Girl Hunter Part 13

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

2 medium-size onions, roughly chopped

4 carrots, peeled and chopped

2 medium-size turnips, peeled and chopped

3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

2/3 cup dried apricots

2/3 cup prunes, pitted

3 to 4 cups antlered game stock (page 213)

1. Heat a large, heavy-bottomed pot with oil. In a bowl, toss the elk cubes in the flour. Shake the cubes well and place them in the pot in batches, being sure not to crowd them. Brown them on all sides and transfer to a plate or rack.

2. Put all of the browned meat back in the pan and sprinkle it with the salt, cinnamon, ginger, and pepper. Then add the vegetables, garlic, and dried fruit. Pour in enough stock for the meat to be three-quarters covered, and bring it to a boil. Lower the heat so the bubbles percolate. Cover and simmer gently for 2 hours, until tender.

Also try: other antlered game, bison Eat the meat and leave the skin.

Turn up your plate and let's begin.

-COWBOY'S GRACE

6.

The Upland High Life By now I am questioning any more of these "blind hunting dates." The next stop on my itinerary is a luxurious ranch in Texas Hill Country, at least according to its publicist who invited me, where I'll be hunting but also be followed around by a photographer and a reporter and a magazine and a camera crew. I feel a bit jaded and not entirely convinced that I won't end up in this woman's pool house in downtown San Antonio, flipping venison burgers for the camera. I call her from Billings Airport and tell her that I'm not so sure. And before I know it, I start to ramble on about cows and bears and elk poaching and a parking lot in McDonald's and how I'm not going to be tricked anymore because I'm Calamity Jane! Something along those lines, anyway. She listens and expresses her horror and sympathy in that Southern female way that I find so comforting. She promises me that this is a beautiful private house for me to stay in, at a real hunting ranch, and I can just rest.

"Okay," I say. "But I'm not getting on any horses."

This Hill Country is a foreign land to me, 1,400 feet high, lush and green, bugless save for the crickets and the dragonflies, and cooler than its slightly southern neighbor San Antonio. It could be a small town in Martha Stewart's Connecticut, with perfectly coiffed horse fences, or in the hills of Marin County California, where the air is slightly damp and smells of burning wood and the roads are dirt. But this Hill Country is in Texas, between a town called Welfare and another called Comfort.

Along Joshua Creek lies a ranch where blazing red cypress trees line up like soldiers along the creek, turning the water crimson. Amber waves of tall gra.s.s blur in a band of perpetual motion, and pheasant and grouse dart in and out of the brush. To the north, the quail flit faster than the dragonflies, and to the south, sounds of prized dogs fill the air, yelping at the feeding hour, lapping up their meal after a day spent flus.h.i.+ng birds from the fields.

I am here for a "media event" at the ranch-one of a handful selected in the United States for induction into the Beretta Trident program, a kind of Michelin Guide for hunters that rates professional hunting ranches around the world and bestows upon them one to three tridents. A trident rating is an indicator of the experience a hunter might have if she chooses to visit this place.

c.o.c.ktail hour is at six forty-five in the owners' residence, where I am greeted by a real African lion frozen in time in a perfectly menacing pose. On the veranda, a stone fireplace burns and mimics the melting sunset and warms the flagstones beneath our feet. The chef appears with a dimpled silver platter of axis venison carpaccio, purple and sweet and bejeweled with vegetable confetti. Across from me, a reporter poised with his notebook sits in a chair made of branches, a tad bewildered and out of his element. A photographer sits languidly on a stone bench, his back to the fire, sipping a merlot. The big Texas husband somehow realizes that I prefer something stronger, fixes a whiskey, and hands it to me diluted with soda and tinkling with ice . . . and after just a few sips offers me more.

Past the veranda, the sky turns into a purple bruise. The Texas wife sits calmly with a pleased smile, her hair velvet black and s.h.i.+ny, sparkling jewelry reflected on her body and blending with the new evening stars.

This is a place where money and tradition collide-where descendents of the five-hundred-year-old maestro da canne (master gunsmith) Bartolomeo Beretta dynasty in Brescia, Italy, mingle with newer dynasties from the American Southwest.

There are many components to this place. In part, it is a library that holds cla.s.sic books and photographs from a hunting honeymoon in Africa, and sterling magnifying gla.s.ses carefully laid on a leather-bound desk with its rich mahogany legs nestled into a finely embroidered rug. The Texas padrone lifts his hand to one of the shelves, and with one motion pulls its panel back to reveal another door leading to a chamber. He types a code onto the handle of the door, opens it, enters into a room the size of a small Manhattan apartment, and gestures for me to follow him.

The interior walls of this secret chamber are lined with vintage shotguns, old McKay Browns with Turkish walnut stocks, Parkers, delicate and rare quail guns, and a 16-gauge Broses. The guns bear utopian hunting scenes brought to life by countless hours of fine metal work carved in Brescia, so fine that the ducks seem to spring from the steel, dogs chasing birds threaten to run off the locks, and even leaves of the trees are shaded and stir in the wind.

