sometimes far afield

Jugging Hare

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Still busy working lots and messing about outdoors relatively little. However, a while back we managed a morning duck hunt followed by a walk for quail. While on that quail hunt, a fine black-tailed jackrabbit jumped up beside me and took off to the rear. I had just been talking to someone about the fact that I'd been intending to try eating a jackrabbit for some time using one of the many European hare recipes, so as soon as this guy hit the top of a leap and before he got too far out, I gave him the top barrel, trying for mostly head.

Once back home, we skinned and dressed the fairly large buck jack rabbit. Abandoning a chance at true authenticity, I failed to save the blood for thickening my sauce. Nonetheless, I marinated the legs over night in red wine, onion, and herbs in a combination of the recipes from The River Cottage Cookbook and Fergus Henderson's The Whole Beast. The saddles I boned out, yielding a surprising amount of meat in two fillets.

I browned the legs and then set them in the oven for a long braise with wine, stock and mirepoix. I then deboned the meat and reduced the sauce before returning the meat to it, again following Fearnley-Whittingstall and Henderson for the most part.

The saddle fillets I rubbed with a bit of salt and cracked black pepper, then seared in a hot cast iron skillet and rested in a warm oven, making a quick red wine sauce (not quite bordelaise, lacking demi-glace) in the same skillet. We accompanied all this with braised red cabbage, mashed parsnips, and crispy roasted potato wedges. Hare 2 ways:

So, how was it? Very good- surprisingly sweet and somewhat reminiscent of mourning dove. I was a bit concerned while dressing out the jack- he was a big one and smelled quite strong. None of that could be found in the final result, with the saddles providing the most distinct flavor but still quite mild. Also, there was a surprising amount of meat on him- I'll take the occasional jack in the future as more than an experiment. Definitely worth a try for a winter evening's meal or three.

Happy '12

2011-12-31T16:56:00.002-07:00

Hope all you all had a good 2011 and have a better & wetter 2012!

You can

2011-10-09T21:45:00.001-06:00

see our house from here:

One of the things you have to love about New Mexico is that most places within the state's borders, you can see a pretty decent mountain. Of course, it might be a hundred miles away, but there is always high country on the horizon. The view above is from a mountain pretty near (that is to say, under a hundred miles) to our new digs. From this peak given a moderately clear day, you can see to where we are down on the plains. Under two hours from dusty heat and agriculture to aspens, fir, and cool breezes.

web miscellany

2011-07-10T18:36:00.004-06:00

A few changes to the blog roll. I've removed a couple of blogs that look to be defunct or not quite started, though I try not to be hasty about such things given my own lapses in posting. I have hopes that Hubert Hubert will start after rabbits again and that McIntyre and Chappell will commit pixel to screen rather than mere word to page.

Also, I've added a few blogs with simpatico content- Greg McReynolds of Mouthful of Feathers has a solo project where he writes about shotguns, a subject of infinite fascination to some of us. It is "Shotgun Chronicle". Also, Mark Coleman's "Wingshot", a blog of upland hunting, has been needing to be added for a while now, as has Gary Thompson's "Silk Lines and Paper Hulls" about upland hunting and fly fishing.That lucky dog is off to fish the Green Drake Hatch. Meanwhile, we had our last precipitation in February and it was over 100 for 23 out of 30 days last month down here. I'm not bitter or anything, I just hope we get a little rain so I can assuage my frustration by hunting quail in my shirtsleeves in January. Also, neither last nor least A has a blog up, sort of a different perspective of some of the same things you see here and I've added the New Mexico Wildlife Federation to the list of conservation links.

Celebrating Independence Day

2011-07-04T17:15:00.012-06:00

Well, one good way might be to barbecue. Outdoors, fire (only in a grill, plenty of other fire in the SW), beer, food- something any of those who fought for the nation's independence and ideals would likely be in favor of.

Perhaps ribs- here are country style ribs and a couple of racks of spareribs, rubbed with Mexican oregano, black pepper, salt, sweet paprika, powdered chipotle, red pepper flakes, allspice, and a pinch each of cinnamon and cumin. After spending most of the day in the rub, they came out of the refrigerator to get up to room temperature and went onto a slow fire with some chunks of oak and pecan on top.

Indirect heat only.

After two hours and change, we started brushing the ribs with barbecue sauce that we stirred up while the ribs were seasoning:

Recipe:

This is a good one if you like a sauce that it more acidic and tart, rather than sweet. The black coffee and the lime juice account for the acidic note. Another hour on the heat with frequent brushings of sauce made for a nice glaze and gave the meat enough time to break down and get tender. Not bad, even if I'm saying so myself.

As for us, in full disclosure those ribs are from last week. We've spent this past weekend alternating between goofing off and working. Up to Santa Fe for a wine festival and dinner with friends at a nice restaurant, then down to Abq. to do some things with a house that is, with any luck at all, nearly completely sold.

From Santa Fe the view of the Jemez Range was spectacular. From the mesas way down toward Cochiti and nearly as far south as Santa Ana, plumes of smoke ranging from small to darned big stretched all the way up to Santa Clara lands. The whole east side of that country is burning, one place or another. Not the fireworks anyone is looking for.

Driving south, though, we passed through some pretty good storms. It looks like the summer thundershowers are coming in, at least up in the mid and northern parts of the state. With any luck they'll knock down those fires pretty soon. Would that they work their way south, too.

Happy 4th!

ducking out

2011-06-20T05:49:00.001-06:00

There is a little water down here. The river's blue line across the map is more thin than that drawn by the Rio Grande, but like almost anywhere else people settled in the Southwest, water flows. In addition, there are playa lakes in wet years and some more permanent ponds along the river valley. Consequently, there is some waterfowl hunting. On the last day of this last season, A, Booker and I headed out to some public access ponds to give the birds a try.

Unfortunately, the wind never did pick up, the weather was relatively warm and the birds, predictably, did not fly.

Those of us who hunt ducks learn that mirrored ponds, while photogenic, are of little help in attracting birds. Once it became clear that the wind wasn't going to kick up and the birds would not be trading around, we packed up to head out. Once I emerged from the reeds, a bird did flush from a bit further down the edge and flew, well, mostly flew, for cover. End of the season and all, I swung and fired, only to see him pitch into thick reeds where it took Booker a good fifteen minutes to nose him out.

Books did make the retrieve, though, the only one all season. I did it for the dog and, in the end, they all taste the same in gumbo, right?

"At length my dear Marquis..."

2011-06-10T06:12:00.001-06:00

"...I am become a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, and under the shadow of my own Vine and my own Fig-tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, I am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments...."
George Washington, Letter to Marquis de LaFayette, February 1, 1784

Already a private citizen, I'm a long way from retirement so this quote is mostly an excuse to show off our burgeoning figs, for which we have high hopes in this warmer clime. I first read the portion of Washinton's letter where he expressed his desire to return to Mount Vernon years ago and, for some reason, the bit about "my own vine and my own fig tree" has always stuck. No grapes planted, though. Melons, eggplant, green beans, black eye peas, squash, okra, tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, dill, basil, thyme oregano, tarragon, artichokes, currants, serviceberries, cherries, and peaches, yes, but grapes no, at least not yet.

quail around the new digs

2011-06-05T12:25:00.002-06:00

So, this move has brought us down into quail territory, lower & hotter than Albuquerque with more grassland and more birds.The little bit of driving around we've done, I've seen a lot of country that looks to me like it ought to be really good for blue quail (provided it ever rains).

