The New Takeout

I'm supposed to be drooling right now. I ordered this Bourbon Red heritage turkey months ago from a Midwestern farm, seeking salvation from buxom but flavorless supermarket fowl. It was raised, butchered, iced, and shipped, and yesterday I drove 100 miles in Thanksgiving traffic to fetch it from a Philadelphia market. Counting gas and the parking ticket I found on my windshield, I’ve dropped about $160 on the beast I’m about to carve into.

As I shave off morsels of meat and pass plates around the table, I’m hoping for something more than silence. Stunned silence would be great. Or maybe some high fives and fist bumps, or a “Hell yeah, sweet bird!” But my friends glance at the malnourished-looking carcass and take immediate inventory of the side dishes. “You paid how much for this bird?” says Kirk, scooping a second hump of yams onto his plate. “Man, next time, just shoot one.”

Easy for Kirk to say. I’ve never killed anything. I’m the kind of guy who calls the state police when I hit a deer, instead of harvesting the steaming, ruby-red tenderloins, as Kirk would. But as I sit down to confront my own plate, I realize he’s right. I’ve chased enough new food trends over the years to consider an old one, for a change. Why not hunt? I push my plate away. “Okay, where do I start?”

Where the Wild Things Aren’t  

I was a “locavore” before the term even existed. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I picked strawberries and hoisted bushels of corn that weighed as much as I did. I harvested pumpkins, dug potatoes, pressed cider, and pulled turnips. Who even likes turnips? Point is, this was a way of life, not a Facebook group or a New York Times Magazine story. And if any of it sounds romantic, you’ve never spent a day dodging yellow jackets to gather “drops”—the fallen apples that become cider.

Like most food-conscious people, I came to appreciate the origins of my food even more as an adult. I’ve always tried to buy my food close to the soil or barnyard from whence it sprang. Living in the suburbs has its advantages: There are farms everywhere in my little corner of eastern Pennsylvania. On any given Sunday, you’ll find me dodging pie-faced, barefoot Mennonite children running between rows of squash. And you haven’t tasted a BLT until you’ve eaten one made with a yellow oxheart tomato still warm from the garden, topped with dry-smoked slab bacon I’ve cured in salt and sugar for 10 days.

The way I see it, hunting would be a way to climb another link in the food chain. Wild game has largely been ignored by foodies—can you hunt in Ferragamos?—but it really shouldn’t be. You can’t beat its provenance, of course. And it’s close to home: There are more deer in America today than when Columbus landed, yet 85 percent of our commercially sold venison comes from New Zealand. What’s that carbon hoofprint look like? Finally, with all the steroidal supermarket fare, wild game remains among the healthiest of meats.

“From a nutritional perspective, wild game is precious,” says Valerius Geist, Ph.D., an environmental science researcher at the University of Calgary. “It’s the closest thing to the diet that shaped us as a species—loaded with protein, vitamin B12, omega-3 fatty acids, and a host of other nutrients.” What’s more, grazing animals such as elk, deer, and antelope also boast a healthier balance of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. While grain-fed animals have an off-kilter ratio of up to 10:1, wild game has a ratio of 2:1. That ratio has been shown to lower the incidence of heart disease. “We should be shouting loudly to get venison-equivalent meat from our agricultural production methods,” says Geist.

Here’s the thing: There’s wild game, and then there’s wild game. And while your favorite local restaurant might claim its pheasant, partridge, rabbit, venison, elk, or boar is “wild,” the animals are no more liberated than a cow or a chicken—overhunting a century ago prompted the government to outlaw the sale of hunted American wild game. Today, wild game is a marketing phrase more than anything else. Unless, of course, you shoot it yourself.

Read why this writer was born to hunt...


Born (Again) to Hunt

“Hi there. You here with a son?” asks Mick Ahner, a volunteer instructor with the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Ahner wears a thick black beard and has the same Pennsylvania German accent my grandfather never managed to shake. I’m in the basement of Bethany Wesleyan Church in Cherryville for the Pennsylvania Hunter-Trapper Education Course, the first step in my quest to “harvest game.” At the front of the room, before a mural of the Nativity, stands a suit of armor wearing an orange hunting vest, next to a lifelike Styrofoam deer. Ahner is near a
projector, readying a series of PowerPoint slides that will guide me—and a dozen prepubescent hunters-to-be—through Hunting 101.

