Girl Hunter.
Georgia Pellegrini.
For T. Kristian Russell.
Without you, there would be none of this.
So long as there is lead in the air, there is hope.
-THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
Prologue.
"Oh my Lord, oh my Lord," Hollis whispers.
In the next field we can barely make out a set of dark crimson tail feathers moving through the high gra.s.s. We move quickly toward the wild turkey, along the levee with our backs bent low, in single file, three of us: a farmer named George Hollis, a man they call "the Commish," and me. We are an odd group, me half their size, trying to keep up in too-large-for-me, full army camouflage that I borrowed from my brother"s closet-remnants from the days he played paintball with his adolescent friends. The others are in proper hunter"s camouflage with 12-gauge shotguns slung over their shoulders, a couple of plastic turkey decoys dangling from their backpacks, turkey callers clenched between their teeth. They climb up the hill beside the field; I stumble after them in the oversize rubber boots that they bestowed upon me to save me from the snakes. We sit panting behind a tree trunk while Hollis unwraps a piece of camouflage fabric attached to plastic stakes and positions it in front of us as a blind. We wait.
"Okay," the Commish says. "This bird"s gonna get to meet Miss Georgia. He"s gonna have Georgia on his mind . . . "
You may be wondering how I ended up here. It was a series of serendipitous introductions, really, a divine aligning of the stars that introduced me to a man named Roger Mancini, a larger-than-life entrepreneur from the Arkansas side of the Mississippi Delta. I had cooked for him from time to time in Nashville, where we have mutual friends, and always found myself reaching deep into my bag of four-star tricks to impress a man so worldly, yet so distinctly a product of the American South.
During one of those dinners, as I glazed a series of Roger"s freshly hunted wild duck b.r.e.a.s.t.s with orange gastrique, he overheard me telling a friend that I wanted to hunt. "Hold on now, Georgia," he said as he sauntered over with a wide-eyed, soulful look, a cigar pressed between his thumb and forefinger, which he pointed at me now, saying, "I"ve got just the man to teach you. My first cousin; we call him "the Commish.""
Roger went on to explain that "the Commish" takes his nickname from the governor-appointed position he has held for many years: commissioner of fish and game for the State of Arkansas, and that he would be honored to introduce me; and then, in the same breath, he moved past me, intent on finding three perfect tomatoes for the Panzenella Salad he had been talking about for some time. It was then that his wife, Betsy, leaned over to me, a gla.s.s of Bollinger balanced in her left hand, and said conspiratorially, "Down there, the Commish is a bigger deal than the president of the United States."
Many months later in early spring, I was introduced to the Commish at an Arkansas hunting camp, the night before a turkey hunt. He was sitting on a tree stump, holding a large Styrofoam cup filled with ice and whiskey in one hand, and cradling a thick cigar in the other, staring into the fire with a serious expression.
He looked up as they introduced me to him, paused, then offered me a drink and a seat by the fire. He had silver hair and his face bore the faint traces of his Lebanese ancestors who had first inhabited this place a century ago.
"You ever shot a gun?" he asked, still staring into the fire, his voice settling onto his words like mola.s.ses.
"Um, no, not really," I said, glancing sideways, feeling the other men at the camp peering at me curiously.
"This twenty-gauge should work pretty well," he said, opening the shotgun leaning against his chair to look down the barrel. "My daughter Ashley learned on a four-ten because it doesn"t kick, but it"s hard to kill anything with it. The first thing you gotta decide, do you want an automatic or an over an" under, which is a double barrel-the cla.s.sic hunting bird gun. Quail hunters, they all shoot over an" unders, that"s just kinda the old European influence. For you I would use a twenty-gauge. It"s a good turkey gun if you can get "em close."
"Okay, that sounds good," I say, wanting to fit in as much as possible but clearly failing simply by the way I looked in my b.u.t.ton-down shirt and J.Crew blue jeans.
We didn"t talk much after that. We just sat there and sipped from our Styrofoam cups and chewed on the crushed ice.
"I"ll pick you up at five tomorrow morning," he said as I finally got up to leave.
Then he paused and gave me a sober look from his dark eyes through tinted spectacles.
"Are you sure "bout this?" he asked.
"Yes, I"m sure," I said, my voice unrecognizably high pitched.
"A" right then. I"ll see you tomorrow," he said.
Now through the turkey caller set between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, just twelve hours later, George Hollis lets out the cluck of a female turkey. The male gobbles back from the brush across the field. George calls again and the old turkey calls back again.
"He"s responding well," I whisper.
"You know what you"re supposed to say?" the Commish asks.
