9.
All of the Jewels That Go Unnoticed in the World The next morning, Peter and I ride through Cajun country on the same highways anch.o.r.ed in the Cypress Swamps, and into southeast Arkansas, back to the Village, where his old Lebanese Aunt Evvy is sure to be making kibbe or stretching Arabic bread and laying it on a griddle to bubble and crisp; and it is the place where his Lebanese uncle Roger Mancini is sure to be saying something wise or profound while whittling something in front of the fire at the deer camp.
The road to southeast Arkansas is full of curious names. As we drive the contours of Cajun country and enter into deep Delta country, we pa.s.s places called Darlove, Hollandale, Tallulah, Silver City, and Midnight. There is Pigalicious Barbecue, which only serves hamburgers; and Belzoni-a town in Mississippi with a museum devoted to catfish. On narrow roads with narrow houses, men rake leaves into mountains and hawks balance on telephone lines. Old and slow Crown Victorias squat in the right lane, and we pa.s.s a painted bus celebrating the anniversary of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.
As we cross the Yazoo River, the fields of brilliant green winter wheat begin, and for hundreds of acres there is only pitch-black alluvial soil with royal green cover, and the deep shadowy trenches of irrigation.
The road through Arcola has a number. It might be seventeen, I don"t know. But on that road, the first Roger Mancini Co. sign appears, the only sign of thriving commerce for 100 miles. There is the same Weico chain broiler for sale, on the same homemade sign I saw two years ago; and a hedged-off Dow AgroScience testing facility, with warning signs not to touch anything.
And at the very end of it all, after a long ride on the levee of the Mississippi River, through a metal gate, past hundreds of cottonwood trees, we arrive at a large campfire, where Roger Mancini is roasting peanuts from his pocket on the end of a shovel.
He drops them in my palm, the sh.e.l.ls scorched. I pop them open and they taste like hot, salty peanut b.u.t.ter.
"What"s on these that tastes so good?" I ask.
"It"s the paint off the shovel," he replies.
He sticks tongs into the fire, brings out a burning ember, and lights his cigar with it.
"Cuz . . . this is a delicious cigar," he says to the Commish, who is sitting and puffing to his left. "Get me two boxes of these." Then to me, winking, "He"s my cigar broker."
Peter and I begin to roast venison sausage on the fire as a prelude to dinner, and Roger breads deer cutlets, sliced from the backstrap of a deer hanging in his vast walk-in cooler. "If you cook it out of the cooler rather than the freezer, it tastes better," he says, heating an inch of oil in a cast-iron skillet over the fire.
"How is business?" Peter asks. Roger looks to the sky, gives a thumbs-up, and smiles.
Roger Mancini has found opportunity all his life. He once bought the inventory of a p.a.w.nshop, then went into the jewelry business, then opened a series of stores that appeal to the Southern Woman. He is an artisan and an explorer with an eye for interesting things, which he gathers wherever he goes throughout the world.
He has a workshop where he builds furniture made from the siding of abandoned homes-those antebellum homes that have been left behind, romantic and melancholy; homes that cost pennies to buy and millions to fix. Roger gives them a new life. He makes their old wood clapboard into beautiful handmade furniture, and builds new walls with them, too.
And in his workshop he collects other things, like many hundreds of old bee homes that he turns into shelves; and church windows and pews, antique bicycles, and ballpark benches, deer antlers, and lots of nice wood. All of the jewels that go unnoticed in the world, Roger notices.
The deer cutlets fry in the skillet, the hot oil bubbling in the smoky light. And we eat it with a good wine and Roger"s homemade bread and an elegant salad bejeweled with pecans.
It is the peak of the deer rut, the first two weeks of December, when you expect to see deer in daylight. In the words of the Commish, "They have one thing on their mind: acting stupid."
It is a moonless night in Arkansas. The nature preserve is silent except for the inside of the deer camp, which is lit with a deer-antler chandelier and golden lamps, and filled with Roger Mancini"s words of wisdom.
"Hunting is at its zenith," he says from his end of the dinner table, still wearing his hunting hat with the ear flaps tied up. "It"s never been like this before. The highlight of my weekend was two blue jays standing around my stand." The heads lining the table nod to the sound of crunching lettuce and the tapping of forks against paper plates.
Roger continues, "The best woodsmen are those who view nature as a sanctuary where they are a guest. They don"t try to control it; they try to blend in and they view it as a privilege to be there. That is the posture that they take." He turns to me. "That"s the kind of outdoorsman I want to be."
Roger wasn"t born owning a gun, the way the Commish was. His father didn"t hunt.
"How did you know what to do?" I ask.
