And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (29 page)

I had pulled the trigger a second time before I saw the bird go down, so my gun was empty and I flipped the barrel release switch with my right thumb, breaking open the action and digging into my pocket for two more shells as the spent ones ejected and flew past my head. I was walking now. A purposeful walk. A measured walk. An even gait right toward the spot where the bird had fallen. I got to the place I had marked in my mind and looked around, expecting to see the pound-and-a-half bird lying where it fell. I was just starting to believe in the power of karma, just starting to believe in the innate justice of the world when I realized something—the bird wasn't there.

Immediately, I went into a frantic search. The gun was by now loaded and closed, the safety returned to the proper position. My head swiveled back and forth. My steps—moments before even and smooth—became clipped and frantic, like I was trying to guard Isaiah Thomas in a game of one-on-one. Where the hell was the damned bird?

Pausing to look back at the spot where I had seen it fall, I caught something out of the corner of my eye, something that, had I not been so hyperaware and jacked up on adrenaline and prehistoric instinct, I probably would have missed entirely. A tall stalk of a thornbush jerked to my left in a direction inconsistent with the movement of the wind. The little grouse was on the run. Any vestiges of the coolheaded resolve I'd demonstrated in wounding the bird was gone. Suddenly I was in the final scene of a
Benny Hill Show
episode. I could almost hear “Yakety Sax” playing as I bobbed and weaved, walking smack into thornbushes and trying to keep up with the bird's frantic and erratic run for life. It was like that scene in
Rocky,
when the grizzled old trainer makes the young boxer chase a chicken through a Philadelphia alley to improve his agility. Only I was no fighter, this was no chicken, and as evidenced by the slaps to the face I was taking from the prickly flora, this was no alley.

Through the lens of hyperrealism, the chase felt like it took hours, though I'm sure—judging by the meager distance actually covered—that it was over in thirty seconds. The bird changed direction one time too many and found itself coming straight back toward me. I had the gun to my shoulder, stalking it like a SWAT officer storming a meth lab, and was ready to fire when once again I thought of the young boy in my dad's Canadian story. I stamped my boot down six feet in front of its beak and it made a weak attempt to fly—more of a hop than anything. It was, perhaps, eight inches off the ground and less than two yards in front of me when I pulled the trigger for a final time. It went down immediately and twisted and writhed for a couple quick seconds before settling down, wings over its head and claws splayed behind it as if tragically failing an attempt at a cartwheel, for the final time.

In the immediate aftermath of my first kill, I was awash in conflicted feelings. I stood stock-still, only moving to flip open my gun and allow the single spent shell to arc behind me, removing the unfired one and stuffing it into my pocket. If I'm honest, I was a little scared. The way the thing flopped and writhed in its final moment of life freaked me out. I didn't want to get too close, let alone touch it, for fear that it might spring to life and make one final, desperate lunge at me. I know. I've seen too many horror movies where the killer is believed to be dead, only to pop back out of the water and drag a freshly deflowered teenager with him to the deep. But it was a strange thing to see, especially that close and in the three dimensions and Technicolor majesty of a crisp winter morning right in front of me. I wondered if I felt guilty, if I had any remorse about taking another creature's life with such wanton eagerness, but was able to answer my own question: No. I didn't feel bad that the birdie had died and I had been the one who made it do so. I did feel a strange pang of anticlimax, though, like I should have felt more victorious than I did. I did not feel like I had conquered nature. I did not feel like Francis Macomber dropping the wildebeest. I felt more like I had conquered man, actually. Like I had stepped up and done something hard.

It was a similar feeling to the one I had after I took Rebecca's parents out to lunch and asked for their daughter's hand in marriage. It was something I had been dreading. I knew I loved her and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, but it's never easy for a guy to confront a girl's parents and ask for their blessing to take their baby girl away. Just like then, I had spent a long time preparing, getting ready for any situation or question. I had rehearsed what I was going to do and practiced how I was going to behave. And when the moment came, it turned out to be not as hard as what I had built up in my head. That lunch was easy. A few questions about my career prospects, a few wise words about the relationship between love and commitment. I picked up the check and it was done. It was the same with this. A few rough experiences and a few thoughts of failure, but then the moment came and I did exactly what I wanted to do, what I needed to do. I got the bird to fly, shot it, and stalked it until it was dead. It wasn't like climbing Everest or any other feat requiring a tremendous amount of physical skill and mental experience. And when it was done, I felt a weight had lifted, like I had confronted something tough and made it out alive.

I still didn't want to pick the damned thing up though. That was the hardest part. When I was sure that its tiny heart had made its last beat, when I was sure that it didn't have any fight left in it, I walked over slowly and squatted down, catcher style, with it between my boots. There was a small amount of blood, about as bad as when you cut yourself shaving and dab it off with some toilet paper, on its wing. I poked at it at first, flipping it over with the tip of my gloved finger and revealing the damage that had been done. My intention was to shoot it in the head, knowing full well that the meat, such as it was, was in the breast and thighs. I had missed by an inch or two, blowing the upper half of the breast, neck, and throat completely off. The small head was attached by the spine and a little skin wrapped around it. Nothing more. With a little more confidence, I picked up a claw between my thumb and forefinger and flipped it over. It was stunningly light and my gun, which was a twelve-gauge and much too big for such a small bird at such close range, had made it all the more so.

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

H
unting 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 pounds 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.

All of a sudden a roasted pheasant didn't sound all that good to me. I began looking up recipes for pho when I should have been working, and while I didn't find one specifically calling for pheasant, I did find a few that looked easy enough and stopped at the grocery store to pick up the noodles, some chicken stock, bok choy (which I had never tried, but looked a little like spinach and cabbage and seemed appropriately Asian) and went home to mix it all up in the slow cooker. My pheasant had nearly thawed, though I helped it along a bit by running the freezer bag under some warm water for a few minutes. I rinsed the meat to get rid of feathers and got out the cutting board and our biggest knife. It was harder than what I had thought it would be to remove the claws. They didn't come off quite as neatly or quickly as I had imagined and touching them, admittedly, sent a shiver up my spine. The rest of the bird looked so familiar, so much like the rotisserie chickens I had practiced on. But the claws were something out of a horror movie. I hacked at them until they were removed and put them back into the freezer bag, burying it in the bottom of the trash can and forcing myself to not vomit.

I put all the ingredients into the Crock-Pot, added salt and some hot sauce, and set it on high. I set the oven timer for two and a half hours, figuring that would give it enough time to cook through and for everything to get soft and delicious. As it cooked, an earthy, savory smell began to fill our small condo. It wasn't an unpleasant smell. I actually kind of liked it. It was different to be sure, but with each passing moment my anticipation grew stronger. All year long, ever since I interviewed Steven Rinella, I had worked on changing my eating habits. I ate more lunches brought from home. I spent less time at drive-throughs. I'd lost some weight and ran my first 5K. I had even resolved to eat no fast food in 2012 and was looking forward to the challenge. But this, this meal warming in my slow cooker, was the pinnacle. This was something I had sourced, something I had hunted and killed, something I had provided. And I was excited to know what it would taste like. I found out when the oven timer went off and I opened the Crock-Pot, ladled out a bowlful, and picked up a piece of the meat, some rice noodles, and bok choy with a pair of chopsticks I'd stolen from a Chinese restaurant.