"What?" I ask.
"He"s gobblin" his a.s.s off."
Hollis chuckles.
"You"re hanging out with a bunch of old men now; you gotta remember that," the Commish says.
As he speaks, a thin red and black head appears through the clearing on the opposite side of the field. I put my head down into the barrel of the gun and look through the scope to get a better look.
"It"s such a little head they have, though," I say, my voice shaking. "How am I supposed to hit it?"
"You don"t have to get it exactly on him. You just get it close and the spread of the sh.e.l.l pellets will do the rest," the Commish says.
I feel my hand tighten as the old turkey begins to strut toward the plastic decoys that Hollis has dropped onto the field. The bird has begun his mating march-stepping forward regally with his wings behind him, displaying the purple and green shimmering colors of his tail feathers, his red wattle and long, wiry beard swaying to and fro. He keeps coming forward, step by adrenaline-inducing step, but then instead of going toward the decoys to my left, he suddenly moves right.
"Hold on," the Commish says. "Just hold on a second." I obey, my head and heart pounding in unison.
"Get your head down on the gun," he continues. "Can you see the red dot on the end of your shotgun?"
"Yeah," I reply. But I can"t see the turkey. "What happens if I miss the first shot?" I whisper, trying to veil my rising panic.
"Don"t worry about it," the Commish says, guiding my gun as I look through the scope like a blind man in a maze, with no idea of what is beyond the camo blind or where the ol" gobbler is doing his dance. I see nothing but the makeshift fence, the cl.u.s.ter of trees and the field, and beyond that the Mississippi, the color of mercury, moving languidly in the distance.
There is a moment of stillness and utter silence when the world seems to be on mute, and then suddenly, hardly 10 yards away, the turkey appears in my scope, so close he is almost in my face. I let out a gasp.
"Do you see him? Do you see him?" the Commish whispers, showing the first signs of real emotion since I"ve met him.
I lean forward and look down the rib of the shotgun toward the red dot at the tip of the barrel, and position it on the head of the bird only a few yards away, my hands shaking, my heart feeling almost certainly too large to fit in my chest. I wait for my breath to become at least a bit more steady, I squint, and then I slap the trigger. The sound echoes through the woods and the field below us and I feel a thrust into my right shoulder as the gun kicks back. The ol" gobbler jumps into the air, in a moment of confusion, levitates higher, toward the trees, and then finally . . . out of sight.
I look at the Commish and feel my cheeks turn hot.
Hollis jumps out of his seat and howls, "Is that a turkey hunt or what?!" as I sink my head down further in embarra.s.sment.
"What did he do there, Georgia?" the Commish asks, grinning.
"He gobbled his a.s.s off," I say, suppressing a smile. Hollis howls with laughter.
"That "responding well" works in upstate New York, but down here it doesn"t. We"re not letting you go back to be a Yankee; you"re from the South now, Baby. Anyone who can put on camo and go hunting with a bunch of rednecks is my kind of girl."
It was at that moment, my cheeks burning with a strange new c.o.c.ktail of shame and exhilaration, a feeling of determination rising slowly in my chest, that I knew I had just been indoctrinated into a brave new world.
Little did I know, this was just the beginning.
Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.
-BERTRAND RUSSELL The Beginning Watching the orange bobbin float by under the willow tree was a kind of pleasure I didn"t know existed until it stopped. Feeling the soil slip under my nails was, too-especially when it ended with a fat worm between my fingers. The bobbin bounced just so over the tiny rivulets of the creek, beneath my feet dangling from my regular boulder. I can still recall the pangs of glee I felt as a six-year-old when the trout pulled on that orange bobbin, and the tug-of-war we played as I pulled on the line and the trout"s bra.s.sy color began to reflect the light. The fish pulled my rod down in a sharp arc and its white belly flopped and its dots sparkled and shined and my father"s hands came down to help me reel it in.
I foraged, too, inspecting mushroom guidebooks with scholarly interest; and I painted, using only wild berries and crushed gra.s.s as my ink. I hung from vines until they fell and then made vine wreathes that I studded with dandelions and rosehips. I shoveled chicken manure and collected eggs, and made dolls from dried cornhusks. I made jams, as taught to me by an old woman who lived on the bank of the Hudson River, and soon declared myself the Wild Raspberry Queen. I pickled green tomatoes and climbed apple trees to get the very finest fruit. I learned the names of plants with my great-hunched-over-aunt as my guide-and helped her protect her budding flowers from an overabundance of marauding midnight deer-on the land we called Tulipwood.
