Girl Hunter Part 7

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon hot sauce

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1. In a large saucepan, brown the meat in the oil, breaking up the meat and stirring with a wooden spoon.

2. Add the garlic, onion, and pepper and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, continuing to break up the meat.

3. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well.

4. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, covered, for 2 hours.

5. Taste and adjust the seasoning to your liking, adding more hot sauce and salt and pepper as necessary.

Also try: wild boar, antlered game, turkey, ground or diced finely

Pulled Javelina

Serves 10 to 12 This is an ode to the cowboys in Alpine and the pulled pork truck that sits outside their saloon. The spices can be adjusted and experimented with, but the final product should always be paired with a tangy slaw and something spicy and pickled, for the real experience. Every smoker is different, so you may have to adjust the smoking time, depending on how your smoker operates. Javelina won't shred quite as easily as domestic pork, but it should shred reasonably well when it is done.

1/2 cup mola.s.ses

1 cup kosher salt

1 quart water

2 shoulders (3 to 5 pounds total) of javelina

1 teaspoon c.u.min seed

1 teaspoon fennel seed

1 teaspoon coriander seed

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 tablespoon onion powder

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 tablespoon paprika

1 teaspoon cayenne

1 teaspoon ground allspice

1 tablespoon dried oregano

1 tablespoon mustard powder

1. Combine the mola.s.ses, salt, and water in a plastic brining bag or nonreactive container. Add the shoulders and let sit in the refrigerator for 12 hours.

2. Remove the meat from the brine and let rest on a rack in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour and up to 24.

3. Place the c.u.min, fennel, and coriander in a spice grinder and grind until fine. Transfer to a small mixing bowl and combine with the remaining ingredients.

4. Preheat a smoker to 210F. Sprinkle the c.u.min mixture evenly over the shoulders and then pat onto the meat, making sure as much of the rub as possible adheres. Wearing latex gloves will help you to get more of the mixture to adhere to the meat.

5. Place the shoulders in the smoker and cook for 5 to 7 hours, maintaining a temperature of 210F. Begin checking meat for doneness after 5 hours of cooking time. The meat is done when it falls apart easily when pulled with a fork. Once done, remove from the smoker and set aside to rest for at least 1 hour.

6. Pull meat apart with two forks and serve as a sandwich, with pickled jalapenos, coleslaw, and tangy dressing.

Also try: wild boar When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying.

They are all different and they fly in different ways but the

sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

-ERNEST HEMINGWAY

4.

Grouse and Other Creatures Montana seems like a logical, almost necessary stop. I think of this state as more entangled with nature than almost any other in the lower forty-eight, being as it is one of the last in the nation with more animals than people. If I want to experience raw nature, then this must be the place, and so I accept an invitation from a friend of a friend to go bird hunting-a "blind hunting date" of sorts. It begins in an airport full of camouflaged men whose bellies are very large and whose hair is very silver. They are clad in their favorite uniform for the fall and winter months, and they will wear it religiously as they carry the fruits of the hunt in their cars on the long drive home.

Montana is sky country, with hills and plains that glisten crimson and mustard in the light. Strong winds send the cars wobbling around the road kill and rotting carca.s.ses, speeding past black velvet cows mingling on great green fields that seem to stretch forever onward until they meet the purple snow-capped mountains.

If there is no ceiling in the sky at night, the Milky Way is extravagant in Townsend-an ungentrified, undepressed town where the folks are regular. There is an ample supply of gas stations in Townsend, ice boating on Canyon Ferry Lake, and mule deer grazing on alfalfa like cattle.

In a board and batten cabin atop a hill, a thin sixty-year-old man named Wilbur listens to Italian lute music and sips a serious Cabernet in sixty-dollar stemware from which he refuses to sip standing up, for fear it will break.

There are bachelor-size things inside: a very small skillet; a small bowl of cashews on the slate counter; gla.s.s vases full of speckled pheasant feathers, each plume a token of his achievements; and a full bar of fine brandies, ports, and vermouth. Next to the bar are seven-dollar winegla.s.ses from Ikea, should you wish to drink standing up.

He heats the cabin solely with a woodstove, often taking the temperature of the room to demonstrate how well he has insulated his house. He likes to write letters to politicians.

But Wilbur spends so much time with his fourteen-year-old English pointer that he generally interacts with people the same way he does with his dog-in single-word orders or replies. Except when he talks about hunting: "I imagine going bird hunting for the next decade. It's endlessly interesting to me," he says, pacing the room in wool moccasins and green corduroy. "It's a lark. I'll go fifty days a year. In the fields, you're predatory, exploratory, interested. I think it's sort of my roots showing in some ways and I think it's the real thing." He hides his small brown cigarette expertly as he talks, but the smell of cloves he exudes betrays him.

There was a time when he was a boy, that he lived in Montana. But he left it behind in the sixties to deal in fine art in Berkeley, when the university was in full dissident bloom. He walked in poet circles, went by his initials-like T. S. Eliot-always had good seats for the symphony, ate at Chez Panisse in the seventies when lunch was $3.50, and could tell a good epoisses cheese from a bad. Now in retirement, he is on a quest-trying to become a Montana man again.

In the morning, as the moon is dying and the air smells of burning mountain mahogany, we drive together toward the Golden Triangle. It is a patch of land to the north blanketed in succulent wheat and tall cover gra.s.s that the birds enjoy.

"Do you remember your first hunt?" I ask.

"I started hunting in earnest at ten before I had a license or hunter safety, for which you had to be eleven," he says, driving cautiously, sometimes mysteriously stopping short in the blue and orange morning "The first bird I ever shot was a prairie chicken while sitting on my uncle's lap. By the age of fifteen when we were all driving, we all started hunting on our own including before school and after school all the way up until the end of duck season in early January. It is still an undiminished pleasure for me. And I would come back to Berkeley with all of this frozen game, and I'd have these dinner parties and everybody was just instantly converted. Even just your basic deer roast. I had a whole circle of people who just begged to get re-invited to that menu. And ditto the grouse and the pheasant."

As the sun rises higher, we can begin to see the silhouettes of mule deer grazing on the roadside. There are sometimes hundreds leading to the fir trees in the distance.