"I didn"t. I just went," he says.
"How did you pay for it?"
"I mowed yards. I bought my first gun on time. A man sold me that gun for five dollars a month on no interest. It was eighty-five dollars and I paid it out. It was a twelve-gauge Remington and I still have it."
The next afternoon, Roger and I drive together on his golf cart toward the deer stand. There is a cooler of Diet c.o.kes and beers, in his pocket are peanuts, and candy, too; and in a small white bucket he carries an dog-eared copy of Faulkner"s Big Woods. He began leasing these 3,000 acres in 1989, then bought them in 1995. In the years that he has owned the land, he has only killed three trophy bucks. This isn"t because he hasn"t had the opportunity; it is because he is selective and patient. There isn"t the same thrill in it for him at his age, as there would be for someone starting out, so he saves it for those who will get the most out of it.
There also are rules that govern which bucks a hunter can shoot, depending on its age and the number of points on its antlers. The rules at Roger"s camp are even stricter than Arkansas"s rules. He manages the genetics of his deer population like an artisan, patiently whittling it into the best possible form. In the golf cart he begins to tutor me on the ways of his deer camp.
"If you"re gonna shoot a cull buck [one considered to have inferior genetics], then you"re gonna shoot him with my big gun. And you have to make sure your eye is away from the scope. "Cause that hurts like h.e.l.l. Kinda firm against your shoulder. And still you gotta squeeze it. It"s gonna kick the s.h.i.t out of you, but you won"t even notice when you"re shooting at a deer."
"If you"re gonna shoot a doe, then you"re gonna use the small gun. If you feel confident with the small gun on the doe, I"d shoot "em in the head. It"s instant death with them and I like that. If you feel confident, you do that. Try to pick out a hair on the deer. And then squeeze that trigger where you don"t ever know when it"s going to go off. It"s just a gradual pull."
We stop to peer at a doe and fawn through binoculars.
"Can you see "em?" he asks, inspecting the inventory with a faint pride. "I"m gonna have to scare "em away."
We drive along for a time, with only the electric sound of the golf cart in our ears and the cold breeze off the Mississippi in our faces.
"We"re gonna try to ease up in there," he finally says. "I have the door propped open. Sometimes it"s possible to sneak up in that stand without them seeing you."
Then we are silent again, save for the sipping of Diet c.o.kes and the b.u.mps on the road and the whistle of the wind through the cottonwood trees destined for the paper mill.
"I keep a stick inside of my stand," he says again. "And I use it as a shooting guide. And what I"ll do is, when I"m getting ready to shoot, I"ll aim it where I think I"m shooting at and then I"ll put it under my arm and put the gun up here and it"ll give me an anchor back here and I"m able to hold it perfectly still. If you wanna kind of try it on when you first get in the stand, you can, and see if you like it that way."
I follow his footsteps to the deer stand, the one he calls the Chad stand, placing my foot on the forest floor where he has, and feel it crackle under my feet. We climb the ladder up to the stand and open the door, which is watermarked from the Mississippi floods.
We settle into two metal folding chairs, and position our guns and feel the wind with our fingers to know which direction is downwind, for if we know which way the wind is blowing, we know where the deer are most likely to appear-upwind from human scent. Then, once settled, he leans back with a book of crossword puzzles, and there is silence, and soon, the sound of sleep.
I watch the ladybugs march in single file along the windowsill of the stand, and past them I can see the string of cobwebs that link the great woods and twinkle in the late afternoon light. In the silence is the machine-gun chirping of a bird and then a distinctive sound. Is it rain or just dried leaves cackling in the wind?
A barge floats along the Mississippi and I spy on the captain through the binoculars. And I can hear the barking of bucks in the distance and the clash of their antlers as they fight.
Bucks travel in bachelor groups of the same age, except during the rut, when they disperse and fight wherever they cross paths. They begin this at two years of age. Before that, they are yearling spikes and aren"t very smart. They have been cast out of the family by the head doe. It"s always a doe that is in charge of the family; if she gives birth to a doe, it becomes a dominant member of the clan; if she has a buck, then she runs him out of her domain. It is nature"s way of preventing inbreeding.
During the rut, the bucks spread their scent. They have scent glands on either side of their nose near the eye, which they rub against trees. With their hoofs, they sc.r.a.pe a patch of ground and urinate in it, then a.s.sume a certain posture and urinate on their legs, too. Does are receptive to different scents; it is like an ID system; or in the words of the Commish, "It"s like their business card."
The cold moist air rises through my nostrils as I sit and hear the bucks clash in the distance and watch the ladybugs march along and the squirrels and the blue jays flutter through their ch.o.r.es.