My mother, on the other hand, was the perennial standard bearer of animal welfare. She was known to bring road-kill deer home in the trunk of her car to give them a proper burial, and to nurse in her home office ailing chickens from our coop. It wasn"t uncommon to trip over a diaper-clad bird named Lorenzo on my way to the kitchen.
During grade school I often visited the Fairy stream and sat on Indian rock. I collected salamanders and slipped them into my pockets for no reason other than their fluorescent green bodies enchanted me.
I preferred not to wear shoes. Or if I had to, then I preferred not to wear anything but shoes. Sometimes I"d sit outside and play the cello in the gra.s.s, with just shoes on.
Once, I made the mistake of saying that school was too easy, which prompted a trip from Tulipwood in the Hudson Valley to Manhattan, which prompted a uniform fitting, which prompted early-morning commutes to a rigorous girl"s school in the city. Soon I was penning history notes next to Ivanka Trump by day and shoveling chicken manure by night.
Suddenly I was hopping back and forth between two worlds, divided only by the George Washington Bridge and sizeable trust funds. Suddenly I was spending time with kids during the week who had drivers in sleek black town cars, and on the weekend I was riding along in my dad"s old black stick-shift pickup to get horse manure from the dump.
The seams of my home life began to unravel as I got older. I moved farther away from manure and raspberry jam on the quest for prestigious degrees and prestigious jobs, which were the logical next step after Manhattan prep school. They took over: the heavy books, the ivy walls, the promises of success and fulfilled potential; and I took the path of least resistance into a corporate life. It was a life that nourished my bank account but never my soul, and I found myself looking up one day, while on the trading floor of Lehman Brothers, and saying, "This can"t be the answer." I wanted to smell fresh air again, to feel the dirt in my fingernails, to collect eggs and stir ruby-colored jam in a pot and watch it grow thick. And so I left, with the taste of hope in my mouth and soon-to-be worthless stock options in my bank account, determined to nourish my soul again.
Two years later I found myself only miles from Wall Street, but a world away, working at an award-winning farm-to-table restaurant on a Rockefeller estate. I had just graduated from the French Culinary Inst.i.tute and had given up my apartment on Sutton Place in favor of a rented solitary room in Westchester, with no hot water. I had left behind the trappings of the city-the cars and bars and boys-and traded in my laptop for a set of good knives.
The funny thing was that I was working the same hours that I had as a financial a.n.a.lyst, but I was now feeding the same people with whom I had once crunched numbers-feeding them such things as delicately smoked trout, carefully plucked baby greens, dainty golden beets-creating small, precious flights of fancy in the center of big white plates. I was throwing out (or at least composting) anything that didn"t look perfect enough to conjure a certain kind of money from their wallets. Sometimes I wondered how far from the dens of Wall Street I had really come.
One morning the chef gave me an unusual order. Pointing out over the sloping hill of the estate at a herd of turkeys drifting and pecking through the morning, he told me that I was going to slaughter five of them for the kitchen. With this a.s.signment came a revelation. Although I had always eaten meat, and even considered myself an adventurous meat eater-embracing the strange cuts and unusual parts found in outdoor markets and Asian butchers-I had never killed an animal with my own hands. A thin, clear piece of fishing line in my hands had always played the intermediary. But if you knew the chef I was working for, you would know that there was no going back.
I put on a clean ap.r.o.n and walked up a sloping hill, where they stood at the top, calm and stunning, feathers fanned out, their high-pitched gobbles echoing into the woods and over the creek. I stood paralyzed as the other cooks chased them down. There was indeed that proverbial window through which I momentarily peered and contemplated life as a vegetarian.
But there was blood in the meadow that morning. One person pinned down a bird while another cut its windpipe. We held the five down until their bodies went limp, then carried them by their feet back down the hill, past the woods where a 900-pound pig named Boris snorted in his pen; he, too, would soon become part of a Bolognese. I stopped just outside the kitchen doors of the restaurant, grasping my bird"s gray feet. I dunked her body in boiling water and plucked her. White feathers filled the air and floated off like a cloud in the sunlight. I thrust my hands deep into her cavity. It was still warm. I slid my hands high up the inside of the breastbone and felt the windpipe and heart and gizzard and intestines and pulled them out in one handful. I severed her feet and head and removed the yellow gland at her tail. I sliced open the gizzard and pulled out the sack of grain she had eaten that morning, the grain still whole. I spread it back out onto the field for the other turkeys to eat.