Ahner’s question makes sense: Most of the kids here were dropped off by their F-150–driving dads, and they eye me suspiciously, as if I were a spy meant to keep them in line or a kid held back about 20 years. The paternal push they’ve had into the woods is what really makes hunting stick across generations, according to research by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). My family’s hunting lineage hit a snag about a century ago, though. On a Thanksgiving Day hunt one year, my great-grandfather Edgar was out looking for rabbits. Edgar was in his waning years, and his eyesight was failing, so he accidentally shot his dog. Then he hanged himself in the smokehouse. End of tradition.

Learning to hunt, my fellow students and I soon realize, has little to do with firing a gun. The class first fidgets through 3 days of lessons in first aid, hypothermia, animal trapping, and federal excise taxes. When Dave Dieter, another instructor, finally announces the firearms portion of his class, the kid next to me clenches his fist and lets out a hushed “Yesssss.” I stifle the same reaction. Control, you see, is the first rule of handling a gun.

“The key to gun safety,” announces Dieter, holding aloft a dummy rifle, “is muzzle control—don’t point a gun at anything you don’t want to shoot.” Sounds simple. But then he gestures to a rack of neutered guns, and all restraint vanishes as the boys scramble to grab them. Two teenage girls with braces hold back, eyebrows raised, as the boys pump imaginary hip shots into the foam deer. Dieter intervenes before someone Cheneys Joseph and Mary, and the throng falls in line. I’m in a church already, so I dash off a quick prayer. I’ll be out in the woods alongside these kids soon enough.

The final exam is a breeze—who doesn’t know oak trees are best for holding tree stands?—and in a few days, my Pennsylvania hunting license arrives in a manila envelope. Inside, I also find a sheet of paper tags, each one a promise of a full freezer. I receive one temporary bear tag, one spring turkey tag, one fall turkey tag, one antlered deer tag, and small-game hunting privileges. Cost: $20.

Sounds cheap, but big-game hunters actually spend an average of $1,580 each year on the sport. Small-game hunters spend about $820, according to the NSSF. “For the guy spending more than $1,500 to take down one deer, the math just doesn’t work out,” says Tony Aeschliman of the NSSF. “Even if you shoot the biggest deer in the state, you’re going to get maybe 100 pounds of meat for your money.”

You might be thinking, If hunting is such a waste of time and money, why bother? By that logic, buying organic produce isn’t worth it, either. Isn’t it absurd to pay double for organic apples at a farmer’s market when there are decent specimens to be found at the store nearby? Food, whether it’s going into a Crock-Pot or a pie, should be an experience, not just sustenance. And I’ll gladly pay more for a culinary background check.

Building the Hunting Apparatus

Here’s a no-brainer: A hunter is nothing without his weapon. But it turns out that a hunter is also nothing without a dog—at least when his prey is ruffed grouse, the elusive Pennsylvania state bird.

I spot an ad for English pointer pups and roll out to a farm in the countryside with a stack of cash in my pocket. As I arrive, two dogs kick up straw in their pen like farmers with pitchforks. I know even less about dogs than I do about hunting, but these are clearly sporting dogs—striated, lean, and tireless, with square heads and big brains packing oversize olfactory lobes. “Tell me about this one,” I say, pointing toward a blur of fur and jowls.

The owner says something about breeding and bloodlines, and then his voice trails off. “I call her Jess,” he finishes. “But you can call her whatever you want.”

“Sold,” I say.

I unfold a few bills and load the dog into the car. She’s drooling and trembling with fear, a stranger to the giant, rolling crate that I’m trying to shove her into.
But give her one whiff of grouse and she’ll react on instinct. A pointing dog strikes a familiar pose when it’s found a bird: It freezes in midstep, tail erect, nose down, and often a front paw raised. That’s in the genes. But there’s a catch. If you want to have time to set up for a shot, you have to train the dog first.

“When the tailgate drops, the bullshit stops,” says trainer Ken Adamik, letting Jess loose a few days later on his Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, grounds. Adamik is a master trainer—a Dog Whisperer for hunters—and is all business. He wears denim cutoff shorts with high rubber boots, and his hair is trimmed tight like an army sergeant’s. His arms are tanned and tattooed, and his exposed knees are scarred from years of rope burns. Seconds later, he’s down in the dirt with Jess, rolling around like one of her littermates. She likes him. And if the guy’s willing to go to that length to impress my dog, well then so do I.

