Girl Hunter Part 16

Serves 4 This is an elegant dish, and the stuffing is good enough to eat on its own by the spoonful. I suggest deboning the quail first so that the flavors can be scooped up and swallowed together, rather than your having to pick around the bones. The birds become little packages this way, which can be tied off with a strand of green onion or chive if you're feeling particularly whimsical. Deboning may sound intimidating, but there are several good online video tutorials that a quick search will pull up for you. Or you can simply get a good pair of kitchen shears and cut along both sides of the backbone and remove the spine, which will allow you to wrap the quail around the stuffing but keep the remaining bones in.

10 tablespoons b.u.t.ter

4 tablespoons finely diced shallots

4 celery stalks, peeled of outer strings and finely diced

1 cup white wine

8 tablespoons finely chopped walnuts

4 tablespoons dried currants

4 cloves garlic, diced

4 tablespoons bread crumbs

8 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-parsley leaves

2 tablespoons fresh thyme

8 quail, deboned if possible

Salt and pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 350F. Meanwhile, melt 6 tablespoons of the b.u.t.ter in a small saute pan and sweat the shallots and celery over low heat, until translucent.

2. Add the white wine and reduce by half.

3. In a small bowl, combine the walnuts, currants, garlic, bread crumbs, parsley, and thyme.

4. Once the wine is reduced by half, stir in the bread crumb mixture and cook until it thickens and forms a paste. Season with salt and pepper to taste and set aside.

5. Distribute a lump of stuffing onto the back side of the breast meat of each deboned quail and wrap the leg meat and breast meat around it until it is sealed. Fasten with a toothpick through the seam.

6. Lay the quail in a cast-iron skillet with 4 tablespoons of b.u.t.ter. Place the skillet in the oven and bake for 12 to 15 minutes, basting the top of the quail with b.u.t.ter three times during the process.

7. Remove from the oven, and remove the toothpicks carefully from each bird. Serve immediately.

In Nature's infinite book of secrecy

A little I can read.

-SHAKESPEARE

7.

A Moveable Hunt As if to prolong my visit in the land of luxury, a college cla.s.smate named Annabelle sends me a note inviting me to go hunting with her family in England over Thanksgiving. She had read in an alumni magazine about my newfound foray into the world of hunting and thought I might want to have the traditional British hunting experience.

"It is a really special event and I think that you'd love it," she says.

And so needing very little convincing, a week after Hill Country I drive through the English countryside toward a different kind of high-cla.s.s hunt, the kind we model ours after.

Two hours north of London, 6 miles to the west of Cambridge, is a village called Ellington. Some say it isn't a village at all but merely a hamlet, with ten brick houses, a church, and a village pub to call its own. The spines of the narrow roads leading here glisten in the fresh evening rain, sodden leaves smack the pa.s.sing cars, tires spatter through the puddles, and it feels like midnight at five o'clock. I arrive at a row of small brick houses lined up like siblings and glowing behind the spikes of a black iron fence. Where the spikes part to reveal fine gravel, I slow and turn left, and drive into the darkness, between the shadows of great conifers that continue down the row like a suspended reverie.

Past the small brick houses, at the end of the driveway, is a great red mansion in fading brick. A white door frames the silhouette of a woman. Around her neck is a rope of pearls that match her straight, pearl-colored hair. She says her name is Magdalen, and she speaks in an accent that is part high British, part Danish farmer. "Let's leave this wet night behind us," she says, as the mansion swallows us in.

In the drawing room, a large fire is purring, and pristine tea sandwiches are stacked in a pyramid, made of white bread with trimmed crusts, smoked salmon, and cuc.u.mber. There is an almond cake, too, dense and delectable. Magdalen pours milk into the bottom of porcelain teacups, their gilded edges twinkling, then dilutes it with very strong tea, exquisitely hot, that steams and blends with the salty salmon on our tongues. The room is pink and tufted. Cream and rose stripes of silk shine from the couch; thick curtains fall heavily from the high ceiling to the ground. The high windows are shuttered from the inside, white and wooden, and latch with a fat wooden arm. The fire cracks and spits, and elegant smiling Annabelle and her husband, Anderson, sit intertwined on one couch while Magdalen sits on the edge of another, talking about pheasants-"They say that the pheasant always walks toward the sun."

