Girl Hunter Part 3

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

3 cups turkey stock (page 214)

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon lingonberry sauce or red currant jelly, plus more for serving

1/4 cup plain yogurt

1. In a skillet on medium heat melt 2 tablespoons of the b.u.t.ter until it bubbles. Add the shallots and garlic and sweat over low heat until soft and translucent, about 4 minutes. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt to help release the moisture. Turn off the heat and let cool for 5 minutes.

2. In a mixing bowl, combine the turkey, egg, bread crumbs, sherry, Worcestershire sauce, parsley, allspice, nutmeg, cardamom, salt, and pepper. Add the cooled shallot mixture and incorporate.

3. Shape the turkey mixture into 1-inch b.a.l.l.s and place on a sheet tray or plate. You should end up with about twenty meatb.a.l.l.s.

4. Heat the turkey stock in a small pot and bring to a simmer, then turn off the heat and set aside.

5. In the skillet, melt the remaining 4 tablespoons of b.u.t.ter over medium heat. Cook the b.a.l.l.s for about 1 minute on each side, just so they are browned but not cooked through. Depending on the size of your pan, you may need to cook them in batches so as not to overcrowd the pan. With a slotted spoon or tongs, transfer to a clean plate.

6. Once all of the meat has been browned, use the pan juices to make a sauce. Whisk in the flour until it is thick and clumpy and let cook for a few minutes while you whisk. A thick paste will form. Next, whisk in the warm stock a little at a time until you have a light brown sauce.

7. Let the sauce thicken slightly, then return the turkey meatb.a.l.l.s to the pan. Cook, uncovered, over low heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce reduces further. Turn off the heat and whisk in the lingonberry sauce and yogurt. Serve immediately with additional lingonberry sauce on the side.

Also try: wild boar, antlered game, upland game birds, rabbit, squirrel, duck No, I'm not a good shot, but I shoot often.

-THEODORE ROOSEVELT

2.

The Village Every year, as hunting season begins in the heat of an Indian summer, my first hunt is in the Village.

While I drive on the thin line of blacktop through the southeast portion of Arkansas, the mist gets thicker as the earth slinks away from the sun. There is something elemental here, evidence of a once vibrant life that's pa.s.sed. Many things are half-collapsed. I see overturned trucks and pervasive rust. Some towns come and go with each flutter of the eye, and some linger a little bit longer . . . like McGehee, a town that emits a sudden flash of light in the gray night; where far back in a cornfield is a football stadium so bright and so polished that for a moment it is the most gentrified city in the south. The stadium is full, containing 3,881 townsfolk and all of their pride. And then I see why-a rough-hewn crooked wooden sign on my right, hand painted by a townsman, announces that in the next thirty seconds, I will be pa.s.sing through the home of the Owls, the State Football Champions of Arkansas.

Along the lake is a house that smells of cooking, and a housekeeper named Betty, who is still repairing the ravages of the night before as the sun sets again. Men sit in antique lawn chairs, regarding the mystic order of the heavens, wondering what part of it all is theirs. Their families are called the Mancinis and the Berberas and the Pagonis, the descendents of the Italian and Lebanese immigrants that came to this place in search of wealth.

On the great lawn beside the lake, a black barrel smoker slowly rotates the bodies of twenty-five chickens, their juices dripping, their skin bewitched to a dark gold. Whiskey and thirty-year-old Chateauneuf-du-Pape appear from the depths of the cellar. There are ribs soaked in apple juice, cooked until the edges are rendered to a caramel crust, and tabbouleh and hummus, and crawfish corn m.u.f.fins to honor the visitors from New Orleans, and a porcelain bowl of baked beans as sweet as candy and musty with hickory smoke.

In every direction are the flickering embers of lighted tobacco floating across sun-weathered eyes, smoke-flavored conversations, and a man injecting an imagined noun with the wave of his hand. On the mantel, a Bundt cake drips with sticky white icing.