“Has she had any birds?” asks Adamik, standing up to hoist a crate of homing pigeons from his white cargo van. I peer inside; the interior surface is plastered with first-place dog ribbons. “There are no bird dogs without birds,” he continues. “Let’s see if she can find these. They’re dirty and smelly, and that’s the way I like ’em.” Adamik hides a few birds in a field, and instinctively, Jess easily sniffs them out. “Yup, she’s birdy,” he says. “Come back next Saturday.”

Read about trusting your hunting dog and finally, the feast...

A week later, I arrive with a handful of other dog owners for the canine version of Montessori. We gather around as Adamik carefully places a live chukar—a type of partridge—into a bird launcher. It’s just what it sounds like: You load the fowl into the remote-controlled, spring-loaded trampoline, and the bird blasts skyward on release. Adamik hides the apparatus in the brush and releases a young dog into the field. When the dog smells the bird and freezes, Adamik taps his remote. Foomf! The bird launches 30 feet into the air, confused but free. That’s followed by a sharp crack as an assistant fires a shotgun off into the distance. The chukar flies away, but bagging it isn’t the point. Do this enough times, and young dogs begin to associate gunshots—something that’s not exactly second nature to them—with birds, something that is.

Adamik jogs back and hands me the rusty shotgun. “Take those birds and this gun across the pond,” he says, pointing to a couple of dead chukars too peppered by shotgun pellets or breaded with dog slobber and dirt to eat. “I want you to wait until I blow a duck call,” he continues, “then throw a dead bird over the water. When it gets to the top of the arc, fire a shot, then throw another bird 45 degrees away from the first.” I look at the pile of tattered birds, shrug, and head around the pond.

I wade into position, and Adamik bellows, “Okay, let’s do it.” I grab the first bird by the legs and give it a feeble underarm loft. It does a triple gainer with a full twist and lands with a thud in the mud just in front of me. Where’s Roethlisberger when you need him? “C’mon, throw it!” shouts Adamik from across the pond. I bunch the next bird up like a football, holding the wings tight to the body and pointing the head toward the sky. I unleash a Hail Mary; another hunter fires the shotgun. I quickly throw the second, and out comes a Labrador retriever to fetch them both.

This is how the training goes. We play-hunt, until eventually it’s time for the real thing.

First Blood

It’s early in the season on a warm September day when I meet shooting instructor James Ross at the Orvis Sandanona Shooting Grounds in Millbrook, New York. Ross is a long-necked, athletic man who fires more rounds in a day than I have in my life, and he’s trying to help me refine my gun skills before we hit the fields tomorrow. I’ve been practicing with clay targets, following them out of the launcher with my shotgun held firmly to my cheek. Blasting birds requires a different approach, though.

“You always start with your gun up?” asks Ross. He sounds like a caddy who could outswing his golf pro. “You look like Elmer Fudd.” We practice starting with the gun safely unmounted. The goal: Raise the gun to my shoulder, swing through the target while pulling the trigger, and nail the bird in the head for a quick kill and intact breast meat. Eventually, my muscle memory begins to set in. It’s a lot like golf, only louder.

The next morning, Jim Dobbs, a veteran guide at Orvis Sandanona, shows up with a truckload of yapping dogs—Jess will stay in the onsite kennel until I’ve had my training. “I have three rules,” the gray-haired Dobbs tells the group of wannabe marksmen that has assembled. “One, make sure the other hunters are in sight before you shoot. Two, shoot only flying birds, at least 7 feet off the ground. And three, always keep your muzzle up and safety on unless you’re shooting.”

Dobbs asks us to form a line, shoulder to shoulder, and we begin plodding through the chest-high brush. President Teddy Roosevelt used to walk these grounds, and the same thick terrain he stomped over still gives pheasants the cover they crave. There’s been no frost, though, and a machete would be useful. Jäger, a muscular German shorthaired pointer that Dobbs credits with 10,000 kills, is in the lead. In no time, the dog points. I twitch, and a pheasant explodes in front of me, its wings swishing like brooms through the air. A shot this close—I could almost prod the bird with my barrel—is difficult, as the pellets are tightly concentrated. But Ross’s instruction takes hold, and I raise the shotgun, swing, and fire.