When we return to the surface from the secret chamber, we sit for dinner in a well-paneled room, another grand fireplace warming our backs and a Texas-size chandelier reflecting the candlelight. We eat pork roast, cranberries, spicy b.u.t.ternut squash, and a chocolate souffle with a sugar crust on top. The big Texas husband tells the story of hunting a "real p.i.s.sed-off leopard" in Africa, which hunted him the whole time he hunted it, and how the African bushmen spoke in their language of clicks as they chased the leopard through the gra.s.s. He tells his stories in the presence of a gallery of bobcats and leopards watching us from the living room, their muscles poised taut for eternity.

"When I'm sitting with men around a fire," says the big Texas husband, "we often ask ourselves, what is it about this that we like so much? And the truth is that we're going back. Even though we eat the nice food and wear the nice clothing now, it was only two or three generations ago that this is how we provided food for our families. Now we just have places like HEB Grocery. But with hunting there is still the camaraderie, a series of beautiful things that bonds you. The people you hunt with will always take your call."

Sitting here and listening, I realize there are as many ways to hunt the food as there are to cook it. It wasn't long ago that American companies entertained their clients abroad in the United Kingdom on a traditional walk-up hunt, the European-style driven pheasant shoot, or on a fast-paced Continental shoot, in a quest to feel a part of old-world luxury.

But in true capitalist style, Americans discovered they could experience similar luxury on their own soil for one-third of the price. And so a market was born in the United States. Hunting amid this kind of luxury was no longer just for the leisured cla.s.s, but for people who had money but limited time; they could now spend a weekend at a place like this. Men could bond with one another and experience that special element of trust that comes with hunting together, more so than from playing a game of golf.

"You'll meet the greatest people in this business," the big Texas husband says, sipping his whiskey. "Multimillion-dollar mergers happen here with men walking behind dogs."

In the morning, I walk the bowl of the Guadalupe River, through bluestem gra.s.s and live oaks. The reporter and I arrive at a field with a gamekeeper they call El Hefe. English setters and pointers and Brittany spaniels yelp from their cages in the back of a truck, eager to begin their daily task of finding and flus.h.i.+ng birds. Lacy, a seven-year-old English c.o.c.ker, walks along El Hefe's side, waiting for Brittany spaniels Stan and Rock to point her in the right direction. When El Hefe says, "Hunt 'em up, Lacy," she dashes forward, the nub of her tail wagging, and weaves in and out of the gra.s.s until the birds fly up and shots ring out.

I bring a 28-gauge Beretta to my cheek again and again, as I make my way through my case of number six shot and the air begins to smell of smoking sh.e.l.ls. Everyone is silent as Lacy weaves. I watch with my arms alert, and my heart beating just a little bit faster. I can hear the squis.h.i.+ng sound of El Hefe's chewing tobacco, as the reporter arbitrarily calls him Bob. But he doesn't care, he just squirts and talks to his dogs. A large tin bath of water has been set in the field for the dogs to cool the Texas sun off their backs. Lacey jumps in and out in one fluid motion. The pointers follow suit, shake and spray without missing a step, and continue to sniff. Hawks fly above me, eyeing their compet.i.tion. They have already broken up the coveys of birds, causing them to scatter, and the dogs now set out to find the birds individually. There are pheasants with their long tendril tails, and quail so small and fast my eyes mix them with the dragonflies, and when I shoot, sometimes one falls and sometimes one doesn't. The chukar, though, is what I want-a native of southern Eurasia, brought from Pakistan to the United States to be a game bird. I have not tasted a chukar, and the one that appears in the corner of my eye, I miss.

After a lunch of meat and peach cobbler and iced tea, a flusher named Tramp takes over for Lacy. She is black and seems almost shy and she weaves in and out and brings the birds up demurely. There are birds everywhere, so many birds now, but still no chukar appears.

I walk the red rows with a swirl of dogs in front of me, their bodies embroidering the gra.s.s. My wool tweed jacket holds in all of the afternoon heat and wets my back, and the dogs continue to weave and st.i.tch, their tongues hanging out in short breaths of expectation. I walk observing all the noises flowing in and out of the gra.s.ses, whirring, cackling, mysterious, and always real.

The guttural chirping sounds of the fields repeat in my mind and so do the images of the men I see fis.h.i.+ng the Guadalupe River on my way through the fields-men stringing up the Guadalupe ba.s.s, bluegill, and catfish.

And then at last, in the iridescent trickles of an afternoon sun, an olive brown figure rises from the left, only 10 yards in front, and crosses my path in a diagonal leap skyward. I swing my shotgun into the sky and squint into the sun, and with a slap of the trigger, my chukar gives unto me. Tramp retrieves it and I hold the bird in my hand. It has a buff-colored belly, bold black and chestnut barring on its flanks, and black lines circling the contours of its eyes, all flowing down its neck and into its chest toward a white throat, covering the span between a red bill and legs.

