Girl Hunter Part 11

I ride through the north fork of the Shoshone River, named after one of the poorest of Indian tribes. I drive through the town of Cody, named after William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, a horse rider and trick shooter who was also a real estate developer and showman who built the Wild West Show and took it all over the world. Calamity Jane was one of his performers. Buffalo Bill was also a hunting outfitter, one of the first people to take people hunting as a business, and his clients included Theodore Roosevelt and the prince of Monaco. He was an entrepreneur of the Wild West and formed the town of Cody when Yellowstone became a National Park, in 1872.

Past Cody, there is only one road across what the Shoshone called "the land of the stinky water." It is the road to Yellowstone, where the geysers and water emit the smell of sulfur. I pa.s.s a V shape in the canyon where the sun never shines, and see herds of mule deer with dark, wet beads for eyes and shiny Rudolph noses.

On the road are volcanic rock formations that look like crystals, and pine trees that are gray ghosts, ravaged by the pine beetle and wildfires. But despite the vast land, some houses are still cl.u.s.tered together, perhaps for scarce resources, or perhaps because even when given the s.p.a.ce, we humans still desire one another's company in the end.

The east gate to Yellowstone is lovely and simple. A ranger tells me everything I could want to know with an animated enthusiasm. She hands me pamphlets and maps and the receipt for the steep entry fee, and it begins to feel strangely like my childhood trip to Disney World. But the drive is beautiful, the dead trees are stark, the snow-capped mountains look fierce, the grand lake glistens, and the blacktop winds gently between the falling rock zones and the water. Ravens carve the sky with their wings and stop at parked cars with their beaks open, beckoning for a morsel. Signs warn people against playing with the animals, and visitors with heavy camera equipment are parked on the roadside. The rivers and lakes in the forest look like pools of oil. Swans dip their necks in it, and duck tails point high to the wind.

At the famous geyser named Old Faithful, a chipper man uses the microphone with extreme regularity, announcing which geyser will go off next. People rush down the boardwalk and stand with their cameras poised. Two ladies watch from the comfort of their Chevy Tahoe, eating popcorn. I sit in silence, eating a sandwich with curious components, and wonder-has nature become one big stadium? Yellowstone is a wilderness that can be seen from the comfort of your car, a series of scenes that can be taken home with you from the gift store. This worries me.

This is supposed to be one of nature's great triumphs, a place where people can experience the natural world in its purest form. I wonder if it is too late, if the notion of "nature" has become so alien to us, that living off the land is only a romantic notion and not a realistic one. I wonder if Nature has become the last great zoo, an inaccessible place.

On the drive out of Yellowstone, a herd of bison block the road, close enough to reach out and touch. They seem stoic and unimpressed with mankind. Farmers raise bison now-restoring prairies with the native gra.s.ses for the bison to eat. It is cheaper because the sun fuels the soil, rather than nitrogen fertilizer, and the bison, which are more mobile than cows, spread the native seed with their dung. Bison meat is nutrient rich, leaner, and subtly sweeter than beef, and bison farmers say that a single bison expends about one barrel of oil during its life, compared to a single cow, which burns eight barrels. Once upon a time, there were 75 million bison roaming the western plains of North America. They were a staple food for Native Americans, who used their hides for teepees, their bladders to store fat, and their partially curdled milk as a form of yogurt.

In the movement to settle the west and transplant the Native Americans onto reservations, U.S. settlers hunted the bison so fiercely that by the end of the nineteenth century, only eight hundred living bison could be identified in North America.

Today there are 500,000 bison in North America. And though they are being raised by ranchers now, there are still fewer bison slaughtered in the United States in a single year than beef cattle in a single day. What makes bison most intriguing as an alternative to cattle is that they are inherently wild and are survivors. They are the only terrestrial North American mammal to have survived the Ice Age and our modern agrarian system of domesticating animals. Whereas they previously had been hunted with abandon, they are now quietly going about their lives under the radar.

Back near Cody, I have my last meal with Stan. I don't know it is my last meal until I sit watching him at his dinner table, cooing over his sirloin.

"This is my baby," he says cutting his knife into the medium pink hunk shimmering on his plate.