Roger wakes and gives me peanuts from his pocket. "There"s a spike, can you see him?" he asks. That is the mark of a seasoned hunter, someone who can see animal life in an instant where everyone else just sees trees. We peer through the binoculars and watch the yearling wandering through the woods without a sense of caution. Soon a two-year-old buck with a chipped horn emerges from the fight in the distance. He nibbles his way through the woods, too, with only slightly more caution.
"If a doe comes out, they are a lot more careful than a buck or a hog," Roger says in a whisper. "They do a lot more watching than they do eating. Don"t make any moves until she"s got her head down. If there"s a group of them, they all gotta have their head down. Don"t do anything; I mean, don"t even blink your eye. Especially if they"re in this lane because the sun is shining, it"s like having a spotlight on you."
We can"t shoot this two-year-old buck or the yearling. In Arkansas, aside from a few exceptions, the general rule is that a buck must have three or more points that are at least one inch long on one side of his rack, or both antlers must be shorter than two inches (a b.u.t.ton buck) to be legal to harvest. There is no age requirement for a doe. Identifying which buck is legal to harvest can sometimes be difficult and requires experience.
"How can you tell how old it is?" I whisper.
"Just imagine a thirty-year-old guy you know is akin to a three-year-old buck," Roger whispers. "But think how he looked when he graduated high school. He could very easily wear the same clothes, the same jeans, but he"d be filled out more in the shoulder and chest now. He"s starting to begin his maturity as a man. A four-year-old would be like when he"s forty."
Roger"s camp is DMAP (Deer Management a.s.sistance Program)designated, which means he works with a wildlife biologist to manage the health and genetics of the deer population and the habitat. It requires him to collect data from the deer that are harvested, from their weight to their antler size, as well as extract a jawbone from each deer. After each hunt, all hunters fill out an observation form, listing how many deer and other types of wildlife they saw during the hunt. Based on the deer population, a biologist and Roger decide on what const.i.tutes a cull buck-that is, one that has poor genetics based on its age relative to its antler size. At Roger"s camp, a cull buck must be four and a half years old to receive that designation. A noncull buck must have at least four points on one antler to be harvested.
If the deer aren"t hunted, their life span is about ten years, under ideal conditions; a doe will live slightly longer than a buck. But in these parts, five years is a lot, due to insect pressure, parasites, and fighting. And in some parts of the country there is severe overpopulation, which causes disease and starvation. That is when the deer become suburban road kill.
Roger snaps open a can of PBR beer and sucks in a sip. "None taste like that very first one," he whispers, gulping. We sh.e.l.l more peanuts and watch a racc.o.o.n waddle over in the path and feed on a pile of corn that has been left for the deer. We wait and watch the two young bucks wander off, and in time the "c.o.o.n waddles off, too, a little bit slower. "That c.o.o.n ate so much he can"t hardly walk," Roger says, looking up from his crossword puzzles.
We wait as the sun descends and begins to bleed through the trees. Roger begins to sharpen his knife. The sound of the blade sc.r.a.pes against the diamond steel, sharp, abrupt, it sc.r.a.pes, sc.r.a.pes. It goes in double time and sometimes in short sc.r.a.pes but it keeps going like a tin engine.
Roger tells me the deer are bigger now than they have ever been, and that today there is something different in the barometric pressure. He tells me a buck will shed its antlers within three days of the same day every year, and that a lot of mystery goes on out there that we don"t understand, and that they act differently every day. And he says modern hunting technology has taken over and removed some of the mystery, and it won"t be long before we can Google up a deer.
Then he tells me that sometimes when you don"t see any deer, it is because there are hogs in the area. And as if to prove his point, a large female feral hog, with five smaller hogs, enters into the path and begins to feed. Hogs are Roger"s nemeses and the enemy of all who tend the land. They are destructive for crops and farmland, so much so that people are paid to hunt them around the country. The hogs are always pregnant or breeding and their population can double in six months. The term boar actually refers to the adult male of several mammal species, including the beaver, the racc.o.o.n, the guinea pig, or the domestic pig. But for wild boar, it applies to the whole species, including adult females (sows) and piglets. In America, in addition to wild hogs and razorbacks, we have Eurasian boars, a species not indigenous to the United States, introduced in 1539 as a food source by the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. Today, what you see running through the hills in so many rural and semirural sections of the country is often a mix of domestic pig and Eurasian boar. Farmers discovered long ago that, rather than fence in a domestic pig and feed it, they could let the animal range freely to fatten itself on acorns, gra.s.ses, roots, grubs, eggs, rodents, and fruit-and rendezvous with one another in the woods. When the farmer wanted his pig for food, he would head out with a rifle and bring home the bacon.
