"Wow. There are so many deer," I say marveling at the herd on the planes.
"The deer problem has gotten really out of hand in states like Montana," he says. "Right up against these mountains is just overrun. You"re driving down the streets and they"re just hanging out. It just takes about two years for them to completely adapt in the habitat, and they have gone back and forth for the last decade on what to do about them."
Game numbers overall are greater now than they were one hundred years ago. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no game licensing or game seasons. There was market hunting-a way for people to make money by selling their game to restaurants, which depleted game animal populations to very low numbers. Regulation began in about 1920. It became illegal to serve hunted wild game in restaurants, which means that any game meat on a restaurant menu today has been bred and farmed just like the cow, the pig, and the chicken.
The fish and game departments now closely monitor the wild animal populations, determining when and how long the seasons should be, asking hunters to supply tooth and blood samples, and monitoring the changing dynamics of sprawl-where urban landscapes interface with outdoor environments.
"I want to go on record that it"s a myth that whitetail are better tasting than mule deer," Wilbur says, breaking the silence. "It"s not true."
Wilbur"s friend Kurt waits for us at a crossroads in the parking lot of a boarded-up saloon, looking elegant and tall in his suspenders and shoulder-length silver hair. His dog, a French Griffon Fauve de Bretagne named Red Elvis, is urinating on a post. We consolidate the contents of our cars into one and drive farther north toward Canada, to meet a farmer named Sammy Field who will loan certain people his farmland to hunt on, in exchange for his favorite bottle of whiskey.
As we drive the whiskey toward Sammy, the great brown mountains turn liquid in the delicate morning sun. Farther north they become b.u.t.tes, mountains with missing tops that the Native Americans once worshipped in their vision quests. Before the advent of steel-tipped arrows and lances, Indians on the high plains who hunted the bison for food and warmth enticed the herds to the edge of these b.u.t.tes and instigated a stampede to force them over the edge.
Over time, as we drive, the land grows more arid and orange, and the sky seems to sink lower and lower until the cloud-filled canyon blends with the snowcaps in the Rocky Mountain front. High above an eagle flexes his wings and pushes them toward his back like a diver, dropping for a rodent into the great blank plane. There are flashes of black stripes as we drive past the perfect rows of wheat stubble, studded with the occasional pyramid stack of tightly wrought rolls of glossy hay.
Old Sammy Field, wearing overalls, with protruding whiskers and disheveled hair, meets us on the corner of a dirt road in his red pickup, 100 yards from his double-wide trailer home. He has the land wealth for something far greater, but he spends most of the days with his cows anyway, and regardless, what"s the point? Sammy Field cares more about being anti-ostentatious.
The truth about bird hunting in Montana is that it requires knocking on doors like a Bible salesman, to see if the owners will let you shoot on their land. The public owns the game, but the landowner controls access to it, heightening a certain discord. There are government incentive programs here to encourage landowners to share their land, but too many hunters abuse it. Bad hunters turn farmers off, and so they don"t maintain the habitat that supports the birds. The modern farmer plays an important role in the fate of so many wild game birds-whether a pheasant will be exposed to predators or not is determined by whether the farmer maintains its habitat or plows down the tall cover gra.s.s. In turn, the hunter plays an important role in influencing the farmer. Although he is caught between a growing human population and a shrinking resource, the hunter"s behavior and treatment of the farmer and his land is really what determines his access to the hunting grounds. Wilbur makes these connections religiously and delicately ("I don"t overextend my welcome here"), calling on his art house charm. He is meticulous about bringing farmers food and drink from Berkeley"s Gourmet Ghetto. But Sammy Field prefers whiskey.
Kurt and I walk in parallel through a field of numbered cows. Number ninety-six is a handsome white bull with red eyelids. Wilbur runs ahead and scrambles down the fingers of the hills. He runs rapidly with his dog Clyde, who dashes forward quietly sniffing the ground intently. Kurt and I walk above on the plain for 3 miles, through the tall brush gra.s.s and over the gray sinews of a dried-up creek. The bleached ribs of a dead cow jut through the gra.s.s, its remaining bones scattered down the ridge.