We did get out a bit during the last season, scouting some nearby BLM and Open Gate lands. Our first foray, we found tracks near a windmill and then bumped the covey, which outsmarted & outran us pretty quickly.

Life & work intervened and it wasn't until the very end of the season that we found ourselves out again. We hit the area around that windmill again, working through a fair amount of pretty big mesquite, when Booker the Chessie disappeared and didn't respond to calls. He turned up sixty yards away having cornered a big porcupine in a mesquite bush and unsure what to do with it.

Books managed to get too close, though:

This required getting back to the truck and breaking out a pair of pliers. The quills in his chest were barely into the skin, but a couple of those in his chin were deep enough to hurt quite a bit when I pulled them out. Books didn't offer to bite, he just tried to keep me from getting at the deep ones. After a careful check to make sure we got them all and that none of the quills had broken off, a big drink of water and we were off to see if we couldn't find some other birds.

Some miles of driving and a couple of big loops walking and all we'd found were more tracks, a sunning badger, and a few antelope. We were headed back toward pavement when a covey of fifteen or so birds flushed across the road and hit the ground running. As I pulled up, jumped out, and started jogging up on the birds it occurred to me that I was all alone. Booker and A are both neophytes to the ways of blue quail and didn't fully appreciate the need to get on the birds and get the covey broken up so we could hunt singles before they all ran into the next county. I might have been a bit short in my explanation and A wasn't really aware that it's ok to run with a loaded shotgun, at least when you're trying to get a bunch of scurrying blue quail to flush. We did get them up though, and, between that flush and catching up to a couple of singles, we managed to scratch down a couple of birds and get Booker a couple of retrieves. One of those retrieves involved a leap over a prickly pear followed by a running snatch on a bird that wasn't quite dead yet. Not stylish, but exciting. The rest of the covey just melted away and disappeared, as blues are so very good at.

You can see the reason for the name "scaled quail":

On the rest of the way out we came across another covey, this one classic late season- small and wise to the ways of the world. They flushed a hundred yards from the truck, hit the ground running, split up and then flushed wild again. Good seed stock.

Here's hoping for a little rain so we have some birds for Books to learn on.

pheasant

2011-05-29T12:45:00.000-06:00

Over 100 F today with a 30 mph wind- our part of the Southwest is a sunny blast furnace waiting for the next fire to start and looking for a little rain if we're to have any quail or a fawn crop. Work still has the best of me, but we did get out to chase pheasants last December on a bit of a whirlwind trip. Let's think of cooler times- Up to North Texas after work on Friday, back Sunday afternoon. Five hundred miles in the truck and a couple on foot. Fewer birds than last year, but good fun, family, dogs, and we found some.

I had to go to my old faithful Citori, up there on the left, as a bit of a contretemps that ensued when Booker the Chessie lept out of the truck (& over me in the process) and jumped another dog left me with a stiff hand and made the double trigger on the LC Smith hard to manage. The o/u probably shoots better for me, anyway. More impressive was my Dad's work with his old Ithaca 37- thousands of rounds at dove, quail, & etc. have made those two a pretty deadly combination.

Back in NM and a few days later, A and I decided to see if the current trend for buttermilk fried chicken would lend itself to the wilder taste and drier texture of pheasant. Pheasant plains style, as it were:

Ever vigilant quality control:

Since we're now Southern plains, we added black-eyed peas, rice, gravy, and greens to the fried pheasant.

It all worked pretty well. The buttermilk did help keep the meat moist and the tang from it went well with the pheasant. We'll have to do it again, though likely in different weather.

not dead yet

2011-02-06T10:46:00.002-07:00

Three months is a longer hiatus than I intended or wanted. Duck season has come & gone, quail is nearly over, and we've only been out a couple of times for short days. More on those soon.

In the meantime, the new job is good, but challenging and very time consuming.
It requires many twelve hour and longer days full of last minute developments and has led to the neglect of family, friends, the dog, guns, the blog, reading, finishing up the move and all sorts of other things. As I settle in a bit more, that time pressure will ease, I hope. In the meantime, sporadic blogging should commence.

If you really need the reference, it's here.

There'll Be Some Changes Made

2010-11-04T18:35:00.001-06:00

I'm not too big on putting a whole bunch of personal information on the blog. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but the personal stuff (except as it applies to hunting, fishing, tramping about, cooking, reading, and so forth) isn't really relevant.

In any event, by way of explanation as to why my already sparse blogging is going to get even lighter and the context of SFA is going to change a bit; A and I are moving, transitioning from high desert to the boundary of the Southern Great Plains and the Northern Chihuahuan Desert. The reason for the move is a job, of course. I've been out of work for a stretch and hey, you go where the work is. Although headed for flatlands, we'll still be in NM and have a bit of elevation, along with living within sight of mountains (though, being NM, that can still be a good part of a day's drive away).

So, our duck hunting has been delayed a bit and, once it starts, it'll probably be on smaller waters and perhaps playa lakes. I anticipate good quail hunting.

I've had a good time the last thirty years in Albuquerque. Even though the city has grown so continuously that a lot of the fun stuff is further out or harder to take advantage of, you have to love the open space and the variety of outdoor adventures only a couple hours away.

For those visiting Abq., I'll offer a few suggestions that might not be found in guidebooks.

First, the best breakfast in town is carne adovada and eggs at the K & I Diner on South Broadway. I'm a big fan of carne adovada and try it almost everywhere, at least once. If it isn't best at the K&I, it's darned close. Plus, their coffee is pretty good.

Next, the best live music venue in the area is the Santa Fe Brewing Company. Located on the south end of Santa Fe, it's a forty-five minute drive from Albuquerque and they offer good beer made on location, good food, and host a lot of good shows, particularly during the summer and if you like Americana. If you're spending a couple of days in this area, check out their schedule to see if you can catch a show. While there, buy a growler of their Chicken Killer. Smooth, malty, dark-ish. Good beer and, at 10% alcohol the bartender will warn you to be sure to "drink it all in one place".

NM has a wine industry and many of the wines are pricey if good. One exception is Gruet sparkling wine. The blanc de noirs is a great food or sipping sparkler at any price, let alone the $11-15 you find it for retail. Their winery is located along a freeway frontage road here in town. Not exactly scenic (and the grapes are grown 200 miles south) but worth stopping in for a taste.

If it's cold, or if you have a cold, or just feel like warming right up, stop by a Bob's Burgers and get a large chile cheese fries (green). Bob's has the hottest green chile of any of the burger joints and the combination of yellow cheese, salty fries, and hot chile will soothe your throat, clear your sinuses, and bring a sweat to your brow to break that fever (if sick, otherwise, it just tastes real good).

Best gun store in town for used, antique, or really interesting is Ron Peterson's.

Northern New Mexican food in a dark bar- you can always get fideos, quelites or carnitas at Charlie's Back Door. The food isn't always great, but it's usually good and the menu is unique in this city.

Best baguette in town, and probably the state, is at Le Paris up on Eubank.

All this is purely one guy's opinion, of course, and a semi-native at that. Thinking about this stuff, I'm struck by what's no longer around town: best fish taco place-gone, best bar for live music-gone, best Vietnamese food by a mile-gone, best fly shop-changed much for the worse, best grower's market- isn't a really good one anymore; best video store-gone, the big used bookstore-gone, the bookstore that held lots of author readings-gone. Guess it is time to check out a new scene.