“Nice bird,” Dobbs says, clambering to retrieve it.

“Did I hit him in the head?” I ask.

“I think you’re more of a tail man,” he says with a wink, tucking the hen into his vest. Dobbs’s dogs flush another dozen birds, and then we head back to base to grab Jess. She has never seen or smelled a pheasant, so Dobbs takes a bird from his pouch and waves it before her nose. Her tail wag, always steady, turns into a full-body dance move. It’s game time.

I’m as anxious as Jess when we reach the brush. The briars thicken as we press ahead, and I listen for the frenetic clank of her collar bell as a guide. I’ve spent months teaching her two basic commands: “whoa,” which means stand motionless, and “come,” which means return to sender. Those are my only options—there’s no “sit” for bird dogs. It’s like trying to race a speeding Ferrari without a steering wheel, just the gas and brake. I hear ringing behind me, at the back of our line, so I whistle her forward. Again, she heads behind the line.

I look around at the other hunters sheepishly, like a father who failed to hit enough fungoes to his error-prone kid. Then her bell stops ringing, abruptly. That silence is the sound of an incredibly excited bird dog.

“She’s on point,” I shout to Dobbs, who orders the line to reverse.

“See a bird?” he asks.

“Uh . . . not really.”

The dense tangle of briars Jess is pointing to could harbor an alligator, for all I know. But as I approach, a bird blasts out from beneath my feet, flying far and fast away. Shots ring out all around. The bird folds up and begins to tumble rather than fly, coming to rest in a thick pine grove 40 yards away.

I chase Jess after the fallen bird and find her holding the dead pheasant gently in her mouth. Some hunters say the remorse is strongest after your first kill. I’d never shrug off any death, no matter how small. But as I take the soft, feathered hen, still warm, from my dog’s mouth, Jess’s tail thwaps against the brush like a soft machete; feathers cling to her smile. If I had a tail, it’d be slapping my hips, too. “If you’re not going to trust your dog, you might as well hunt alone,” Dobbs says, approaching. I might have pulled the trigger, but my 10-month-old dog gets credit for the kill.

Back at the ranch, I tease away a few feathers at a time from my pheasant, careful not to tear the tissue-paper skin. I snip off the head, wings, tail, and feet, until I’m left with a tiny chicken. I use my hands to rake out the warm organs—heart, liver, lungs—and then open her crop to see her last meal. There are pinecone seeds, cranberries, sorghum, and ground-cherries that grow like little gift-wrapped tomatoes in the fields of Sandanona. This pheasant had one bad day in its life. We should all be so fortunate.
 

The Feast

Cooking game requires a delicate touch, so I call up Tory McPhail, a hunter himself. McPhail is the chef at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, and coauthor of Commander’s Wild Side. “Wild birds taste like the foods they forage in the wild,” says McPhail. “You taste a pheasant from one county, and it’s going to taste different from one from the next county over.” It’s a concept I know from the world of wine: Just as grapes take up mineral flavors from the soil and reflect their sense of place, pheasants have terroir.

The pheasant I’ve brought home makes our heirloom Thanksgiving bird look like a bargain. Months of preparation, thousands of dollars, 4 hours of hiking afield, and I still can’t feed a table of four. But once the bird is quartered, seasoned, and braised with red wine on a bed of chunky root vegetables, the taste is unparalleled. The meat is lean, taut, and flavorful, and yields a rich brown juice. The legs are filled with fine bones that force you to eat slowly—a good thing. The dark meat is rich and rosy pink; the breast is ivory white and moist, toothsome without being tough. And it’s not as gamy as I thought it would be.

“You know what’s coming up, Terri?”

I call to my wife.

“What?” she says, cautiously.

“Turkey and deer seasons,” I say, digging in. “It might be time to buy a chest freezer.”

I picture myself calling a turkey in the morning light, or dragging a deer home from the forest and making sausage and jerky and steaks. Then I notice something on my dinner plate I’ve never seen before: two tiny lead pellets, which fall from the breast of the bird. They’re my pellets. And that makes this bird mine, and mine alone.