In the distance, Wilbur still runs up and down the fingers of the hill, his hands waving maniacally for us to keep up. Kurt doesn"t seem to notice. Instead he adjusts his red suspenders and pushes back his long strands of silver-white hair, looking skeptically at the sky and the cloudy western front through the orange tint of his shooting gla.s.ses that change color depending on the light.
We walk on through the old barns in the field, where the Hungarian partridge likes to linger. We scare a jackrabbit that speeds through the gra.s.s in an undulating sprint.
"Everything is so still," I say looking at the shimmering vast land around us. "The sky feels so low."
"It"s a really off year," Kurt says, pausing to smell the air. "It just acts that way."
High rains and late frost in Montana killed the chicks in a cold snap. The rain then grew thick, tall gra.s.s that makes the remaining birds hard to see.
It is a challenge even in the best of years. The partridge is an immigrant from Europe, the most abundant game bird in Montana. The pheasant is an immigrant from China, and makes you work and hunt harder than you ever have before; it is, in a sense, the last wild bird. Many animals, from the mule deer to the squirrel, adapt to humans, but the pheasant still has a distinctly wild spirit-it cackles as it hears you and runs off on its springy legs.
The breeze rises sharply and reddens our faces now, then drops low again, and the sky turns phosph.o.r.escent as a flash of color paints the wind. We weave in and out of grazing red and black Angus cattle shimmering in the light, beige strands of dried gra.s.s dangling from their mouths. They pause to watch us midchew, as if we"ve just delivered bad news.
In the distance there is a double shot that blows the trees full of life.
"Oh, there he goes," Kurt says shaking his head and smiling. "I just can"t keep up with him, so I"ve stopped trying."
And soon an orange cap rises up from the valley, hands raised high, with a speckled brown and white Hungarian partridge in each. Wilbur has a yellow smile of expectation on his face, as he walks toward us, and we smile and nod in silence.
"I like how animated shotgun shooting is! It"s an exploration of the elements," he says, dropping the two Huns not into his game pocket, but into mine, the large pocket built into the back of my jacket and secured with a zipper.
We walk on to new pasture, stepping in puddles along the way. Kurt and I help each other over barbed fences held together by crooked old fence posts. Time pa.s.ses slowly in a way that tires. The weight of the two Huns against my back gets heavier over time and the winds get higher and drier until I can taste the saliva in my mouth. My body cells begin to tingle. The two dog-man teams run ahead of me, the men relying on the dogs" noses, and they look like the perfect companions. Hunting is in both species" genes.
Many hours pa.s.s, and the patchwork of farming properties begin to blend together. The sun now centers itself in the low ceiling of the sky, and the sweet-and-sour smell of cow manure ripens the air. Upland bird hunting in Montana is a game of knowing the bird-knowing that the Hungarian partridge prefers field stubble and weed seeds, that the pheasant likes tall cover in cattails and fescue, that certain grouse will eat exclusively sage. It is also when you begin to see possibility in things you never have before, such as the beauty of a fanned-out half-pecked cornhusk lying in a plain. Up on the corner where the field meets the gravel driveway, Sammy Field is breathing heavily, letting out small puffs of vapor as he kicks a pile of steaming cow dung. It is then that I realize that he is tired, too, and that upland bird hunting is also a bit like a game of chicken. n.o.body wants to give up first, admit that his back aches, his ankles itch, or that one of his socks is very wet.
Occasionally we break to pick burrs off the dogs and ourselves, and to eat a boiled egg and a piece of chocolate, and have a drink of water before we try another line of tall gra.s.s along the pasture. But eventually there are signs of relief; the sun is covered by c.u.mulus clouds now and I can feel the gentle prairie wind on my face, cooling the sweat on my neck.
