Girl Hunter Read online

  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 goddess 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 participate 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 bumpy 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 molasses, 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 heels–wearing 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 Saturday 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 bacchanal 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 shells; 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 space between the lines, and in that space a whole world exists. It is rare to know how much time passes 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 th
e 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 passion 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—scrappy, 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 cluster 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 breasts 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.

  The air is wet as we drive past steaming piles of sheep dung, through the perfume of eucalyptus, then high into the green hills. Finally we come to the rounded peak of a short grass hill, and we slow to survey the scene. As we step out to walk, the sky is changing, and dark clouds are stacking.

  “It won’t rain,” Scruggs says. “You need a south wind for it to rain.”

  We walk farther, through the sweet dirty smell of hay and past an occasional cow blocking the muddy road, running wildly ahead of us, then off the road in a frenzy of flying saliva and guttural snorts.

  In the silence of this alternate wilderness, you almost see the gentle rhythm as things happen—condors descend majestically on their prey, squirrels run frantically, golden eagles hang-glide above our heads, dipping and then reemerging with rabbits clutched in their talons. It all unfolds like a well-thought-out ballet, a logical pattern of energy being transferred from one organism to the next.

  And then it begins. “Jakes!” Scruggs shouts in a whisper, grabbing my shoulder and spinning me around, binoculars suctioned to his eyes. I feel a heavy stillness, thick and promising, as I step higher onto the hill and see three jakes—the young male turkeys, the best-tasting wild turkeys you can hope to hunt during a California spring, when hens are off-limits and old turkeys are tough.

  “They don’t have very big beards,” Scruggs says, squinting through his binoculars again.

  “I don’t care about size,” I say. He looks at me and gives me that keen once-over again.

  “You don’t?” he says with an eyebrow raised.

  “No.”

  He pauses to contemplate. “Okay, then follow me.”

  The three of us walk farther along the green pasture and tread along the edge of a gully, watching them from the shadows of the brush, languidly selecting insects and digging for worms with their undeveloped spurs, moving through the clover and crabgrass. One jake begins his mating march—dragging his wings behind him, fanning his colorful tail feathers, making a low spitting and drumming sound like a gong. He keeps dancing forward, like some fine-feathered Fred Astaire.

  Sean and Scruggs begin to fall behind as I creep along the brush. In part it is because they expect me to shoot now. (For some reason, men always expect me to shoot earlier than I ever do.) But I keep crawling along the bushes with one of Sean’s 12-gauges clenched in my hands. It takes a long time to move just a few yards. I freeze again and again as the jakes look straight at me. Some say that if their sense of smell were as acute as their sight or hearing, we would never be able to catch them.

  Wild turkeys are the ultimate test for a seasoned hunter. They teach you things—that the hunt itself is the great thing, not the amount of game you take home. There are many times when you leave the woods empty handed, and all you can do is salute an ol’ gobbler for outsmarting you.

  I keep inching along, watching the jakes’ dark crimson tail feathers move through the high grass, as they flex their muscles for the hens they hope to attract. When I reach a small clearing in the brush, where the hill meets the gully, I finally sit and watch them strut. I don’t know where Sean and Scruggs are anymore; my head is a kaleidoscope of adrenaline mixed with visions of turkey Tetrazzini.

  I feel my hand tighten on the shotgun as they begin their regal dance. I raise my right knee just slightly to stabilize my shot. Then two jakes move toward each other in the clearing, their identical silhouettes bobbing in the sun. And as two of the heads come together and become one, I slap the trigger of my shotgun and the silhouettes disappear.

  Sean and Scruggs appear at my side, and I hear Sean shoot as the third jake runs up and over the crest of the hill.

  “She got two!” Scruggs says somewhere behind me as the adrenaline quiets its coursing hum and stillness overtakes us.

  “I think one of them was Sean’s,” I say. As I approach I can see the jakes now, lying in the tall crabgrass right where I had last seen them.

  Scruggs shakes his head. “Two in one shot.”

  I can see that they are young, their beards not fully developed and their spurs rounded rather than sharp. Despite their youth, they are heavy, very heavy, as I lift them by their leathery feet and carry them off the field, their crimson feathers fanned out and enveloping me like parachutes for the world to see. “She got two,” I hear Scruggs say again behind me, that skepticism in his voice gone now. “I think one of those was Sean’s,” I repeat. But he ignores me. “So where are we hunting next?” he asks.

  Back at Sean’s house we take the two turkeys into a wooded area and begin to pluck them, a few feathers at a time so that the skin doe
sn’t tear. Sean’s girlfriend, Ree, bursts through the kitchen doorway, her long, curly brown hair flying in her wake. She is ecstatic at our success, wanting to know the details and snapping photos as we pluck.

  “Do you want to have this experience?” I ask her, smiling. “Yes!” she says, rolling up the sleeves of her plaid shirt. I step away from my half-plucked bird and let her pluck.

  “Whoa,” she says after a few plucks. “It’s not that I’m grossed out . . . it’s just that I definitely come from a grocery store kind of family.”

  Next we sever the wings at the first joint, then the head and feet. We cut a slit below the tail and remove the intestines, heart, and gizzard in one handful. From the top we cut another incision and remove the crop, all of the grain the bird has eaten in a day. “Eww,” Ree says. “But in a good way.”

  In this moment, with the turkey warm in my hands, it all feels strangely familiar. Like the beginning. Like the very first time I killed a turkey on the softly sloping hill of a restaurant, the moment I felt the warm heart of a turkey in my hand and realized what it meant to be an omnivore. That was the moment that led to this one, the moment that made me a hunter.

  There have been so many other moments between then and now, so many strange, primal, and transformative experiences. But I know much more now than I did that day when I harvested a domestic broad-breasted white with only a knife and my hands. Even though I had spent many hours at a stove, learning the highest forms of culinary creativity in esteemed restaurants, it was nothing like the education I found in the woods. I know now that turkeys, when given freedom in the wild, are like ghosts—if they’re not vocal, you’d swear there aren’t any within 100 miles. I know that subtle changes in barometric pressure or the weather make animals act differently. I know that distinct natural feeling of tapping into my original human instincts. Today I am much closer, perhaps as close as I will ever be, to where my food comes from, but it wasn’t always this way. In fact, getting here it was more difficult than I expected.