"That's the thing that I don't think most vegetarians and vegans understand," he says. "The woman is the one that needs the meat. The male does not. And the man that brought home the meat was the one who got chased after. There's no doubt it was that primal. I mean, we didn't grow this brain on our head from eating tomatoes. I mean there's not an ob-gyn doctor that's not going to load you up with iron. All the stuff that's in meat-if you're not eating it, you're in trouble."

Then he nags me to say that his is the best beef I've ever tasted. In this moment, the spirit of Calamity Jane grabs hold of me and I know I, somehow, have to go.

I get up and make a brief phone call midmeal in the pink frilly bedroom, then conjure up all that I learned in ninth grade drama cla.s.s when Mrs. Turner cast me as Abigail in The Crucible. I channel it all, the angst, the outrage, the drama as the townsfolk were burned at the stake for their witchcraft, and I emerge from the bedroom with tears streaming down my face and exclaim, "I have to go!" It was an Oscar-worthy performance, one I'm not particularly proud to say I performed, and one that will possibly have karmic implications down the line for the lies I had to tell. But sometimes, you just have to go.

And so I walk down the gravel road where the air smells like dried blood, with suitcase in tow, and I wave good-bye to the cows. I keep on walking away from Stan and his wisdom and his steak. And in a strangely cascading sequence of more phone calls, I arrange for a couple at a car repair shop to drive me to Billings Airport. And in the most beautifully ironic metaphor, they, the kindest of strangers, willing to help an unfamiliar girl escape a barren land, meet me in the parking lot of a McDonald's.

They are sweet and talk to me about cooking and how they had no plans on a Sat.u.r.day night anyway, other than to go out to dinner at Arby's or McDonald's. And they point out the sugar factories on the road, and the oil refineries, and the single red light of a limestone mine in the middle of the desert at dark, and the smell of sulfur drifting from the Yellowstone River. And she tells me that she loves to bake and has written homemade cookbooks from time to time. I close my eyes and feel the yellow light from the oil refinery drift over my eyelids. The comfort of her voice and sight of it all make my eyes well with happiness. I think about the albino horse, and the rhythm of its steamship lungs. I wonder when I will taste elk harvested with my own two hands. Was this trip a waste? I ask myself. I don't think so. Because as I was taught that very first morning I went turkey hunting with the Commish, it is the hunt that matters, not the amount of game you take. Things are now in high relief for me more than ever before. And just as much as I want to be a hunter, I know the kind of hunter and the kind of human I never want to be, and that is a lesson worth paying for.

Elk Jerky

Makes 20 to 25 strips One of the traditional ways our ancestors preserved meat was by drying it. It is also one of the simplest. Fresh strips of meat were often first soaked in a marinade or brine, then, traditionally, hung to dry in the sun, the attic, or some other dry place. Some people let it hang over a slow, smoky fire, which added flavor and discouraged flies. You can, of course be modern and use the oven or a dehydrator.

2 pounds elk (lean cuts are ideal)

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon brown sugar

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

2 cloves garlic, sliced

2 teaspoons cayenne

1 cup water

1. Put the meat in the freezer for about 30 minutes, until just firm. Slice it across the grain into strips about 1/4 inch thick.

2. Combine the other ingredients together in a bowl and mix well. Let sit for 10 minutes.

3. Add the strips and marinate, covered, in the refrigerator overnight.

4. Preheat the oven to 200F. Place the strips on tinfoil with the door propped open and dry the strips until they are pliable, 5 to 7 hours.

5. Store in a plastic container for up to 2 weeks.

Also try: other antlered game, bison, turkey, rabbit

Elk-Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

Serves 6 I once met a hearty Wyoming woman who lived in a farmhouse, and her kitchen smelled wonderful. When I inquired about the source of the aroma, she said she was making a pot of stuffed cabbage rolls. This is my version, inspired by the memory of those good kitchen smells. It is cooked in a tomato sauce base, which is the traditional Eastern European way.

12 cabbage leaves, large and unblemished

1 pound ground elk meat

3/4 cup cooked brown rice

1/2 cup finely chopped onion

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

1 egg

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1 teaspoon pepper

1/2 cup cream

2 tablespoons Marsala

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 (8-ounce) can tomato sauce