We arrive at an improvised junkyard holding a rusted horse buggy, a few rubber tires, and the pale blue sh.e.l.l of a car. We come to a pool of water formed by a thin stream. The dogs stop inside the gra.s.s and point, then turn to stone and tremble. A brown hen pheasant flies up in the breeze and snaps to the right along a line of pines. Wilbur yells, "Hen!" to call us all off from shooting. If we only shoot roosters as the law usually requires, we do not harm the pheasant population; a single rooster can fertilize the eggs of twenty hens, in the same way a single rooster is all that is needed for a barnyard full of hens. In the field, sorting the hen from the rooster is a series of split-second decisions. Kurt seems to know almost intuitively what it is going to be and predicts it before it rises from the cover. In part, it is that hens prefer the tall, thick, wet gra.s.s, whereas roosters prefer the outer brush. But there is another difference, too.
There is a mystical quality in the rooster as he shoots into the air like a feathered arrow, in all his green and purple splendor. The long spike of his tail feathers taper for aerodynamic flight, and he banks to his side and paints the wind. I hesitate when I see the rooster, in awe of his faultless beauty. You must follow the bead of your shotgun just ahead of him with both eyes open until the bead is just ahead of his beak point, and that is when you slap the trigger.
Sometimes the rooster doesn"t fall. Sometimes he will keep flying because he is a rooster and he is mysterious. Sometimes he will leave only a single feather floating to the ground for you to ponder. That is why you hunt the rooster. You must earn him and be taunted by his cackle. You must walk sometimes for eight hours to earn him, and you must hurt a little, and sometimes you must hurt a lot.
The distinctly wild spirit of the rooster means you must spend time respecting him and feel the fear of not finding him, and also the fear of actually finding him, before he will relent and fall. And even after he falls, lest you become too proud, he will sometimes disappear to a place where even the dogs must search forever until they finally catch the scent and seek him out and drop him in your hands, smooth and handsome.
There is grouse, too, the one the Native Americans called fire birds. Grouse rely on forest fires to create highways for their habitats-a mosaic of gra.s.slands interspersed with shrubs and brush-filled coulees. They linger along drainage ditches, surrounded by grain fields, and subsist on native bunchgra.s.s. They snack on buds and berries, on rose hips and wild watercress. The males display their mottled feathers and white bellies and violet neck sacks in their mating dance, stamping their fully feathered three-p.r.o.nged feet rapidly twenty times per second, rattling their tail feathers, circling and dancing forward, inflating their sacks. The one that does it the best is chosen by the female to mate.
Having traversed the gra.s.s cover by midday, there is one last chance for us to take home a bird. It is in late afternoon, at four o"clock when the birds peck at pebbles in the gravel roads to improve their digestion. We drive in the truck along these roads and look for birds through the cracked windshield. The tall gra.s.ses beside the road are yellow and creamy in the wind and I can begin to feel all of the stiff and sore and strained parts of my body harden, one by one-I can count them.
"It"s an old Montana tradition to shoot a bird out of a car," Wilbur proclaims. "I"ve shot a lot of birds from out of the car window. You hold the steering wheel with your knees. Are you ready to do it?"
I don"t really hear him. Instead I open the window until the air in the truck smells like corn, and I bask in the yellow light on my face and watch the combines in the distance as wide as a highway, trolling along. "That is nice stubble," Kurt says of the hacked-off wheat. But there are no birds. The moon is rising and it is time to leave.
After we bid good-bye to Kurt and Red Elvis at the crossroads of the old saloon, Wilbur and I drive through vacant towns. I can see the shape of an old man in his reclining chair through a pair of gla.s.s doors. I see people giving a point salute to one another as they drive. I see wings beating in the trees. I see whitetails everywhere, jumping like s...o...b..a.l.l.s over hillcrests.
There are noses and antlers sticking up above the beds of pickup trucks, and men and their daughters in camo. In some places, the colors are still royal and true before they fade toward dusk and headlights flicker on. Where the Missouri River is dammed at Canyon Ferry Lake, the water reflects the light in its ripples. We turn right over the railroad tracks and up the steep dirt road and meet Wilbur"s neighbors, retired transplants from Minnesota, cleaning an elk in their driveway. They are warm and sweet and accept an invitation to come for dinner. They are bringing elk, caribou, and mule deer to go with our quarry. We creak up the hill, my muscles antic.i.p.ating the bubble bath and my stomach aching for the roasted bird, bathed in b.u.t.ter and brandy. As we come into the driveway Wilbur says, somewhere far off, "Be prepared for his cream sauce."