Roger Mancini leans his shiny head back on a green antique lawn chair, his teeth clamped firmly down on the cigar protruding from the side of his mouth. He is conveying his wisdom to some young men who lean in intently: "Don't be wishin' you were fishin'," I hear him say. He turns to listen to his Italian neighbor Nero play his guitar, making up lyrics as he goes. They take turns; Roger interjects a few, then Nero returns. And then more people come and sit and sip and sing, and a few others play, too, and it sounds like poetry.

Across the great sloping lawn, the boys on a party barge can be heard howling in the distance, an octave too high, weaving along the lake between the cypress trees suspended on the surface of the water.

Inside, one of the wealthiest men in Arkansas sits at the long mahogany table and tilts his head back and looks up at the ceiling. He will spend five months of this year on his boat, drifting through the Southern Hemisphere, and the rest in this unknown village, deep in the Delta.

Ca.s.sidy walks in with a bag of bread from his commercial bakery in New Orleans, and the Commish glides in and out with the rib grease on his hands. He is a man of few words, but when he does talk, people pause to listen.

When you leave this place to find sleep, you always go kicking into the night, through the bug swarms in the pool of a single fluorescent streetlight, the hound dogs prancing after you with saliva spraying from their jowls. And you look at the clock and it is one. And almost immediately afterward, you look at the clock and find it is five. And you climb out of bed with the taste of whiskey still in your blood and quickly swallow some instant coffee and a banana.

This is the rhythm of the Arkansas dove hunt. This is how I always find it year after year, untouched by time. Dove hunting is a social affair, to be sure, and so I imagine there are many variations on the same theme around the country on this day, the opening day of dove season.

The Commish always arrives ten minutes early in his white pickup. It is one thing in life you can rely on. His truck is full of gear that changes only slightly, depending on what is available to hunt. But it always contains the cooler, full of ice, water, Gatorade, c.o.ke, and beer. And there are many articles of camouflage, from chairs to hats to rubber boots. And there is a dog named Humphrey, a golden Lab who likes to put his tongue to the wind as we drive swiftly along the dirt road in the unquiet darkness of the morning.

The Commish is fifty-eight and is both a planter and a banker. He oversees a chain of banks, and owns and operates thousands of acres of farmland. As we drive along the road together, the flatland and rich alluvial soil are part.i.tioned-700 acres here, 600 acres there-and a lot of what you see is his. In the Village, people are many things at once-a planter and a lawyer, a storeowner and a doctor. This is how people have always forged a life for themselves along the great Mississippi Delta.

When the first pioneer farmers entered the Mississippi River Valley, they found a formidable and forbidding world of dense forests and swamps that evoked a primeval world. There were enormous stands of oak, gum, cottonwood, hickory, pecan, elm, pine, and cypress, some more than five hundred years old.

These early-nineteenth-century farmers carved out plantations and small farms for themselves and set out on a long struggle to cultivate the Delta-a struggle that meant controlling floods, draining swamps, and clearing the land. The land along the powerful Mississippi River was continually crushed by heavy floods, including the most devastating Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which changed lives for generations. Running in some places to a depth of 100 feet, the flooding also left behind even richer soil.

This place has always been a slowly cascading sequence of anomalies; a place where people fought the elements and the river for decades to become great established families, transforming their lives from hunting panthers in the overgrown cane jungle that engulfed their plantations, to attending European opera festivals-this place would come to be known as the Alluvial Empire. There was a time not long ago when cotton was king and the settlers of this region were considered "the aristocrats of the earth."

The Mississippi River and its wild chocolate waves at once created great wealth and great destruction for those who fought to tame it. Above all, the river perpetuated the plantation system, which prospered in the antebellum period but finally collapsed under the pressure of the Great Depression and World War II. Sharecropping replaced slavery after the Civil War, as Chinese and then Italians migrated in hopes of owning land. They had a cashless economy that relied on the rise and fall of cotton to fuel commerce, keeping many tenant farmers dependent on landowners.