Preceded only by the smell of a pipe, puffing its tobacco like a small chimney, Magdalen's husband, Fergus, enters the room. He is carrying a gla.s.s bowl of ground pork studded with sage, and he is slowly mixing it with a fork as he walks. In the corner, he sits in a small chair, mixing quietly while we talk and sip, his clear, rimless spectacles stationed at the tip of his nose, the smoke from the pipe rising and mixing with his facade.

When the tea sandwiches and almond cake are finished, we move into the kitchen, where Fergus finishes a.s.sembling his pork mixture and peels soft-boiled eggs. He spreads a layer of ground pork on a cutting board, slathers it with Roquefort, then rolls a strip of it around a boiled egg. "You put the ship in the bottle," he says, demonstrating. He rolls the pork-covered egg in whole wheat flour and sets it on a plate, then repeats with the others, one by one.

In the next room, the breakfast room, we fill our leather-bound flasks with cherry brandy and sloe gin for the next morning's hunt, drinks that will keep us warm in the sunless British fields. While we siphon the brandy into the containers, Fergus stirs another bowl of pork and announces in a slow British staccato, "Time to go to the pub." And so, with the flasks full and the pork mix resting, we wrap ourselves in coats and rubber shoes, and walk out into the black night, among the shadows of the great trees again until we get to the end of the driveway where the wrought-iron spikes line the row of glowing brick houses. We make a left onto silent country blacktop, and a few hundred yards down, across a wooden footbridge, we come to a pub named the White Fox.

It is lively beyond the creaking door. A small fire burns at the end of a small stucco room that seems to contain the entire population of Ellington. Men stand grinning broadly, their chins raised slightly. They wear wool sweaters and corduroy and leather boots laced above their ankles. An old man with sunken lips talks about cricket, and I am told that he plays it better than anyone ever has before. Eyes twinkle and the laughter reverberates as the room gets warmer and people drink on, save for the bursts of cold air that enter with each new patron. The rule is that villagers buy a pitcher of beer in the order in which they enter the pub, and so pitchers of room-temperature British ales are pa.s.sed about, and ciders, too, and the room is filled with the movement of fluttering eyelids and blond heads, and a pretty girl floats from side to side behind the sticky, lacquered bar.

Tom the gamekeeper sits beside the fire drinking a Pink Lady, cider with a dash of port, a drink from the 1930s that is said to have rendered the French worthless when they drank it during wartime. People talk about the next morning's hunt, whether the fog and wind will behave and whether anyone will catch a woodc.o.c.k or the mystical, rare white-headed pheasant they call the Christopher Reeves, which once chased Fergus as he drove across the field in his green John Deere Gator. The villagers laugh and tell other stories about one another, because the community is, in truth, an extended family all dwelling side by side in the glowing brick houses of Ellington. And when they are done with their stories and their laughter, and the last pitcher has been emptied of its last drop of foam, people begin to trickle out, and we do, too, walking out under the lanterns laced with cobwebs, where the air smells like fish and chips lingering from the pub kitchen, back over the wooden footbridge, back along the silent country blacktop, to the doorstep of Ellington Estate.

At eight o'clock the next morning, the muted light leaks through the yellow taffeta curtains of my room, and I can hear a tinkling sound crescendo as Magdalen brings a tray of Earl Grey up the stairs and to the door. She knocks and sets down the tray, snaps on the lightbulb under the fluted lampshade with its ruffled edges, and pours my tea, the milk, as always, first. I sip it until it is gone, and eat a chocolate biscuit laced with orange marmalade, and when I return from the bathroom an invisible butler has already removed the tray.

Downstairs in the breakfast room are chocolate croissants and grapefruit and a chorus of jams. Soon I can hear the villagers come in the front door and head to the drawing room, where Fergus is already pouring cherry brandy into small crystal cups. The people are as cheery as they were the night before, but now instead of wearing corduroy and wool sweaters, they are wearing tweeds, and knee socks with ta.s.sels, and some are wearing rubber Wellingtons and olive-colored newsboy caps, and almost all of the men are wearing ties. One is even wearing a Mexican ammo belt, a ring of golden shot sh.e.l.ls clinging to the circ.u.mference of his belly.

The room fills and when everyone has arrived, the chatter subsides and Tom the gamekeeper pa.s.ses out the peg cards to the eight guns, which a.s.signs their shooting station, and explains the rules and the ch.o.r.eography of the day ahead. Fergus announces a ten-pound bonus to the shooters if they get a white-headed Christopher Reeves pheasant and a five-pound fine if they don't, and the room lets out a roar of laughter.