The cream sauce is wonderfully creamy, with mushrooms and elk underneath. And there is an intoxicating medley of apples and squash from the Minnesota neighbors" garden, pressed and stirred together in one dish. And there is wine, one gla.s.s, worth seven dollars, filled partway for when we want to stand, and one sixty-dollar gla.s.s filled partway for when we want to sit.
We stand and sip, and the Minnesota wife talks in her sweet Minnesota voice, and suddenly, just as I begin to drift into the warm reverie of the moment, I feel something strike my rear end. I turn my head, red-cheeked, knowing instinctually what has just transpired, but not wanting to believe it. Wilbur walks by briskly swinging his wet, grease-stained dish towel with a look of sheepish amus.e.m.e.nt. For a second I am reminded of the misogyny I found so tiresome while working for four-star chefs in New York and in France. And I recall the jacked-up Lehman Brothers traders, giving me a little tap when they were feeling particularly high on life or a little lonely after a long day at the office. Naively I a.s.sumed I had left this behind, that the home of an eccentric Berkeley art dealer who hunted for food was far from these other places. Before I began hunting, when it was merely an idea in my head while neatly tucked into my urban lifestyle, this was the kind of act I imagined happened among men who lived in the backwoods, who were self-proclaimed rednecks that held burping contests, the kind of men Wilbur proclaimed he, too, looked down on. Except that my experience in the backwoods had never fulfilled that stereotype. In fact, it had done everything to contradict it. I stand here thinking how fascinating it is to me, really, that he was the one to bring out the a.s.s-slap.
Wilbur, utterly unaware of his transgression, resumes his post at the table. I pause and put down the seven-dollar winegla.s.s, as the neighbor chirps in her singsong voice, then lean in to the table and pick up the sixty-dollar winegla.s.s and stand back against the counter. I look at Wilbur, raise my gla.s.s with a wink and take a nice big sip, and watch the wave of panic wash across his face.
Partridge with Pancetta in Orange Brandy Sauce
Serves 4 Maybe it was the Montana air, or the fact that I had walked for so many hours and so many miles to earn it, but sitting down to eat this was a revelation. The sweetness and the saltiness and the dripping fat and the most tender breast meat I had ever sunk my teeth into, all made the perfect combination. It will work with other bird meat, but I like to think there is something about the small tender white meat of the Hungarian partridge that made the experience. I recommend keeping the breastbone in whatever meat you use, whenever possible, to help the meat stay moist.
Marinade: Zest of 1 orange
1/2 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup brandy
1/4 teaspoon dried tarragon
1/4 teaspoon dried parsley
1/4 teaspoon dried rosemary
1/4 cup olive oil
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
4 partridge, b.u.t.terflied, bone in
To Cook: 4 round, thin slices pancetta
4 tablespoons cold b.u.t.ter, cubed
4 thin slices orange, cut from the center
For the Marinade: 1. With a whisk, combine all of the marinade ingredients in a baking dish. Place the meat breast side down in the mixture. Marinate for 3 to 4 hours, turning over every hour.
To Cook: 1. Preheat the oven to broil. Place one orange slice on each breast that is sitting in the marinade and then cover with pancetta. Fasten them with a toothpick on each side.
2. Add the cold b.u.t.ter to the baking dish with the marinade and place in the oven. Broil the birds breast side up, basting every 5 minutes, for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove the b.r.e.a.s.t.s and let them rest on a plate for 10 minutes. Put the baking dish back in the oven and let the sauce reduce for 5 minutes more. Serve immediately.
Also try: prairie chicken, pheasant, turkey, rabbit
Whole Pheasant Poached in Juniper Sauce
Serves 2 Poached pheasant should be on everyone"s bucket list. Luckily it is now available in grocery stores, if you aren"t able to harvest one with your own two hands. It is sweeter, softer, and more tender than chicken. It is a bird born to be poached. It would be a good idea to have some fresh ravioli or tortellini on hand to serve as a bed for this pheasant and its broth.
1 whole pheasant, skin on or off
6 pieces bacon or pork fat, cut into 1/4-inch-thick strips