Along with coyotes, the wild boar is about the smartest wild animal there is, able to smell and hear from remarkable distances and stay alive and thrive under almost any circ.u.mstance they face. More so than any other wild animal, they learn quickly. Hogs easily learn to root under and break down fencing. They quickly become "snare smart" and learn to avoid traps of all kinds. They are among the most destructive animals because when they dig up the ground for roots, they kill native plants, particularly near water sources, and this often causes serious soil erosion. They destroy valuable crops and devour the eggs and young of small native animals and endangered species, while consuming much of the food source of those native populations. They are genetically programmed to be aggressive toward wolves, a natural predator, which means they are equally aggressive toward domestic dogs. Their population is so large in the United States today that their activities are no longer limited to rural areas. They are now arriving in people"s backyards and living rooms from Fort Worth to Cleveland to Abbeville, Georgia, because nature can"t support them in such large numbers. Even when unprovoked, they are always fast and aggressive, and sometimes fatal.
And so I am faced with six hogs in my path, instead of deer. This is what happens sometimes. You go out with one meal in mind, and come home with something else all together. It adds to the magic and mystery of it all.
I peer through the scope of the small gun and rest my elbow on the anchor stick. I squint and place the crosshairs of the scope at the base of the big hog"s head. The golden foggy light spreads horizontally through the trees and floods into the scope, so that all I can see is a silhouette.
"Be patient now, be patient," Roger says, his voice a touch unsteady. He is clearly unsure about how this is going to unfold. He has never seen me hold a gun before and my appearance doesn"t instill the same confidence as his typical deer-stand companion.
I don"t say much as I lean forward and look at the big hog. I lose her silhouette in the scope as the sun shifts again to shoot into my eyes. I pull away from the pain and readjust. I tightly squeeze my left eye shut and try with my right eye only, holding my breath to minimize the shaking. Through the golden mist I find her again and place the crosshairs again at the base of her head. I pull the rifle toward me and add pressure to the trigger, clenching the gun into the pocket of my shoulder. With my right eye peering through the scope and barely steady, I pull the trigger and watch her fall in her place.
The other pigs run squealing into the woods.
"You are bad!" Roger says, howling in surprise and delight. "That is the biggest hog I have ever seen here."
"Then that one will be for bacon," I whisper, smiling.
We sit in silence as the big hog lies in the golden streaks of sun and the breeze of the Mississippi gets colder and stronger.
"I"d be surprised if the other ones don"t come back," Roger says. "They ain"t got nothing better to do."
To my surprise, they do. They all return and eat in the same place as before, working around the big dead hog. I place the crosshairs of the scope on the head of the next biggest pig, small and black, and see only its silhouette again. As the sun drops lower, the haze shoots even more sharply through my scope and into my eyes. I fix the crosshairs on the still silhouette and then lose it again. The image begins to shake as I squint; perhaps it is the haze, or my hand, or my breathing. When I find the silhouette again, I hold my breath and squeeze and watch it drop.
"Two," I say. Roger begins to howl with pride. The remaining four hogs run off squealing. "Isn"t that a sweet little gun?" he asks.
"Beautiful," I say, envisioning sausage. There is a silencer on the gun that makes me sound like a sniper. It adds an air of mystique.
The hogs all come back again. And again after that. And they eat around those that lie in their way.
"Three," I say hitting a third hog. Roger smiles.
And then a fourth. Roger chuckles in surprise.
"Five." Roger just shakes his head and grins. But the fifth one gets up after it falls and runs a few yards to the left, out of sight.
We wait. Roger peers through his binoculars. "I don"t think it went far, unless the coyotes got him," Roger says.
The worst moment in hunting is an imperfect shot. It is hard to prepare for the moment you are responsible for suffering. Rather, it is hard to prepare for the moment you know you are responsible for suffering. It is all in the knowing.
Grabbing a couple of chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s from the meat aisle of the grocery store so I could put together a quick stir-fry after twelve hours in a cubicle, I wasn"t forced to internalize the suffering the animal had gone through in a factory farm, which I was now endorsing with my wallet. There weren"t pictures of the bird whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s were bred to be so big that it couldn"t walk but only drag its chest, along with the thousands of others sitting in a dark, confined s.p.a.ce.