P.s. Title reference here.

a link

2010-10-31T17:36:00.002-06:00

Just a quick, holiday-appropriate link.

Click here to get some nifty free content from Tor.com- the best zombie story I've read in a long time, called "Preparations" and written by Mark Mills.

no water

2010-10-24T18:29:00.001-06:00

A few days ago, Chad Love of the Mallard of Discontent posted about the lack of water in his early season ducking haunts over in Oklahoma. Full of hubris or too cocksure, I commented that "at least our river is still flowing". I should have checked first.

That's Booker and I standing right in the middle of the main, and only, channel!
This'll be my eleventh or twelfth season hunting the Rio Grande and this is the lowest I've ever seen it at this time of year. The water will come up once irrigation season ends in November, but it's going to have to come way, way up for there to be enough water to float (or attract) many birds.

Nonetheless, we saw a few ducks on our scout and made some preparations for the season.

Duck season starts this upcoming week. It's usually slow at first, with the lack of water I'm guessing it'll be really slow, but we lucked into sandhill crane permits for later in the year and are looking forward to a chance at the "ribeye of the sky" as well as more ducks once they re-water the river and some (hoped for) bad weather up north pushes them down.

late

2010-10-22T10:01:00.004-06:00

On one of our grouse hunts, A came across our first lobster mushroom:

As with some other first mushrooms, this guy was pretty unmistakable when seen in the flesh.

Unfortunately, it was late in the season and that guy had been up for a while; the bugs had found him first and, rather than the crisp white flesh described in the books and on the 'net, he was a soft, bug riddled mass. Still, is was great to see and positively identify a new (and prized edible) species. Further, we've duly noted the location and will give it all due attention next year.

into fall

2010-10-15T07:07:00.000-06:00

Today is the last day of dusky grouse season in New Mexico. A couple more days spent out in the woods didn't result in any more birds for us, even way up in one spot that I've pretty much always found birds. This is the first year I've been blanked.

Some other predator got to this one first:

Steep meadows:

Grass as high as a Chessie's eye:

Our weather has turned fall-like, cool in the evenings and at night. Summer's gone and the garden is putting on a last burst. Time to really savor those last tomatoes.

Duck season starts (in the zone we hunt) in just a couple of weeks. We'll go to making game then.

scarce on the ground

2010-10-08T10:04:00.011-06:00

We've been out half a dozen times this grouse season, with one flush (three birds) to show for it. We've found dust baths, feathers, droppings, and miles and miles of country, but can't seem to come into contact with the birds. One of the things I love about hunting blue grouse is that you do get to work for them. Down in NM, they seem to frequent high mountain meadows and parks (think 9,000 feet or so), usually in areas where there are spruce and aspen both. For me, at least, a good grouse spot is one in which I find birds one out of three times I hunt it. Some places that look like good habitat never produce birds. Other places will only provide birds occasionally. So far, we've hit most of my "good" places and many of the "worth trying" spots.

Of course, even if a spot if full of grouse, you won't necessarily find them. The birds will lay low if they can and let you walk by without a flush. Also, the country is big- no way to completely work an area that might hold birds (at least, not with a flushing dog)- so you might pass them by. As it is, this year I'm not certain if it is a good year for the birds or if populations or low. I'm guessing low, but I'm not certain.

As the season is nearing an end, we're going to make a trip up north and take a long hike up a mountain that has usually had birds on it. I don't think I've gone through a grouse season skunked and would prefer to keep that the case.

In the meantime, scenery and other photos.

First, because while it may be the law in Colorado, it's just a strong suggestion in New Mexico (sort of like traffic signals), some fall color, which isn't in full swing yet:

A late-blooming wood rose:

Merriam's turkeys. If we were turkey hunting, we'd have been in good shape this year.

Big ol' vulture sitting up on a ridge. I don't know if he had a full belly, or if the lack of wind made it too much work to fly, or if something he'd eaten was disagreeing with him, but he allowed us to get pretty close and, fortunately, I found him before the dog did. The Chessie though he needed retrieving, and that wouldn't have been a pretty scene:

The fall has been fine. Warm, our last trip was the first one cool and damp enough for the dog to have a good day working, and lovely. We've seen elk, deer, and the aforementioned turkeys and heard elk bugling as well. Now all we need is to get into a few more birds.

how's that historic?

2010-10-01T12:36:00.003-06:00

Noticing quite a bit of smoke in the mountains to the north, I did a quick internet search for new stories on any forest or brush fires up there. I found out about the source of the smoke (a controlled burn), but also came across a news story from the past summer that made me wonder a bit. In relevant part:

"The Red Fern Fire about 13 miles east of Cuba (New Mexico) is reported at 120 acres and also is zero percent contained.
The fire is threatening one cabin and is reported to have burned a historic outhouse Thursday.
The Forest Service did not provide details on the history of the outhouse."

So, how does one find an outhouse historic? Someone famous used the facility? Died in there? I don't think there were ever any battles in the Jemez Mountains for an outhouse to have survived or been utilized during. Darn it, now I'm going to spend hours trying to figure this out.

back alley

2010-09-26T17:47:00.000-06:00

Scene-
A residential alley in a large Southwestern city. Not scary, but not the best part of town.

Back fences, the spoor of the bum:

Looking into the back yards, some of these primitives even have animal parts on their fences.

Earlier, a couple of shady characters headed down that alley. What were they up to? Why the leather gloves, empty beer flats, and tongs in their hands? The answer is in the bottom left corner of the first photo. Let's look closer:

That's it, nestled amongst those spines: tuna. Now you can see the reason for the gloves and tongs. That fruit has stickers of its own:

Sure enough, those early morning skulkers came back with pounds of prickly fruit:

Said fruit was peeled, cut up, then boiled.

Once softened, the tuna was mashed, then the juice strained from the pulp. A closeup of the seeds might make a good Halloween poster: eyes......magenta eyes!

Let us repair to a recipe. After the addition of lemon juice, pectin, then sugar, the prickly pear juice gets cooked into jelly:

Skulkers' purpose revealed, mystery of the purloined cactus resolved.

Growing up in West Texas, we picked a bunch of prickly pear tuna, burned off the spines, then my mother made them into jelly. I recall glochids in fingers (actually, cactus spines in fingers was a pretty common experience for anyone spending much time outside around there), Mom being disappointed in the resulting jelly, and eating said jelly on peanut butter sandwiches for a good long time. Recently, talking to Mom about that experience, she recalled that the recipe came from Texas Parks and Wildlife and that the texture of the jelly wasn't great, nor the flavor particularly strong or notable. I remembered the taste as being good, but nothing about the texture of the jelly. Immature palates and all that.

The last year or two, I've been meaning to try making prickly pear jelly myself. People come to the Southwest and plant cactus. Why, I can't imagine except for naivete, or the specific purpose of keeping folks back from your fence or yard. Even then, you have to put up with cactus in your yard. In any event, tuna is all over town and no one seems to do anything with it- you can see it falling and rotting all over the place. Last year the season got away from us, but this year A and I did a little gathering around our neighborhood and put up two batches of jelly.

Tasting this jelly, I remembered that other from childhood. The flavor is also reminiscent of Jolly Ranchers (that is to say, the original Jolly Rancher that was a sort of a bar, and came in two flavors, as I recall- kinda apple and kinda watermelon-dang, I quit eating candy for twenty-some years and everything changes). The jelly tastes of watermelon and a bit of strawberry, although there is a green, earthy note on the finish that the candies can't boast. Not the best jelly in the world, I'd happily trade it for rose hip, which is going to be a real favorite. Still this is better than most anything commercial and might really appeal to folks who like subtle jelly. Further, the price of the fruit was right and it adds some nice variety to the pantry.