The contemporary Delta remains a product of its plantation heritage. There still remains a modern form of sharecropping, now called tenant farming. But no one lives in the few remaining old plantation homes that glide by our window as we drive, because no one can afford the rent-another reminder that poverty runs deep here, as does old wealth.

The Delta has one of the lowest population densities in the American South, sometimes less than one person per square mile. The demographics are the same as they were before the Civil War. This is one of those preserved places, its authenticity both inspiring and heartbreaking at once. It is where you make your own destiny and you make your own food.

The Commish talks most when he is on his way to a hunt. He will tell you things, such as why his state is so poor. "Farming methods have changed," he says quite simply. "And the population declined as the farming methods changed from human hands to mechanized labor." The young people leave, too, reducing the state income and increasing illiteracy and unemployment, leading inexorably to extreme poverty.

When we arrive, the other trucks are parked in a cl.u.s.ter on the outskirts of the field, all the boys and men stand in their camouflage, yawning and sluggish, and sucking in hot coffee. The Commish stops and rolls down his window to check on them, then continues on, along the dirt road, his truck tossing clay in its wake.

He finds a promising patch of land and sets up two small folding chairs in front of a field of dead sunflowers, facing the cotton-millions of milky white b.a.l.l.s of it that begin to glow iridescently as the orange sun rises, turning the boys in the distance into black silhouettes.

We sit in silence and watch the sunrise and feel the orange heat on our faces and the bubbles of Diet c.o.kes on our tongues.

"You know what time it is?" the Commish says.

"What time?" I reply.

"Cigar time."

I begin to smell the strands of sweet tobacco as the sun begins to tear through the field, and the doves begin to flutter in. They descend, silently, sparingly, toward the wheat that has been scattered by the farmers to sweeten the field. Killdeer weave in and out of the doves and I try not to mix them up as I swing my shotgun and slap the trigger.

Dove hunting centers around their feeding patterns: Doves feed in the morning at sunrise, and in the late afternoon, and because this marks the beginning of hunting season in many states, you will see many hunters out twice per day at first, satisfying their thirst after the eternal spring and summer drought.

"Do you remember your first hunt?" I ask, while we watch the sun rise.

"My first hunt was a dove hunt with my dad and his friends. I was probably five or six years old," he says. The Commish talks about doves and hunting and life, in equal parts words and silence, in between the crisp report of his Benelli shotgun. He is one of the rare people who can say just as much with silence as with words.

"Any highway is like a buffet line for doves," he finally says out loud, as Humphrey retrieves and drops a dove into his palm.

What he means is that all of the fields, now in their most fertile state, are a distraction for the doves, which draws them elsewhere and sometimes makes the sit-and-wait method less successful, as the doves dip in and out of the vast buffet of farmland sandwiched on either side of the thin line of blacktop cutting through southeast Arkansas. This season, though, is expected to be one of the best dove seasons ever.

"The dove population is up this year because of a dry spring and summer, which increased their nesting success," he says. "We usually plant sunflowers, which doves love to feed on. Some harvested agricultural fields are great places to hunt during certain times of the season. Water holes are great afternoon spots, also."

But for most hunters like the Commish, any hunt is about the experience itself, sitting here and watching the sun rise with his dog and his cigar, not really the amount of game they take.

"My wife has always viewed hunting as 'the other woman,'" he eventually says.

We sit for hours, or maybe minutes, longer; time pa.s.ses differently here. As the doves are fetched one at a time and added to the pile, this hunt feels strangely anticlimactic. It is beautiful here, it is peaceful (save for the blasts into the sky), but am I allowed to sit like this when I hunt? Don't I have to experience a little pain? I think about this as tendrils of cigar smoke float by and the Commish asks me about the book I am writing, and about my father.

"He's a vegan," I say.

"A who?"

"A vegan."

"What's that?"

"Someone who doesn't eat meat or dairy or other animal products."

"I never heard of that," he says, letting out another shot and sending Humphrey darting into the cotton field.

In the end, the sun casts shadows onto the theatrical faces of the fading sunflowers, as we fold up the chairs and carry our gear to the truck.