Similarly, there were no images of a cow with bloodshot eyes on my Styrofoam-packaged filet mignon, to help with the knowing. There wasn"t the big, bold warning sign that they put on cigarette packages. Sure, I had options of all-natural, whatever that means, and organic, which means something more in theory. But it never meant the animals roamed freely through the wild, exercised their muscles as much as they pleased, ate whatever they pleased, and had the natural life that nature intended. I like to think that the animals I eat now never suffer, because I watch them die. It sounds callous but I have come to believe it is actually more humane this way. Except the rare moments like this: They"re hard when it isn"t an instant death. When my shot is imperfect. But even here, I am paying the full karmic price of the meal. I will know while I eat. I will know how it all went down. And I still think that is better. Because it makes me a more conscious chef, a more careful hunter, and a more awake human being.
We wait for a short while, but the sixth hog doesn"t return and I have to find the fifth one that I shot imperfectly. The air is rapidly becoming gray and murky as we climb down from the deer stand. I search the woods while Roger guts the rest one at a time like an expert surgeon, using their blood to clean the meat as he goes. He finishes all four in under fifteen minutes, then uses a pulley and a tree and a push of his golf cart"s gas pedal to string them up on the back of the cart while I continue to look for my last hog or a trail of blood. Then I hear the hysterics of a pack of coyotes, screaming like banshees only yards away. They have found my last hog first. As the cycle of life goes, they will kill one less animal tonight.
We leave the entrails of the hogs on the forest floor for the coyotes as well, and drive away into the muddy night, the four hogs hanging behind us on the golf cart. We speed along the dirt road of the preserve, and the cottonwood trees become a fine lace against the purple sky.
When we return to camp, Peter is skinning another hog and the Commish is smoking, and the electric hook goes up, creaking as it goes, a pig attached, and one by one we skin them all with knives, starting at the hooves and peeling down toward the head like removing a latex glove. We power wash the stomach cavities and the spray hose splatters and drips pink, and soon we roll the hogs into the cooler to lower the temperature of the meat before I begin to butcher them for sausage, and roasted whole hog, and braised belly. The largest hog is so big that her hind legs hang down and settle on the concrete floor. I cut out the thick slabs of belly, its thick layers of fat unusual for a wild hog, and ma.s.sage it with pink salt and sugar and herbs. The ma.s.sive hams I debone and place in the freezer so they will be easier to grind into sausage. The backstrap is so thick and long that we stop to admire it, pastel pink and thick enough for elegant round medallions.
In the evening, Roger and I talk about cla.s.sic literature on the way to Walmart, the only place within 50 miles to get dinner ingredients. "Read The Brothers Karamazov, then read East of Eden," Roger tells me. "See if you don"t see any similarities. Steinbeck was heavily influenced by Dostoyevsky."
Inside Walmart, the woman cleaning the floors is giving a church sermon, while we select from a pile of Pink Lady apples for our whole roasted pig. "A"right, I wanna bare my soul to you for a second," Roger continues, inspecting the apples. "Astronomy. The speed of light is one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. A light year is how far you can go at that speed in a year. Now, how many seconds are there in a year, I don"t know, but you multiply that times one hundred and eighty-six thousand and that"s one light year. Okay. The edge of our galaxy is two point two million light years. So if you consider something that vast, isn"t it a bit silly to take things too seriously in life?"
I smile and nod, turning a Pink Lady in my hand and dropping it in the bag.
"I"m baring my soul to you now! That"s what I think about."
We drive back to camp in the moonless night, where the fire is high, the hog is roasting, and venison is braising. At the dinner table again are the sound of lips smacking and the high flavor of roasting meats dripping their juice from a well-used cutting board. The cousin they call "the Dream" dines with us now, wearing an orange bobble hat knitted by their Aunt Evvy. He has been hunting for a week at Island 86, the hunting club started by his father, many years ago.
"I"m hunting ghosts now," he says. "It"s just as fun to hunt them as it is to hunt the real thing." And here, one hundred years later, Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Ga.s.set"s words seem never more fitting. This is where we fit into the universe, as a very small part of a vast 2.2 million light year galaxy: soaking up the juices of roasted meats, at a long table of friends, under the warm light of an antler chandelier, on a moonless December night, somewhere deep inside the Mississippi Delta. That part of being human will always be inside of us.
Braised Venison Shoulder
Serves 4 The venison shoulder also lends itself well to braising. It is high in muscle tissue and will benefit from slow cooking at a low temperature in a bit of liquid and aromatics. Over time, the cooking breaks down the muscle tissue further than if you were to simply age it; and as the collagen melts, it gives it a b.u.t.tery texture. Before cooking any venison dish, however, it is best to age the meat, which will drastically improve the flavor and texture. See the aging chart on page 242.
Marinade: 4 tablespoons olive oil
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1 onion, chopped