much attention to scale. But there it was. Right there. Right in front of me. After a year and thousands of miles, hundreds of hours spent reading and studying, learning, walking, waiting, stalking fruitlessly through the tall grass, it was there. Right there. I was only out of the car for twelve or thirteen minutes. I had given myself an hour and a half. I had planned on walking four miles, and it turned out I only had to walk a few feet. This was my chance for a pheasant. This was my chance for redemption. This was my chance to put a period on the end of my project.
I didn’t want to startle it by moving too quickly. I took two steps away from my car and raised my gun to my shoulder. I drew aim and waited. Do I shoot it now? On the ground? Do I wait for it to fly? Can I make it fly? After a few long seconds’ contemplation, I decided such considerations were the luxury of the experienced, the privileged sportsman for whom there would always be another hunt. Was it selfish? Sure. Morally ambiguous? Maybe. But I made my decision and was willing to live with it. I took my time, carefully sliding the safety switch forward and following the bird as it moved slowly from my right to my left. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I felt the pressure of the trigger against my finger, and just as the pheasant was about to step behind a thin two-year sapling, I pulled the trigger. Immediately, the pheasant hunched over. It’s not like in the movies when the hunter fires and all that is left is a puff of feathers. That would defeat the purpose of hunting. And I wasn’t so close that the bird went flying. Instead, it slumped to one side like it had tripped and began flopping and flailing.
The adrenaline kicked in. I took a few steps forward, breaking open my gun and letting the spent shell eject past my face. I didn’t take my eyes off the pheasant. It looked like it was going to get up and make a run for it, so I slammed my gun shut, raised it, and pulled the trigger.
Click.
It took a moment for me to realize I had not reloaded the top barrel and had thus pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. I tucked my cheek against the stock, keeping both eyes open and pointing the gun at the bird. I put the weight on my front foot, bent slightly at the waist, and lifted my right heel slightly off the ground. This time when I pulled the trigger, all motion was stopped. The bird slumped, jerked slightly, then stopped. I snapped my gun open and put two new shells in the barrels before snapping it closed again, never breaking stride, but walking purposefully toward my quarry. When I reached the place where the pheasant lay, I stood a couple feet away, gun at my shoulder, waiting for it to move. I stood with my gun shouldered, even though I knew the pheasant wouldn’t hurt me, but I didn’t want it to get away. I couldn’t live with myself if I merely wounded an animal and let it get away.
I waited for perhaps a minute before unloading my gun and resting it against a tree. I knelt down and looked at it. It was beautiful. The feathers were black and brown, white and teal, a complicated mosaic that formed a complete picture that was enough to make a man marvel at the mystery of the world. After another moment, I felt something welling up inside my chest and without warning or forethought, I released what Whitman described as a “barbaric yawp.” I shouted at the top of my lungs nothing in particular. Just a release that lasted maybe five seconds and what followed was a mixture of elation and pride. I had gone into the world bigger than myself and emerged more alive than when I had entered. I was carrying my pheasant—it was no longer “the” pheasant or “a” pheasant, but “my” pheasant—out of the woods toward my car when the green pickup truck with the Department of Natural Resources seal on the door pulled up. My first thought was that it was a wildlife officer, so I laid my gun across the elbow of the arm holding my pheasant and dug into the pocket of my hunting vest to retrieve my driver’s and hunting licenses. When the truck pulled up, I proffered my papers and held my pheasant up high.
“I finally got one,” I said. “First one of the season. First one ever. But I got one. You need my license?”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” said the man in his late fifties with the thick walrus mustache of salt and sand.
“Are you the Warren County officer?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said. “Just turning around.”
“Oh,” I said and put my identification back into my pocket.
“Nice bird, though,” he said.
“Thanks, it’s mine,” I blurted and instantly felt like a jackass. Was he really there to confiscate the pheasant on behalf of the state? Sometimes I don’t know where this shit comes from.
“Yup, sure is,” he said and pulled away.
It took me longer to field dress my pheasant than it had taken to hunt it and when I was done, I was left with perhaps two pound
s of breast and leg meat. I left the lower legs and claws attached on the off chance that I might have to prove to a game warden that it was a rooster and put the whole of it into a gallon freezer bag and closed it in my trunk. I called Rebecca as I pulled away, but it was still early and she didn’t answer her phone. I tried calling Dad but got his voice mail too. I sent my wife a text reading simply “I got one,” and an hour or two later, after I had stopped at home and put the meat in the freezer, showered, changed, and had gone to work, I got a text message back from her reading “Finally. It’s about time.”
My God, I love that woman.
I waited until after Christmas to cook my pheasant. I was home alone; my family was still in Cleveland, and I had planned to meet them in a couple of days to celebrate New Year’s. After months of reading recipes and books about pheasant cookery, months of reading about game and eating healthy, I had decided on a simple roast with roasted vegetables. I dog-eared the page in my book with the recipe and made a list of ingredients to get the next day on my way home from work. I moved the frozen meat, claws still attached, to the refrigerator to thaw and settled into bed to watch a little Anthony Bourdain. He was in Vietnam. It was a rerun, but one of my favorites. In the episode, Bourdain waxed poetic on the perfection of the simple Vietnamese delicacy pho. Essentially a noodle soup with vegetables and meat, pho was something I had always wanted to try and that night I went to bed dreaming of the salty, savory soup. All the next day, it was all I could think about. It seemed so easy. Stock. Vegetables. Rice noodles. Protein. Hot sauce.
And Now We Shall Do Manly Things Page 28