Taste aside, it is one of the prettiest jellies I've ever seen.

Sidetrack

2010-09-22T06:46:00.004-06:00

We recently went looking for grouse in Northern NM. Didn't find any, though we did run into some gallinaceous birds- the common New Mexico blurry turkey:

Even though we couldn't come up with grouse, I saw a couple of feathers and a dust bath at our first spot. The road into the next spot, always bad, was much worse after a month or so of rain. Because it was so slow, we were getting toward the evening hours and, on the way up, were passed by a couple of bowhunters headed up, no doubt to those same meadows we were planning on trolling for grouse. Two sweaty bird hunters and a hundred pounds of dog racing about are not conducive to elk coming out at dusk. Also, it was opening day of their season, so I felt a little bad about going all the way up there and hitting those meadows. Consequently, when we went by a bunch of wild roses sporting large, ripe rosehips, we took a few minutes to gather a quart or so of the hips in order to make jelly, then headed down the mountain.

We relied on two different recipes in our jelly making, using the extraction technique from the first and, as they agreed on about everything except pectin as far as the ingredient list for the jelly, the pectin-utilizing technique from the second.

After cleaning off the stem and flower ends and any other detritus, we boiled the hips in water and then let them steep.

After steeping, we mashed them up with a potato masher, then extracted the juice (and quite a bit of pulp) through layers of cheesecloth set in a sieve. We'd have gotten clear jelly by using more cheesecloth and letting the juice just drip, but decided that we wanted the pulp for body (and Vitamin C, we hope) rather than trying for a prettier, clear product. Once we'd extracted our juice and pulp, in went lemon juice and pectin, to be followed by sugar.

The jelly ended up this rusty orange color:

The flavor is good- much like oranges, but without the bitter note you get in marmalade, and with a woodsy undertone. It came out a nice, tart jelly. Rose hips are supposed to be very high in Vitamin C as well, so it's good for you to boot. Definitely worth doing again.

Just when you thought you were safe

2010-09-20T08:26:00.001-06:00

from mushroom posts, here's another.

So, what did we find up in Alaska? A mushroom festival!

We attended a workshop and a guided foray aimed at edibles of the region. In addition, A and I took a couple of hikes to show her some of the country (as she hadn't been up there before) and, along the way, noticed some interesting 'shrooms. The folks leading the foray said that mostly they get yellow footed chanterelles, hedgehogs, and angel's wings- nothing like the big boletes we enjoyed this year. With all the rain, moss, and decaying wood around in those spruce forests, we kind of expected more. Regardless, the rain forest is beautiful in a green, drippy, close sort of way. Check out this lichen, which we think is cabbage lungwort:

Of course, maybe the local folks were being cagey when discussing edibles in public forums. On one hike we found a small bear's head, which smells quite like a cauliflower mushroom, as well as a good sized growth of oyster mushrooms. We also saw quite a few angel's wings, although not in huge amounts, and a couple of hedgehogs.

Bear's head:

In addition, we ran into these-

which we haven't been able to identify yet. They look just about like a fried egg setting, don't they? Edible or not, cool mushrooms.

Fungus, it's everywhere.

AK again

2010-09-17T16:42:00.013-06:00

Well, back from Alaska- another trip chasing coho salmon. Back in '07 we ran into a low water situation which kept a lot of fish from heading up stream during the period we were fishing, this year was something of a repeat of that. Consequently, it was another tough fishing (or, ha ha, catching) year.

Still, we did catch fish, mostly by hiking up one stream until past most other fishermen, then finding a pool holding fish that wanted to bite. Some just didn't. Others would offer to chase a lure or fly and then you'd get a strike.

Beautiful, sunny weather with little or no wind. Warm. I brought too much fleece and not enough t-shirts. Next year will probably be different. More black flies than before.

Great views, what with all those curtains of rain, drizzle or fog between you and the scenery.

A little brown bear kept showing up on one stream, but he wasn't aggressive towards fishermen.

I hope that he doesn't get enough salmon bits that he associates with humans to change that.

In addition to the silvers, there are some dolly varden in the streams, too. Every now and then one will whack an egg sucking leech. Egg flies will get more strikes.

I'm looking forward to a chance to get back up there.

Silver season

2010-09-06T18:20:00.004-06:00

Fishing not blogging.

Perhaps a little bragging:

A silver salmon on the fly is probably right at the maximum level of fun.

Alaska:

food geekery, or, a taste test

2010-09-01T16:31:00.000-06:00

Another fungi post. "Gee," you might be thinking, "doesn't he do anything other than mushrooms?" Well, shortly, yes. Bird season has started, but the doves aren't around that we can see and other adventures are afoot, keeping us off the ridges looking for blue grouse.

Before too long, I hope to do some salmon blogging. And grouse blogging. Maybe a little fall trout blogging and, before we know it, it'll be time for lots of duck blogging. Maybe some dove and quail blogging and almost certainly a little pheasant blogging. This year, there likely won't be any elk or deer blogging. In any event, as all you outdoor folks know, sometimes you have a good year for one thing or another and, when that happens, you'd best take advantage. I remember my Dad and Grandad talking about shooting pintails in south Texas after Hurricane Beulah by walking the rows down orange groves and pushing the swimming birds in front of each other to flush. Got lemons?- Lemonade.

In our case, we've had a good year with lots of mushrooms. So, we've been hunting and picking mushrooms. If every grouse in northern NM had three clutches this summer, you'll probably read a ton about bird shooting on high ridges. Same thing if we find a nearby dove hot spot and they decide to hang around through September. For now, more mushrooms.

After our trip up to the high country where we found king boletes (boletus edulis) we checked another part of a more local mountain range. There, we found a few white kings (boletus barowsii) hanging on and a few puffballs. So, in hand, we had some prime king boletes and some prime white king boletes. Recently, a couple of serious food bloggers have wondered at the difference in flavor between the two. Give the chance, we put on a little taste test. We picked some nice examples of each (the kings are the mushrooms with the lovely mahogany colored caps),

sliced them up,

and gave them a little time in some hot butter.

Once they were about equally done, we ground a little fresh pepper on and sprinkled them with a bit of salt.

So, the verdict?

Definitely different. The barowsii have a slightly spicy note reminiscent of a really good parmesan cheese. The edulis are a bit more sweet and have a rich, mushroom-y note that seems to call for red wine, rich sauces, and meat. Each very good, but not quite the same. It'll be interesting figuring out how to get the most out of the more delicate flavor of the white kings. Grouse and pheasant, likely.

puffball fail

2010-08-30T17:00:00.002-06:00

On one of our recent mountain trips, we found a few giant puffball mushrooms. The specimens we found weren't very large, but ranged in size from that of a lop-sided softball to perhaps a Nerf (tm) football.

Our finds might have actually been a type of sculpted puffball (calvatia sculpta) or Western giant puffballs, but all of the true puffballs are edible, many described as "delicious". Those that we picked were the few that we found that were still quite firm. Puffballs are that family of mushrooms that, as a kid, you used to find in the yard all brown and wizened and that exploded into powder when kicked. The "powder" is spores and the big guys produce "bilyuns and bilyuns".

We took a pair of the smaller specimens and, following the recommendation of a couple of different books and many websites, sliced them, dredged the slices in beaten egg and then in bread crumbs seasoned with salt, pepper, parsley, and grated Parmesan cheese, and fried 'em.