The tradition of this kind of driven shoot in England began with n.o.bility and is rooted in the cla.s.s system. It is almost always held on estates and is almost always an elaborate affair, if not quite as elaborate today as it once was. It is shooting, more than hunting, and I have even heard it called grocery shopping by my serious Texas hunter friends, because most of the work is done by those not shooting the guns. But if this is grocery shopping, then it is a formal and elegant form of it, one that British of n.o.ble descent practiced for centuries at home and in colonies, and a form that has now been adopted in part by the Texans and others in the United States.

A shoot requires advance planning on the part of the estate. Birds are placed in the fields weeks before the season begins so they can orient themselves to their surroundings and so the gamekeeper can ensure their health. The birds are encouraged to stay in the shooting area through the good animal husbandry of the gamekeeper, who makes sure the habitat and environment is appealing to them.

On the day of the hunt, the shooters, called guns, are placed in a.s.signed positions with a.s.sistants to help load their shotguns. When in position, a team of beaters, led by the gamekeeper, move through the areas of cover, swinging sticks or white flags to drive the game out. These events are called drives, because the birds are driven over a line where the guns wait patiently in their predetermined places, s.p.a.ced twenty to fifty yards apart, bellies full of cherry brandy and chocolate croissants.

In the drawing room, we guns now select our violet peg cards, then walk down the stone steps of the estate onto the gravel drive. We walk up the ramp into the back of a horse cart lined with wooden benches on either side, and pile in with our leather gun slings, puffing clouds of brandy-laden breath into the bitter air.

When we step out onto the first field, the ground is sodden and sucks against my rubber boots. A mythical scene of the English moors unfolds, the colors and the fog painted in beige and cream and gray. In the distance, an old, white-bearded man with a walking stick emerges from the mist, making his way along the bushes with his white flag, keeping a distance from the other beaters so his wobbly legs aren't lost in the thorns. As he approaches the guns, he looks like a sorcerer emerging from the pages of a book of legends, the tangled wires of his beard swaying as he waves his flag.

Traditionally, it was less prestigious to be a beater. It was the aristocracy who held the guns while the servants beat the bushes, managed the dogs, and carried the equipment. Today, in most cases, it is still about money; people usually pay several thousand dollars to be a gun in places that make a business out of this kind of hunting. But here at the Ellington shoot, it is more about preference. I am the only woman standing in a line of men, in their caps and tweeds, holding guns in the field. In front of me in the distance are the rest of the men and all of the women and city girls, giggling and chattering through the woods in their pink and olive-colored Wellies.

The blow of Tom's high-pitched horn pierces the picture as the first drive begins, and from far off I hear the pitter-pattering of more white flags slapping against the brush, as the beaters push the birds toward a flushing point. Sometimes the birds begin to flock in large numbers; sometimes they are partridge, sometimes pheasant, sometimes wood ducks. Sometimes the birds are smart and scurry ahead along the edge of the woods, rather than take to the sky.

The drives are twenty-five to fifty minutes long. They begin when Tom blows his horn and the beaters begin beating the bushes, and they end when the beaters reach the end of the wooded area and Tom blows his horn a second time. Each gun fires against the strip of sky in front and behind, and always above the tree line. Depending on the position they occupy and where the birds are breaking, the guns will get many or few birds, and so the guns rotate pegs at each drive to ensure they all get a shot.

The shots ring out in the misty air, the guns pausing only to reload-ancient, double-barreled over-unders and side-by-sides, some no doubt worth upward of $100,000. It feels a bit as I imagine wars used to be in ancient times; people lining up in an orderly fashion and simply shooting; waiting to see how the chips fall when it is all over. In my case, when it is all over, there is a colorful pheasant at my feet, but not the Christopher Reeves.

Once the second horn sounds, the dog handlers and their anxious dogs begin the task of retrieving all of the birds that have dropped. The birds are loaded on to the game cart and the beaters rea.s.semble to prepare for the next drive, as the guns walk up the ramp into the horse cart and ride the b.u.mpy ride to their next peg.