The most knowledgeable outdoorsmen are often the El Hefes, who have spent a life as hunting guides and understand the nuances of nature better than all of the other humans around them. The El Hefes of the world won't always share this knowledge with you because it is just a part of their existence, and quite honestly, they have a job to do at this type of hunting ranch, leading you through the dance of the glossy fields, guiding you and the dogs toward pirouetting pheasants. But sometimes when you inquire, the El Hefes teach you a bit more than is normally known.

By the late afternoon we switch our prey. I now sit in a deer stand in a small forest with a twenty-year-old guide named Grady who could moonlight as a football player, except that he recites animal facts as a player would game stats. We are waiting for an axis deer, a reddish-haired native of Asia whose meat is fine grained and slightly sweet. Grady instructs me on the need for proper camouflage. "With big game, you always want to break up solid colors, and break up your outline; you don't want to silhouette yourself," he says, squatting on an overturned bucket and peering through a pair of binoculars.

An armadillo and a porcupine waddle through the leaves below my deer stand, just the point of a leather tail and a coat of spikes showing through the dry leaves.

The axis deer, like the pheasant and the chukar-like us-is also an immigrant. The famous Texas YO Ranch began bringing exotics into the United States in the 1950s and '60s and today these include axis, fallow deer, blackbuck antelope, sika, audad, and addax, among others-all of which have naturalized and flourished in range and pasture where they can come and go as they please.

"How do people justify going to Africa to kill a lion for sport?" I ask. "I don't imagine they are eating lion meat for dinner," I smirk.

"Those Africa trips that wealthy men take are actually what keep the animals from going extinct," Grady says matter-of-factly. "And the native tribes do eat the lion meat. For a single animal, thirty to forty thousand dollars goes back into the local economy, which incentivizes the governments to keep the animals healthy. The U.S. is now introducing certain breeds like the blackbuck back into their native African populations, where their conservation practices weren't good enough and there is poaching."

The idea of an "exotic" in a sense becomes relative with time. After all, the white man was an exotic when he first stepped on the soil at Plymouth Rock.

But the notion of importing exotics is far older than the United States. It is the stuff of myth and legend. After capturing the Golden Fleece, mythological Greek hero Jason and the Argonauts discovered pheasant on the return voyage on the Phasis River. (Pheasants derive their name from this river Phasis, now called the Rion.) There, they caught some and brought them home to Greece.

While Grady talks, I peer through the slit in the square wooden deer blind, and see the chalky nose of a young whitetail buck outside, chasing a three-year-old doe in heat, their cottony tails wagging like the spaniels'. But I am in the deer stand not for a whitetail but an axis, and so I wait.

A gray-faced whitetail doe appears next, trailed by a parade of twenty-three wild turkeys, heads bobbing forward and backward, feet stepping purposefully on the pine-needled forest floor.

"Axis deer vitals sit farther forward so you have to shoot really tight to the shoulder blade," Grady says as I peer through the crack and into the flood of evening sunlight.

"Axis deer don't breed 'til they rub out the velvet in their horns and are full horned," he continues in a heavy whisper.

In the distance, beyond the clearing where the whitetails stand and feed, and the turkeys peck, I can hear the high pitched bark of an axis doe, then her soft-pitched mew, like a cow elk's. But she doesn't show herself. By now, the sun has grown murky, too murky to see, and as if to let me know, an axis buck lets out his screaming roar from the woods, telling me to go home.

Grady and I climb down from the deer stand as the stars flicker on, and we begin to walk the twilight path toward the ranch house. Arriving, we find a stone fire pit, and a long table of roasted meats and very fine wine.

"Next time, you'll harvest an axis," he says.

"Why do you use the word harvest?" I ask.

"In my mind, it is just like any other harvest because it is food for the table," he says.

In Texas, there are few public hunting sites, and few places that can be leased for less than ten thousand dollars per gun. Large companies are willing to pay large sums to entertain large clients. Experiences like these are hard to come by and are ones that you will remember fondly for the rest of your life. They are the kind you wish will stick like beer-battered pheasant to your ribs. As a result, they also present a moral dilemma. This sort of hunting isn't sustainable as a way of life. It is a sporting event, an opportunity for leisure, even though all of the birds are used for food. Looking at the experience objectively, it isn't where I can go regularly if I want to eat only meat that I've killed with my own hands. In a way, it is much like the aristocratic approach to hunting in the Old World, a way to put on woolen coats and experience what it must have felt to be Catherine the Great as she sat in a well-paneled banquet room, with platters of roasted pheasant and stuffed partridge dangled beneath her nose. This experience is escapist and luxurious, so far from the everyday, or rather, so far from my everyday. But it is something I will always recall fondly-the way that one remembers a warm, bright elusive dream.

Braised Pheasant Legs with Cabbage and Grapes

Serves 4 Unlike a farmyard bird, wild birds have muscular legs, which lend them well to braising. Each bird will be different, depending on variety and age, but the key is to cook them low and slow until the meat is tender and falls off the bone. A good braising green or vegetable can be subst.i.tuted for the cabbage.

8 pheasant legs

Salt and pepper

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons b.u.t.ter

1/4 cup diced onion

2 cups finely sliced cabbage