We congregate with the boys and men back where we left them and begin to clean the birds. The men puff on cigars and a few of the boys raise their eyebrows at me as I begin to pluck a dove. It is most common to breast the small birds and toss the rest. But when I tell them I am a bit of a purist, they pluck, too. And I show them how to gut the bird and cut off the gland at the tail and they watch intently and begin to pluck some more, and then we form an a.s.sembly line and soon have fourteen plucked doves among us.

As we drive away, the air smells of burning rice straw, and the fields are a vision of black and gold stripes. I begin to notice that some people walk along the sides of the infinite roads because they don't have cars. The Commish doesn't react because it is such a familiar sight. He tells me about the time he met the Horse Whisperer, an Australian man who walked the roads all the way from Nashville and could tame a wild horse in an afternoon. But even an anomaly like that is commonplace here.

We go to breakfast at LJ's, the only place to go, where the bathroom soap is thinned out with water, and the morning soap opera plays on mute; where an elderly couple sits side by side reading the paper, and a pair of curly-haired mother-daughter clones sit across from each other, eating their pancakes in silence.

Ca.s.sidy and Peter sit at the end of our table, eating a morning cheeseburger and talking about the best sausage maker in town, Jimmy Little.

The Commish extends his arm slowly to reveal his watch from under his sleeve, then brings it to his face and squints his dark eyes through rimless gla.s.ses. "Jimmy Little's funeral is in ten minutes," he says as if announcing the price of corn.

The table is silent again as we eat our western omelets and greasy, succulent hash.

The rest of the day in the Village consists of a deep afternoon nap and a visit with Roger Mancini in his antique workshop; and then the Commish heads over to his farmland, where one of his workers has a photographic memory and will recite the baseball scores from the last twenty years if you ask him to.

But then at night, the stage lights up again, the lake reflects the moonlight like one thousand angry diamonds, the gla.s.ses jingle, and the cigars smoke.

The walls of Roger Mancini's smoking room resound with the sounds of Faulkner as he imparts his wisdom to the young people again, a kind of wisdom that will linger with them for days after. "If it's not of substance, it will never be a success. Nothing in history has been," and "Be happy with what you're doing," and "If the world can live without Winston Churchill, they can live without me," and then howling laughter as someone says, "This wine is so good that if it was any better, G.o.d would have kept it for himself!"

We sit around the mahogany table again and eat dove putach, a traditional Italian stew filled with tomatoes and wine and whole doves. And then beer-battered fried dove breast, and then cold poached dove and pears in brandy.

"This meal makes me want to learn to shoot better," someone says. "My plate looks like a biology cla.s.s," someone else says, chuckling as he wipes the vestiges of putach from his plate with a piece of Ca.s.sidy's bread. "We're suffering from extreme comfort."

It is not recorded when this lake became a lake. Some suspect it was when the Mississippi River changed course and the forces of erosion cut the bend in her flow, forming a crescent-shaped lake. This is the place where it all began for me and the place I keep coming back to. It is where I missed my first turkey and where I tasted my first hog slowly smoking in a dome-shaped grill. It is a place of such sweet sadness, of nostalgia, of blues pioneers, and in some ways of hope for what could be. It is a place some people like to ignore because it doesn't smack of success and commerce. But it is a place that can change the meaning of success for some; where you can still find comfort in the simplest of things-in the wild tonic of the rain, and the salty crunch of a simple fried dove harvested with your own hands on an orange morning and consumed in the same night. It is a place where time moves differently, a place where you can settle into a deep vinous sleep.

It is all so easy, so deceptively easy, to hunt and gather and live well here if you have means. It is because this place, of all the places I've ever met, is untouched by time. It is easy to live off the land when you have no other choice. In a way it is choice that plagues our modern food system, our expectation that there will be seven kinds of peanut b.u.t.ter on the shelves of the grocery store, and twelve brands of boneless, skinless chicken breast in the refrigerated aisle. And I wonder if living off the land successfully is possible anywhere but in the Village.

Beer-Battered Fried Dove Breast