Lunch:

These were ok. The crust was nice and the mushrooms slices had a texture that was most nearly that of good tofu (positing the existence of such a thing)- nearly creamy yet slightly firm. However, there was a bit of a chemical aftertaste that was odd and not really pleasant. A generous splash of siriracha took care of that, but then all you could taste was the hot sauce.

Undaunted, we essayed a variation of a recipe that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall described as "one of the most spectacular and satisfying wild food recipes I have ever cooked".

We took a larger puffball, sliced off the top, then hollowed it out for stuffing.

For that stuffing, we sweated some onion and carrot, then sauteed some chopped porcini and the chopped center portion of the puffball, browned a bit of pheasant, added fresh sage and parsley, deglazed with white wine, then mixed all together along with enough breadcrumbs to get a good texture. This we filled the 'shroom with, placing the excess in a baking dish to go alongside.

The puffball itself was wrapped in buttered foil (for support) and then baked for a good long while in a medium oven. After an hour, you could smell something from the kitchen. Something good, underlain with a vile, chemical, chlorine sort of scent. The latter strengthened.

Looks good, right?

It was not. The pervasive chemical note rendered it inedible (at least, for those not starving). The stuffing from the baking dish was ok, but still had a faint whiff of the high school chemistry lab about it.

Puffballs are described as inedible when old or soft, but these were firm and white inside. In "Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America", Fischer and Bessette describe the giant puffball as having a "delicate taste and texture" that is "truly unique and wonderful". We've eaten some puffballs before that were ok, if unexceptional (in other words, pretty flavorless). Maybe we found some growing on the wrong mountain or something. However, what with ceps in them thar hills, I'll be hard pressed to try another puffball anytime soon.

History as You Travel

2010-08-27T08:43:00.004-06:00

Henry Chappell has recently returned to Home Range. From reading his recent posts, I turned to his blog roll and read up on Wyman Meinzer's blog. There, Meinzer has a photo essay of scenes from the Texas plains paired with excerpts from the journals of hunters, travelers, and pioneers of the nineteenth century describing the spot.

Blasting down an interstate at 75 mph, it is awfully easy to miss or forget the challenge presented to the folks who shaped the lands you're crossing. Even on foot, it can be hard to realize how different a stretch of country felt a hundred years ago, just two overlapping lifetimes. Witness Ecorover's collection of photos of abandoned cabins in the wilder country around Butte, Montana. Designated wilderness areas can be an exception to this, in that they're likely to have been unpopulated, high, harsh, or remote all along, thus qualifying for wilderness designation.

Hiking the Pecos high country, I'm nearly always reminded of reading the books of Elliot Barker, who came to New Mexico in a covered wagon and, son of a homesteader, trapped some of the last grizzly bears out of the Pecos before becoming a game warden, head of the state Game Department, then carrying on trail rides well into the age of jet travel. Barker wrote about many of those experiences. Years (now nearly decades) ago, I was taking a short backpack into the Pecos Wilderness and, on Hamilton Mesa, ran into a Portales rancher horsepacking in with his two young sons for a muzzleloader deer hunt. The trail was level and wide, they had a couple of pack horses and one of the boys was on a pony, so I was able to keep up for a couple of miles while we compared experiences up there. I was quickly asked if I'd read Barker and, having answered "yes", our talk turned to the books and the adventured recounted therein, along with the places described in them that we'd seen. You could see the boys nearly shivering thinking about the huge silver bears up in the dark spruce, gone some seventy years before.

Check out Meinzer's great essay.

near the end

2010-08-23T06:06:00.001-06:00

As Steve Bodio has recently noted, we're getting right to the cusp of fall here in the higher parts of the Southwest. Recently, A and I decided to hit some more high country and look for mushrooms and, having had some success nearby, headed further north and quite a bit higher. We were hoping for lobster mushrooms or chanterelles, both no-shows. However, we did find the Rocky Mountain variant of boletus edulis, the king bolete. Sporting a nice dark mahogany colored cap, the kings were up quite high and were remarkably free of fly larvae compared to the kings and barowsii we'd found further south a couple of weeks ago.

Interestingly, the mushrooms were also much more heavily browsed. Lot of stems eaten off at ground level by somethings much bigger than squirrels. My money's on elk.

We found most of the 'shrooms back up under spruce.

The best ones were up high. How high? Pretty high-

Even big ceps were free of bugs, making the long drive worthwhile. Along the way we saw turkeys, deer, antelope, and a coyote that was lying in the sun some hundred yards down a scree slope. I'd stuck my head over the ridge and was scanning for elk when A walked up.

She asked "Isn't that an animal down by that little green patch?" Said patch being about two hundred yards below, I'd noted the light colored spot and dismissed it as a bleached stump, for no critter would hold still with me moving around so near. A asked me for the binos, claiming the "stump" had moved it's head. About the time I got them to her, the stump, a big 'yote, got up out of it's sunny day bed and loped for cover. Huh.

The country felt like fall. No real attempt at afternoon thundershowers, skunk cabbage and some ferns going brown and gold, coolness to the air and the sky turning a more pale blue. I kept thinking about grouse and bird hunting.

Still, on the way out, big shaggymanes had popped up in the bar ditch and shone in the headlights. We left them, having all the ceps we wanted to handle.

Fall is nigh. Stand by!

Recommendation

2010-08-19T16:30:00.001-06:00

Richard Thompson was in town this last week and we managed to catch his show, which was a second time for me. The first of his shows was amazing, this one just as good. One of the best shows you'll ever see, just RT up there with an acoustic guitar, voice, and forty years or so of fantastic songwriting. Thompson's songs tend to address the darker side of love and life, but he actually rocks pretty hard for a guy who's frequently described as a folky. As I've mentioned before, he'll occasionally cover something surprising, too.

Looking at his tour dates, I see that he's going to be up in the NorthEastern US for a bit, then he'll come back through and hit San Francisco, Salt Lake, Boulder, Tulsa, Dallas and Austin in October. Those October shows won't be solo, but if you find him near your town on a day you aren't already committed to a hunting or fishing trip, I highly recommend making the effort to catch him.

From the YouTube, a recording (not mine, from a different performance) of the song he opened with:

and of his cover of The Who's "Substitute" (also not mine and not in NM) but which is the song he ended with the other night:

Seasonal mark

2010-08-13T07:37:00.005-06:00

We generally make a couple of homemade pizzas once a week, usually on Monday night. The variations are driven by our garden, freezer, and pantry and are pretty much endless. Particular favorites are smoked salmon, caramelized onion, and feta or bacon (homemade), basil, and tomato, or bacon and green chile, or Swiss chard (lots, and finely sliced), feta, and black olives with lots of garlic in the sauce. One pizza that gets in the rotation as soon as ingredients are available and that I particularly look forward to is the classic Pizza Margherita. Simple, but, with fresh tomatoes from the garden and fresh basil, perfect in its simplicity. Early last week we had enough tomatoes for our first. Most years, the ingredients are on hand by early or maybe mid-July, but this is an odd year for the garden.