It is all extremely civilized. There are moments when I feel ashamed of how civilized I appear in my houndstooth coat and rubber Wellies, as birds drop from the air in an accelerating arch across the sky. But what I do like is that I touch the birds. I collect each one and carry it by its feet to the game cart. I inspect it, feel its weight in my hands, and internalize the moment. I can almost taste curried pigeon and smell roasted pheasant smothered in apples and cream. I conjure in my imagination sherry sauce to drizzle on roasted woodc.o.c.k, something I have never tasted but always dreamed of. I antic.i.p.ate the moment when Annabelle and I will stand in the cold bas.e.m.e.nt and pluck pigeon to take back to London for Thanksgiving dinner, and how I will have to hang my pheasants from a London fire escape for four days to age it well enough to eat. I don't think I ever aged a bird from my Manhattan fire escape. Nor did I pluck and gut one an hour before I served it, while my dinner guests looked on in horror. This is all new and strangely invigorating.

There are six drives altogether, some in the morning and some in the afternoon, with a break for elevenses-a snack break an hour before noon. Our elevenses takes place in the conservatory, after we have hung the birds in the larder in pairs of two. Tom, Fergus, and I tie a loop around each bird's neck and pull it snugly, then place one bird on either side of a wooden rafter so that they balance each other out. "You hang them by their head, not their feet; it's the natural flow of food," Tom says, contrary to French and American instructions I have seen for this.

The guns and the beaters file into the conservatory, and food follows them on silver platters-crisp cups filled with prawns and mayonnaise, mugs of steaming mushroom soup, sausage rolls, and Fergus's Scotch eggs fried and cut in half, yolks oozing. There are Fergus's famous Slogasms, sloe gin mixed with champagne, and more cherry brandy, too, which he uses to spike the mushroom soup.

Beyond the fogged windows of the conservatory, the dogs and their handlers run the span of green gra.s.s, while inside, silver cups pa.s.s from hand to hand, full of bubbles and pink liquid. I wonder how good people's shots will be after this, then let the thought drift past, joining once again in the revelry and accepting another Slogasm.

The beaters and the guns are standing under the orange vines that lace the ceiling of the greenhouse. They pat one another on the back, laugh at the thorns and the mud on their tweeds, and exclaim, "Good show!" and "Well done!" And then at last, their bellies full, people set out on the next drive, and I follow, a hundred-year-old double-trigger side-by-side balanced on my shoulder.

No two drives are exactly the same on these hunts-different locations, weather, wind, direction of light, and the birds make every time new. And each community makes it different. The hunt in itself becomes a kind of cultural litmus test as it varies from region to region. This Ellington hunt plays on the "us and them" quality of the English shoot. But in the same way I played house as a child, there is an air of make-believe, as if I were stepping into a game of Clue or a Bronte novel. There is even the requisite bit of drama from time to time, such as when a muntjac, a beast that is best described as a kind of small deer with horns, spears the side of a terrier, and in the distance we hear commotion among the beaters, and the whole hunt stops as a dog is hauled off to the vet for st.i.tches. There is still also that subtle hierarchy-this is the great estate and Fergus is the beloved patriarch of this domain. Despite all of this, though, there is an underlying sense of equality and respect between the villagers and him-they can be overheard saying that they like how inclusive he is with them, and he can be overheard saying, "If I were immersed in people just like me, I'd be pretty unbearable." And so this ancient game of "the guns and the beaters," continues until we reach the last field, strategically chosen because it is adjacent to the pub.

According to the villagers, there is a place on the Devon coast, a wonderful dreamy sort of place, where the birds can be seen flying off cliffs 120 feet high, and all you can do is stand in the moorlands and watch them in awe and forget to shoot. As I stand in the meadow now, I see a bird that I have never seen before, but I know what it is simply by how I feel when I see it.

"Wow, look at that!" I say, watching it fly by.

"It's a dodgy woodc.o.c.k," Fergus says, observing through a puff of smoke from his green Gator.

The woodc.o.c.k is small, with a needle for a beak and a thirty-mile-per-hour speed. I have heard stories about its delectable dark meat and have wanted to taste it, but all I can do is watch the moment fly by, quick as a flash, as I stand mesmerized by its acrobatic flight.

By the end, I have bagged several ducks and several pheasant, and there are pigeon and partridge in the larder as well, from other people's shots. But the truth is, no one really knows which birds are precisely whose, and that is decidedly not the point of this hunt. It may be the most social hunt I have ever experienced.