That day, I used every edible part of the animal and treated it with integrity from the field to the plate. The experience awakened a dormant, primal part of me, and more so, it made the kind of sense to me that I could feel deep in my marrow. As I went on to work in other four-star restaurants in New York and in France, I still wanted to know more, and soon found myself going one step farther down this path, away from the grocery aisle and into the wild.
The Girl Hunter.
In Roman mythology, the master of the hunt was the G.o.ddess Diana. She was praised for her strength, athletic grace, beauty, and hunting skills. In Freemasonry, she was a symbol of sensibility and imagination, of poets and artists. Shrines were erected in her honor; stags followed her wherever she went; she ruled the forest and the moon.
I like to think that Diana"s influence has never entirely waned, that hunting was never just about men getting together in the woods. Hunting is an extension of our being both humans and animals-our first work and craft, one of our original instincts.
We are what we are-omnivores. We were meant to partic.i.p.ate in nature rather than keep it at arm"s length. I see evidence everywhere that we have become so self-conscious in nature that we now designate areas where those "wild" traits are allowed to be expressed, to the point that the wilderness has become the last great zoo. And it turns our natural human instincts into an abstract condition, rather than a natural human state. Humans have less potential in these contrived landscapes than they do in places, cultures, and behaviors closer to our evolutionary beginnings. Modern life conceals our need for diverse, wild, natural communities, but it does not alter that need.
Often in response to this people tell me, "I don"t think I could do it." The good news is that you don"t have to. But if you want to feel what it is like to be human again, you should hunt, even if just once. Because that understanding, I believe, will propel a shift in how we view and interact with this world that we eat in. And the kind of food we demand, as omnivores, will never be the same.
Now that I have revealed the cornerstone of my food philosophy, I am going take you on a wild and often b.u.mpy ride from field to stream to table.
In a single year, I set out to discover if it is truly possible today to live off the best your hands can produce. Is it possible to eat only the meat that you kill? And is that kind of kill more humane than the rest of it? This is my road trip, my ride on the back of an ATV chasing wild hogs along the banks of the Mississippi; my dove hunt with beer and barbecue; my visit to the birthplace of the Delta Blues, a cigar and Scotch at dusk, smoked hog and mola.s.ses, all in the name of knowing and understanding what it means to be an omnivore in this modern world that we live in.
The people that you meet along the way-the men, and the occasional woman-were generous with their invitations and all of them were my teachers. Their names have been changed to protect their privacy and respect their generosity. You"ll see the good, the bad, and the ugly on this journey, including my ill-advised fearlessness, and hopefully will learn as I learned. Most important, you"ll see the transformation of a stiletto heelswearing girl who, yes, lived close to the land while growing up, but had never truly lived close to the land. You"ll see it"s possible for absolutely anyone, no matter how strapped to city life, to change, to become more one both with nature and with being human.1 The pleasures of eating are trumpeted loudly in today"s society and that is a wonderful thing. But the pleasures of knowing what occurred on the journey from the field to the table are just as important, because the food tastes so much better that way....
I do not hunt for the joy of killing but for the joy of living, and the inexpressible pleasure of mingling my life however briefly, with that of a wild creature that I respect, admire and value.
-JOHN MADSON.
1.
The Beginning and the End.
They say you always remember your first time. For me it was that turkey hunt four years ago, early on a Sat.u.r.day morning deep in the Arkansas Delta, in a place they call the Village. It was after a spring night spent drinking aged Scotch and smoking cigars on a wide veranda with some of the most gregarious and unpretentious Southerners I had ever encountered. They were well-heeled country folk who liked to live large and take no prisoners when it came to what they stood for and the life they prized. Good food was a huge part of that life, and on that particular evening before the hunt, there were rows of silver-haired men smoking cigars, mud caked to their leather boots, before a granite table bearing endless stacks of cheese and freshly baked bread, and a mound of salad that could feed a regiment. Meats-cacciatorini, salami, ham, pork belly, catfish, and other de-lectables, too-were piled high on platters, and, of course, we had collard greens with white macaroni, and chips and dips. And there was plenty to wash it all down: red wine, beers in large tubs with ice spilling out over the edges, and then the whiskey before the meal and after, too, when everyone moved gradually into the smoking room by the fireplace and the guitars emerged, and the loose, hard notes of the blues drifted beautifully overhead in a haze of Cuban cigar smoke, a sort of baccha.n.a.l to welcome in the warmth of spring and summer and, more important, the start of turkey season.
