That's a Fowl Shot

I stepped out into the pristine, close-cropped field, drank deeply of the frosty dawn air, frowned, and checked the bottoms of my boots. Both were clean. My next sour breath walloped me out of my pre-coffee stupor, and I remembered that everything within miles of Shrub, Colorado smells like the sales barn on the edge of town. For those of you who have never ventured into cattle country, a sales barn is a place where ranchers congregate to buy and sell their livestock; logistically, this involves thousands of big, tightly-quartered animals standing in their own excrement. For those of you who aren't familiar with the smell, imagine standing at an exhumation next to a bonfire fueled entirely by beef jerky.

But the cattle trade, however interesting, was not what brought me to the plains of northeastern Colorado--I was there with my mother and grandparents to hunt pheasant.

That should be qualified: my grandfather was hunting pheasant, and the rest of us were along as low-quality bird dog substitutes. But though I wouldn't be shooting, the trip was a windfall. First and foremost, I got to spend time with my grandparents and my mother. For another thing, I exist mostly as a tweed-clad metrosexual in Manhattan, and I figured that killing wild animals would be a good way to get in touch with my salt-of-the-earth virility. And as an extra enticement, when I get bored at Columbia gatherings, I can bait my fellow partygoers, who are sure to be appalled by anything to do with shotguns.

The reason for the trip was also gastronomic, of course. Pheasant is arguably the most important game bird in Europe and the United States, and I was looking forward to feasting on pheasant wrapped in bacon and roasted, or combined with pork, cognac, and truffles in an earthy terrine. This, however, was not the main point. After all, pheasant can be found in the freezers of many well-heeled markets, and fresh pheasant is available from D'Artagnan, an upstate specialty food purveyor. Even more than eating pheasant back at home, I wanted to be directly complicit in the chase, in finding a pheasant alive and well, and dispatching it for the sake of dinner. I've felt for a long time that, growing up in cities, it's too easy to take for granted the fact that an animal dies every time I order food, and I reasoned that to eat in a less casual, more mindful way, I should occasionally join the hunt.

So there I was at dawn in Shrub, all tricked out in hunting gear, and unlike my grandfather--who looks exceedingly cool in red flannels--I was feeling a little out of my league, like a middle-aged housewife in cargo pants. By the time I got to the car, my grandfather was already sitting shotgun with the 2003/2004 Walk-In Program Atlas, mapping a route. Pheasant hunting in Colorado involves tromping through "habitat"--brush, cornstalks, stubby trees, and tall grasses where pheasants can nest and take cover from natural predators and people like us--to flush pheasants into the air for a clear shot. Trouble is, most of the land is privately owned, and over the past decade ranchers and farmers have demanded increasingly dear fees for the privilege of hunting on their property. To avoid becoming like Great Britain, where the pheasant hunt is a natty rite of privilege, the Colorado Division of Wildlife sponsors the Walk-In Program to keep the sport democratic. Now in its third year, the program, which pays private landowners to open sections of land to anyone with a $20 Walk-In Permit, has enrolled around 160,000 acres of habitat.

Unfortunately, many of the Walk-In areas we visited weren't fit for pheasant--the chances of finding birds in the low, sparse grasses were about as good as finding the Rothschilds summering in New Jersey. At the end of the day, we left empty-handed. I very nearly missed out on the ennobling project of closer contact with the origins of my food, but we were in for a last stroke of luck--a steak house named after a John Wayne movie, cooking up thick slabs of beef from the sales barn just blocks away.