The whole village walks back to the estate for three o'clock lunch that soon drifts into six o'clock. The beaters and the guns eat in separate rooms, another mark in the game of "us and them." But after several courses have been served and consumed, the beaters enter the dining room where the guns sit, and line up around the table. They praise the guns for their great skill and their success and their general standing as superior citizens of the world. And after everyone has nodded and clapped, they file back to their room and we all continue to eat course after course of lamb and potatoes. Everywhere there is cut crystal and silver cups; and the sound of wine splashing, soon followed by crimson port; candlelight that twinkles over shakers of cinnamon and salt; and the gurgling of laughter that fills the room and echoes in time from the room that holds the beaters. We eat cheese and biscuits and I begin to hear the cigar cutters snipping and the ring of the cigar lighter popping on, and the flavors of cigars and Camembert mix with the smell of clementine on my fingers.

When the guns have had enough wine and food to make them generous, they file into the beaters' dining room and line up in front of the granite mantle all the way to the end of the table. Someone leads the way in, saying, "We saw your work and it was impressive. We saw your dogs and they were fierce. And you looked nice doing it." The room erupts in laughter. Someone else lifts a gla.s.s to Fergus for hosting the shoot, and carafes of cut crystal are pa.s.sed quickly to fill the gla.s.ses for the toast. "May I drink with you?" Fergus asks, as the gla.s.ses are raised and tapped together.

The rest of the evening is an everlasting medley of food and drink and chatter and smoke. "Put a breeze behind the white wine," someone says. "Good luck to you," Fergus says as people begin to leave. "Love to Sue. Cheerio, then."

Fergus turns to a young man next to him. "Why don't you propose to her, for f.u.c.k's sake?" He takes a thoughtful puff on his pipe and then, "If you're going to make the girl move out there, at least do the proper thing. I'll give you a month and check up on you. Get off the pot, for chrissake. You can't keep these girls on the line for year after year after year."

Around the room, chunks of ash fall and flake on the marble ashtrays, and I begin to feel a bit dizzy. My throat begins to sting from the cigar, when all I can do is wash it down with port, and just when the revelers begin to seem generally pickled, Fergus announces it is time to go to the pub again.

A crowd of young people, still in their Wellies, step out onto the gravel driveway and begin to head to the pub. Drowsy and finished with the bone-chilling cold, I join Fergus in his antique navy blue Bentley. He snaps on the radio while we wait for Magdalen, and loud orchestra music begins to roar. Cymbals clash and trombones bellow and vibrate in the crevices of the old leather-smelling interior, and soon we are driving away from the stone pillars, through the colonnade of conifers, over the clicking of the cattle guard, stopping to pick up one of the villagers who was the "top gun" of the day. "Is His Lordship still sleeping?" Fergus says over his cell phone. "Give him a kick and tell him I'm outside your front door." And just like the story of the Hare and the Turtle, the young people walk by making clouds with their steaming breath, while we wait for the villager who stumbles out of bed, still in his clothes, and skips out the door, into the Bentley.

Inside the pub again, the silver mugs dangle from the bar hooks, glittering, and the room smells of fried fish again, and of roasting nuts. Pickled herring on toast is the special of the night, but the villagers are here for pints. They stand in the twilight of their drinking, some looking weary, some invigorated with each successive sip.

The gamekeeper's wife, Emma, the expert wild game cook in the village, sits besides the fireplace and I listen to her talk of curried pheasant kebabs smothered in yogurt, and layers of pheasant breast and cream cheese wrapped in bacon, and pheasant stir-fry. Her paintings of springer spaniels peer down at us from above the mantle, as her husband, Tom, leans in to give me notes on the dogs-that springers die half-trained, and Labs are born half-trained. We talk about the birds and how we will age them, whether the tradition of this hunt will include aging the birds until their skin is green as used to be done. "They used to hang them until their heads popped off," Tom says, smiling. But for him it isn't necessary. "People don't like food high these days," he says; "just put it in the chiller for three to four days."

The villagers stand in a cl.u.s.ter in the pub, the beaters with gra.s.s stains on their knees, the guns with mud caked to their heels. They hold their pints high to their chests, and through an amber liquid crowd, I see the face of Fergus, sitting on a stool at the end of the bar, the long tendrils of his eyebrows in disarray, a hint of amus.e.m.e.nt in his azure eyes. The villagers buzz around him, and they talk about the strangeness of American politics, and the Oxford University Beagles and Hounds-a university hunting club. Shooting clubs are common in British schools, in the same way debate club or sailing is-it is considered one of those essential life skills that make you a well-rounded person. They ask why we don't have shooting clubs in American schools.