Just for fun, here's a new try- a half and half pizza with oyster mushrooms on one side and cauliflower mushroom on the other. Oyster mushrooms are an old favorite of mine on pizza, but these large wild oysters gave better coverage and a particularly nice flavor. Not the best use of cauliflower mushroom though, as the garlic & cheese combined to overwhelm most of the nuance of its more delicate flavor. Earthy pizza-

The green chile stands are setting up and starting to perfume the air, a sure sign that the season is getting ready to turn. Although fall is always best, I'm not sure I'm quite there yet. I haven't gotten my pizza margherita fix yet.

fungus on the brain

2010-08-06T06:30:00.000-06:00

Just for fun, here are some other mushrooms we've found recently and were able to identify. These were not for eating but interesting to look at and included Amanita muscaria (fly agaric):

Gomphus floccosus ("Scaly vase chanterelle" which, despite it's name and appealing appearance, isn't recommended for eating):

and Pholiota squarrosa ("scaly pholiota"):

One thing about keying-out species that you're pretty sure aren't edible or that you aren't interested in eating is that the process of going through identifying characteristics and figuring out exactly what you're looking at makes identifying the edibles a lot easier and more certain. That said, we still run into lots of fungi that we can't figure out.

It's Good to (have) King

2010-08-02T12:25:00.001-06:00

King Bolete, that is. Boletus edulis and, mostly, Boletus barrowsii.

After last week's outing, we figured to head up to the same area in northern NM and see what another few days of rain had brought up, mushroom wise. After a long hike finding not much, A spotted a pair of big king boletes growing right out of the shoulder of the dirt road. After running into some (inedible but spectacular) clitocybes (clitocybe candida),

we started finding more boletes, both the kings and the barrowsii. King boletes:

You can see why they're called that:

Probably no surprise to experienced mushroom hunters, these big guys were bug hotels. Nonetheless, we ended the day with a nice batch of porcini gathered mostly just road hunting. Spotting a big one from the road, then pulling off and searching the immediate area to find younger, more prime for eating specimens.

In fact, the day was so good that shortly thereafter we gathered up friend Matt and headed out for another day of mushrooming. Just a little time had made a big difference. Some of the big guys had really moved past their "best by" date:

However, once we got to looking, we started finding the white boletes almost immediately, scattered and in small bunches.

Mixed in were lots of slippery jacks (not picked), aspen boletes and a few Satan's boletes to keep us on our toes.

We're pretty sure this is a Satan's bolete:

Not something to eat, anyway.

Aspen boletes (Leccinum fibrillosum):

Here's Booker the Chessie wondering what the big deal is about some fungus, right next to another (and our largest to date) cauliflower mushroom, one of two that we found that day.

Here's another cauliflower mushroom that some woodland creature, I'm betting elk, got to first:

We saw evidence of big boletes being browsed similarly. Squirrels and mice just nibble:

Nice eating size, unnibbled, porcini buttons:

We gathered quite a lot, not knowing when we'll get back up or how long the kings will last, then got home and processed until midnight. The dehydrator filled up in no time, moving us to field expedient measures:

Porcini- they're what's for breakfast:

Investment

2010-07-30T09:08:00.004-06:00

"No doubt the admonition to 'take only photographs, leave only footprints,' is desirable in certain sensitive or pristine areas. But it is inappropriate in most situations because it is a fundamental denial of who we are: creatures of the earth whose most ancient heritage (or birthright, if you will) is foraging for food in the forest.

This enforced separation of human being from the natural world can only undermine support for public acquisition and protection of habitat. The more we view the forests and fields as a resource...the more likely we are to cherish that resource. Protecting habitat for aesthetic reasons alone lends credence to the argument that a few widely scattered parks are enough. But harvesting a sustainable yield of mushrooms, fish, and other wildlife creates a quantitative demand for habitat on top of a qualitative one."

David Arora, All That the Rain Promises and More, p. 254.

oysters and cauliflower

2010-07-25T18:03:00.005-06:00

Oyster and cauliflower mushrooms, that is.

We've been looking for (edible) mushrooms on outings the last couple of years, largely without any success (see here, here, and here, which are only a few of the times we've hunted for mushrooms while out and about). We're still working on the learning curve, using a stack of references and field guides to puzzle our way through identifications and being very, very cautious about what we've picked and handled. Up until the other day, the only thing we'd picked and eaten on our own was a small bunch of shaggy manes and puffballs. Since it has been raining up in the mountains the last couple of weeks, we swung up to 9000 feet or so in a nearby range and checked around a bit. Over the course of the day, we saw elk, deer, turkeys (with half-grown chicks) and grouse (with chicks as well). Although there weren't a whole lot of mushrooms out, we did come across a couple of nice edibles.

First, we found oyster mushrooms, a good-sized bunch growing out of a log right where we'd pulled off the road. Checking that area more thoroughly, more logs had a few scattered oyster mushrooms on them, but no heavy growths. Some of them were past prime, but we managed to get a nice batch.

We also found one large shaggy mane in good condition and one large shaggy mane that was a bit too old.

Further up the hill, we came across a cauliflower mushroom. Pattern recognition is a funny thing. If I see something through brush that I think might be a piece of an animal, say a deer's ear, it will occasionally prove to be part of a deer, but more often turns out to be a branch or something else that bears a passing resemblance to fauna rather than flora. On the other hand, I'll frequently spot a deer, or other critter, that is only partially visible but I'll immediately know that I'm looking at an animal. In much the same way, this mushroom was unmistakable when spotted on the forest floor. Though I'd never seen one in the flesh before, it was pretty clear what we were looking immediately. No pictures of the mushroom in situ, though, as cameras only work when you charge their batteries. Here's what the piece of mushroom we harvested looked like back home:

Here's a pic of the oyster mushrooms, up close and looking rather shellfish-like:

We decided to try a recipe for the cauliflower mushroom that called for serving it in a salad dressed with walnuts and lemon after first sautéing it in a bit of butter.

The scent of this mushroom is unlike any other that I've encountered, not woody or fungal but rather spicy with citrus notes. The flavor was somewhat similar, although not as pronounced. The texture was really nice- toothsome with not quite a crunch. Overall, very good and something completely different from anything I've had before.

Of course, oyster mushrooms are available in the grocery store, so they weren't the same sort of surprise. These were nice and big, though, so we prepared them in a fashion similar to what we've had in a tapas bar. First, we dry sautéed the mushrooms until they had released most of their liquid, then we brushed them with a little garlic-infused olive oil and gave them a few quick turns on the grill while the meat rested, sprinkling them with salt and parsley.

A light red wine, some buttered noodles, green beans from the garden, a bit of oryx and you have a nice summer meal with just a little more wild to it than the meat alone provides.

One of these days we're going to figure out where the boletes grow, and the chanterelles, and the morels, and hedgehogs, and really big puffballs and....

nearly authentic

2010-07-20T16:07:00.000-06:00

Just about everyone is familiar with the near ubiquitous fajitas- marinated strips of meat that are grilled and, in most restaurants served on a hot iron platter with onions and peppers. I'd imagine that most folks even know, or can easily enough discover, that "fajitas" (Spanish for "little belts") originally referred marinated and grilled skirt steak, which was thinly sliced across the grain to make the tough meat easier to eat. That dish- marinated and grilled skirt steak, probably originated in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

Down there, fajitas were served on a plate with beans, rice, perhaps guacamole or pico de gallo, and with tortillas for wrapping it all up. Since skirt steak was cheap, it was good party food. However, there were no iron platters, no bell peppers, no shrimp fajitas (takes a fine hand to get those off the carcass), and no chicken fajitas.