After I missed my first turkey in the Delta, I spent many afternoons in a shooting range at home among fathers and sons, blasting clay pigeons, while an elderly man named Walter gently adjusted my stance and raised my elbows just slightly and taught me what it meant to get my head down on the gun. Now in retirement, Walter released clay pigeons at the trap range as his pastime, and we had a Friday afternoon date of sorts. It was among these kindly men and their adolescent sons that I learned to "pattern" a shotgun, to make sure the spread of the pellets was even on a target, and that not all ammunition was called bullets. It was with Walter and my other unlikely tutors that I learned shotgun ammunition was called sh.e.l.ls; and rifle ammunition was called cartridges; and a 20-gauge shotgun was lighter than a 12-gauge, and they continued to become lighter as the numbers went up. It was also where I learned to sight in a rifle to make sure the scope was accurately mounted, and that I could spend years studying all of this and still not know it all. So I just figured out what I needed to know, and after trying out all the guns like Goldilocks, decided that a 270-caliber rifle and a 20-gauge shotgun were just right.
Now still, so many seasons later, so many hunts later, the arrival of the wild turkey in spring marks the beginning of certain things for me, and also the end. The earth has begun to warm; I can smell it just as much as I can feel it. It is the last hurrah of the hunting season, when the earth erupts in color and rain. The light starts to come up along the edge of the trees to the east earlier than it has for months, and I can hear the sounds of nature slowly rolling out of bed-rustling, squeaking, groaning, stretching.
There is so much waiting in a hunter"s life, so much silence and s.p.a.ce between the lines, and in that s.p.a.ce a whole world exists. It is rare to know how much time pa.s.ses by while you are in this world, but wild turkeys mark the end of your time there, because they are the last big hunt before the season ends and the long summer months begin.
Now, as I drive along the Sonoma California coast toward a mid-morning turkey hunt, that is what I think about, that this is the end for a while. It is the last chance to hear the owls agitate the turkeys at daylight-and to hear the turkeys gobble back as the house wakes up.
My hunting partner is a man named Sean who was born and raised on the Sonoma coast. His girlfriend, an enthusiastic follower of my blog, has volunteered him to me and so he waits for me warily in Bodega Bay, leaning against the end of his pickup, watching the salmon boats come in. He is tall and lean and in his early thirties. He is dressed in beige canvas workpants, heavy boots, and a faded T-shirt that suggest he wears these every day, as if they have become part of his very form, an extension of his lifestyle. Sean is an expert underwater hunter-he often dives for his food, fetching abalone and salmon with a spear among the great white sharks of the Pacific. Through the years he became such an expert at underwater hunting that he began to lead expeditions in the Pacific and in Mexico. It was his ever-growing pa.s.sion for eating what his own hands could procure that eventually led him to hunt on dry land as well. Hunting was a process of discovery that became a natural extension of his lifestyle.
"It just felt so natural to me. It made sense," he says as we drive along the winding road in his truck. "I grew up fishing with my dad, but it wasn"t until I befriended some locals here who took me under their wing, that I started hunting game. And then it became the primary source of my meat eating. I don"t have a taste for store-bought meat anymore."
Befriending the local landowners was essential. Sean admits that the ranch families here are very different than he is, in many ways, in terms of their values and politics. But they discovered that they had something to offer each other-Sean could teach them about hunting in the sea, and they could teach him about hunting the lush Sonoma land. As he says this we turn into a dairy farm to meet one of these locals, Marcus Scruggs, whom Sean describes as a "man"s man."
Scruggs looks as if he could be a street fighter-sc.r.a.ppy, medium height, with a permanent scowl etched into the contours of his face. He gives me a keen once-over before he begins to talk, a look that I have gotten more times than I can count by now. "Are you ready to hunt some turkeys?" he asks with more than a hint of skepticism. "Yep," I reply. He walks away without responding.
The three of us squeeze into Scruggs"s two-seat pickup and drive to a local sheep dairy to seek out wild turkeys. "I"m a coyote hunter," Scruggs says as we drive. He stops several times to survey the rolling hills with his binoculars, to see if there are any coyotes lurking among the cattle. By day, and when he is not coyote hunting, Scruggs builds bridges. But there"s something about coyotes that really get him talking.
As we turn into the sheep dairy, a large tom, a male wild turkey, fans his tail in the field next to the truck. "That"s a beauty. Look at that beard," Sean says, eyeing the cl.u.s.ter of wiry feathers that grow from a male turkey"s chest.
"Yeah, it is," Scruggs says. "The domestic birds these days are like Orange County women. Their b.r.e.a.s.t.s are really big but at some point you have to ask yourself why."
I decide not to shoot the ol" tom. It doesn"t feel very sportsmanlike without some exertion on my part. Besides, I think he is too close to the road. So we drive further into the dairy land.