The best way of serving fajitas also started down in the Valley, in the form of the "botaña platter". Botaña is Spanish for "snack" and in many Mexican or Tex-Mex restaurants ordering a botaña platter would get you a selection of appetizers. In Pharr, a restaurant called the Round-Up started serving tostadas (fried tortilla chips) covered with refried beans and cheese, then topped with fajitas, guacamole, chopped lettuce, onion and pico de gallo. When visiting my grandparents back in the 70's, we'd go by there and order one or, if enough folks were together, two, as a botaña platter is served communally. A good botana platter is crispy chips, smoky, chewy meat, hearty creamy beans, rich guacamole, spicy and tart pico de gallo with crunchy lettuce and onions- just about everything good in that style of food, all at once. The lady that started the Round-Up came up with the dish and you can still find good examples of it down there. If you're ever in the area, I highly recommend trying one. Alas, for all the many virtues of New Mexican food, it does not include a botaña platter. Homemade is the only option.

Personally, I'm not fond of the cast iron platter fajita variant. I never order it in restaurants anymore because most the time they use some cut other than skirt steak, the marinades tend to be overpowering, the onions greasy and the peppers overcooked. That's not even mentioning the lack of refried beans and the unlikelihood of getting decent pico de gallo. In addition to those many sins, it isn't what I grew up eating.

Though I am disdainful of the more recent incarnation of fajitas, I do not hold that attitude with any sort of pretense to authenticity in my own cooking. This is because I myself stray from the true path of (beef) skirt steak. Dressing out an elk or a deer, you get meat on the front shoulders that you can take off in big flat sheets and which features long muscle fibers (and a lot of silverskin). Too thin to cook as brisket (unless you get a really big elk), I noticed a long time ago that it resembled fajita meat. Rather than grind it or cut it up for stew meat, I like to remove most of the tough connective tissue (but don't get worried about getting it all) and leave the meat in fairly large pieces. Then, every so often, I'll get hungry for something close to the real thing, fajita wise, and marinate some of that meat in some (cheap) tequila along with lime juice, a little oil, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper. Then I'll grill it quick of a hot fire and slice it across the grain. It's a good way to get a little Tex-Mex flavor.

Of course, if you're going to go to the trouble of marinating and all, you might as well go the whole nine yards. Here's one version: first, before putting the meat on the fire, fry up some fresh tostadas, as they taste so much better than anything out of a bag.

That, and have some beans on hand to cook into refritos.

A little cheese:

Into the oven:

Once hot, add the (also hot but not put into the oven so you don't lose too much moisture) meat:

Chopped fresh or pickled jalapenos, guacamole, chopped onion (no pico de gallo- in foodie-speak the pico was "deconstructed"), some lettuce and you're just about done.

This botana platter is made with oryx and really ought to be layered a bit higher. However, since it was only for two, we left it low.

No cast iron platters in sight.

New best friend

2010-07-11T07:57:00.004-06:00

My new best friend is this stuff. Self-fusing silicone repair tape. The why is a somewhat long story.

See, A's house has been landscaped, at least in front, with way too much "xeric dirt" and we set out to change that. At one time, long, long ago, the front yard had a sprinkler system. In keeping with the lower water use that we in the Southwest should all be practicing, I set out to put in a drip irrigation system for various soon-to-be-installed native and low-water-use shrubs. Digging out the four sprinkler on/off valves, I found a 2 or 3 inch galvanized line coming in and a tangled mass of corroded galvanized 1 inch pipe going out.

Too much for my (lack of) skills. We talked to a plumber who agreed that, yeah, the big line coming in probably tied into the main line into the house and he could tie to that with a backflow prevention device and a pressure reducer. Now, with the summer rains coming, we set out to get the new stuff in the ground during the cooler, wetter time so that it'd have a chance to get established for the winter and a good start next spring.

We plotted out and dug trenches for the irrigation lines, bought risers, manifolds, emitters and pvc and put the whole thing together. This past Friday, that was all taken care of and we were ready for a plumber to tie into the old stuff and we'd be off planting and other fun stuff. The original guy who'd looked at it wasn't available, though, so we talked to another outfit. They took one look at the original pipe and said that no, they couldn't fasten to that and they'd recommend replacing the main line from the house to the meter.

They further opined that, while we could get someone to try to fasten to the old stuff, and we might get lucky that doing so would not engender any leaks, we'd be living on borrowed time. So far as we know, the original line is nearly seventy years old or so.

The quoted price was about our original budget for the project but, we talked it over and then got to digging out a deeper trench to get the water line to the house, including digging out everything up to the meter including under the sidewalk. That was Saturday, plumbers due this morning.

After much patient digging to get to the meter, ginger excavation premised upon the truly rotten condition of the water line, I managed to whack that pipe with a shovel about two p.m. on Saturday afternoon (Not that hard! Really! It was a tap!). Water began blasting out across the yard, I began cursing and sprinting for the key to turn off the water at the meter. Geyser subdued, it was off to the local hardware store. I was thinking of a couple of big pipe clamps and some thick-ish rubber sheeting but the guy at the store recommended trying a ten-dollar roll of "Rescue Tape". Self-fusing silicone wonder tape in hand, I returned home and cleaned some of the scale (not too much, it's about all that's holding things together) off the pipe and laid in a couple of layers of tape. It's funky stuff. You stretch it to activate it so that it'll stick and it gets hot as you do so (and smells funny- I don't really want to think about what those chemicals might do). The harder you stretch it, the faster and tighter it fuses. One hard part is just stretching the section you're trying to lay down- stretch further up the roll, it'll fold onto itself and immediately become permanently useless (of course, I'm doing all this two feet down in dirt and mud, so nice even wraps are a bit of a challenge). Two courses of tape did not stop the leak and blew out. Approximately five courses of tape, the whole roll, did. Dry as a bone-40 psi nicely contained. Ten dollars. No call to an emergency plumber. A shower that evening. Water in the dog's bowl. I love that stuff.

A roll is going in the truck, another in the house, and one might even get into my daypack.

McDonald, the 2nd, and the States

2010-06-27T22:48:00.008-06:00

The Supremes handed down their decision in McDonald v. Chicago today. This case follows D.C. v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court held a city ordinance banning the possession of firearms violated the right to keep and bear arms expressed in the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The Heller decision was limited, though, in that it only dealt with a firearms ban that was in place under Federal government authority, since it dealt with the District of Columbia.

Once the Heller decision was filed, a number of challenges to various ordinances limiting or banning firearms were made. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision signed by now-Justice Sotomayor, held that the Second Amendment did not apply to the states. The Ninth Circuit, in a decision which has been referred for en banc review (which is on hold pending the word from the Supremes in McDonald), held that the Second Amendment did apply to the states, as it dealt with a fundamental right (I talked about it here).

Right now, the decision only appears to be available as a 214 page pdf. So, most importantly, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment does prohibit state and local governments from restricting the right to keep and bear arms (too much). The decision is 5-4, with the Opinion of the Court written by Justice Alito and Justice Thomas concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. Justice Stevens dissented (no surprise) and Justice Breyer dissented, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor (not really a surprise, either). Lots of meat there, lots to read. I'm sure scholars of Con law are working on analyses right now. In the meantime, the Sullivan Act's progeny are going to cost lots of cities and towns lots of money.

For further reading, but less than the 214 pages of the McDonald decision, Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive article on the Second Amendment and Court decisions which I'm sure someone is updating right now.

Update
Well, having read the opinion of the Court, the concurrences, and one dissent, I'll add a couple of things.

First, there is a fair bit in here for attorneys who will argue as to the continuing validity of various restrictions on firearm ownership. On page 26 of the Slip Opinion, the Court cites to language from Heller describing handguns as being protected as they are the weapon of choice for self defense. On page 39, the Court describes the "central holding" of the Heller decision as "...the Second Amendment protects a personal right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, most notably for self-defense within the home." I predict this language will be cited in response to any argument that restrictions on automatic weapons, any long guns (including short barreled shotguns), nunchucks, switchblades, or suppressed firearms is unconstitutional. As the Supreme Court has held that the right preceding and underlying the Second Amendment is that of self-defense, only "undue" restrictions on weapons that are both "preferred" (which, likely, will mean in common use today) and "suitable" (which, likely, will mean whatever a given judge decides) for self defense will be overturned. Want a Remington 1100 chopped off right in front of the gas port and loaded with buckshot to protect the homestead? Don't hold your breath. This conclusion is reinforced by the plurality's admonition (p. 45) that it is important to keep in mind that Heller held a right to keep and bear arms is not "a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose".

Second, and very good news, is that the Opinion of the Court makes it pretty clear that Justice Breyer's repeated calls for an "interest balancing test" to decide whether given statutes infringe the right to keep and bear arms is, for now, not going to become law. The plurality twice notes, at page 45 of the Slip Op. and again on page 50, that it explicitly rejects such a test and that the majority in Heller did so as well. Combined, that's precedent. Also, the majority characterizes the Second Amendment right as "fundamental". The Seventh Circuit had held in this case that Chicago's handgun ban had a rational basis to a legitimate state interest. The "rational basis" test is less demanding than an "interest balancing" test rejected here. I believe this will only leave lower courts with "strict scrutiny" at the test for evaluating firearms restrictions. So, those restrictions will have to be narrowly tailored to accomplish a compelling governmental interest and must, in addition, be the least restrictive means of accomplishing that interest. While this is good news, you have to keep in mind that the limitations inherent in the right being protected as described just above. Great news for the folks in DC still trying to get handguns in the face of persistent foot dragging by the city government, though.

Justice Scalia's concurrance is a fairly vituperative calling out of Justice Stevens' dissent and political philosophy, I'd speculate that the tone would be a little different if Stevens was staying on the bench. Interesting read, depending upon your definition of interesting.

P. 67 of the Slip Op.- Justice Thomas' dissent- A great (from an originalist perspective) treatise on the doctrines of selective incorporation, the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment, and the 14th Amendment in general. Most legal textbooks are less informative. Personally, I think his argument that the Second Amendment applies against the states due to the Privileges and Immunities clause is logically and legally unassailable, despite the hundred and thirty years of (bad) decisions stemming from the Slaughterhouse Cases (which are a fine example of authority justifying its conclusion by tautology) and Cruikshank.

the rain

2010-06-26T16:24:00.001-06:00

"The next day, at about three in the afternoon, the western horizon would be a wall the color of lead. On the front of the wall would be little clouds, pale silhouettes of torn cotton. I'd try to remain calm; baby storms would have been skittering by for a week now, teasing the powdery earth with sprinkles and infusing the dry air with a breath of mountain pine, but nothing had happened yet. I'd go back to work.
A half hour later, a dark blast of wind, laden with the odor of wet dust, would punch through the yard, swirling sand around the windows, rattling the panes. From the yard I'd see a wall towering over the town and know that we weren't going to have to water the asparagus again. We'd stand and inhale for a moment, stretching our arms toward the storm; then, as the hiss of a billion approaching raindrops bore down, we'd run. Pick up the hawk, call the dogs, slam the windows as the rain bashed in, soaking papers five feet from the sill. In the roaring cascade outside, we could not see the ground, hidden in the white smoke of atomized rebounding droplets. And then, hail--BB-sized, pea-sized--drifting in windrows beside the walk; thunder, shaking the house, lightning flashing all around, a nearly simultaneous bang and flicker. We'd grin and the world would smell like water."
Stephen Bodio, Querencia, Clark City Press 1990, p. 8-9.

Right now, we're in the "baby storms teasing" stage, hoping for the big ones to come in and wet things down.

birds on a wire

2010-06-14T05:56:00.002-06:00

Courtesy of my Dad over in SE Texas, photos of the whistling ducks that have been hanging out on the powerline by their house every morning. Something just wrong about seeing that waterfowl silhouette from this angle and in such a location.

Ah, the melodious chirp of the duck, greeting the dawn!

revolver

2010-06-06T19:09:00.000-06:00

Here recently Steve Bodio put up a couple of posts about revolvers over on Querencia and I thought I'd throw up something on the subject as well. Revolvers, like pump shotguns, are something mostly and, bestly, American. The Webley aside, most other-than-American revolver designs are more curiosities than commercial or military successes (bet there's a comment from someone about the Nagant). From the U.S., though, there are the entire series of Colt single actions, culminating with the Single Action Army, the Smith & Wesson top-break revolvers, the Smith and Wesson Military and Police in all it's various guises (one hundred and twelve years of production and counting!), and then there's this gun:

This particular revolver is a Colt "New Service" manufactured in 1934 and chambered for the .38 Special cartridge. The New Service model was the largest-framed double action revolver built by Colt and was introduced in 1897. By the time production ceased during World War II, three hundred and fifty-some thousand revolvers had come off the production line. The reason for the large frame is that it was originally designed to accommodate the .45 Long Colt cartridge. Thousands of New Service revolvers were sold to law enforcement agencies in the United States and abroad, as well as to the U.S. military. Also, a substantial number were chambered in .455 Eley (a slightly longer version of the famous .455 Webley cartridge) and purchased by Great Britain as military sidearms.

The revolver is fitted with a Fray-Mershon "Sure Grip" adapter and, as you can see, has lots of holster wear and wear in general- not surprising for a working pistol carried on a regular basis. The grip adapter is designed to fill in the stocks a bit and improve double action shooting.

My father started with the Border Patrol in the early 60's and, interestingly enough, was first issued a .38 Special Colt New Service, albeit one fitted with a heavy barrel, rather than the tapered barrel of this pistol. Dad recalls the Colts as having a remarkably good trigger, which is high praise considering he carried and shot thousands of rounds through a Smith and Wesson Model 19 in the course of his later career. You can read a short article about the New Service revolver in the Border Patrol here.

One of the attractions of firearms for those of us who enjoy guns is their durability and history. Some of the more useful and durable designs were produced for decades and used around the world. Any given gun can be beaten into junk, but a lot of worn old pistols, rifles, and shotguns have years of use behind them and, if cared for a bit, left in them still. While worn finishes, nicks, and scars aren't necessarily sought after features, the stories that attach to the dings render them less marring.

So, what makes this old gun special? No particular romance is associated with it and it would be nothing special to a collector, as those folks mostly look for pristine condition. On the other hand, there is this provenance- the pistol spent a career in the U.S. Customs Service, belonging to a family friend who, at one point, was the District Director of Customs for the Port of San Diego. The original owner has long passed so any particular stories attaching to the gun are unavailable. The pictures, though, tell of thousands of hours of carry and likely hundreds if not thousands of shots fired at the range. So, this old pistol has a family connection and over seventy-five years of use- it's good for another seventy five, or longer, too.

Up North (NM)

2010-05-28T06:37:00.001-06:00

Last week we had the opportunity to hang around a bit in far northern New Mexico, up near where the Sangre de Cristos cross over into Colorado. A short drive near dusk on the highway leading to the York Canyon Mine, which cuts through a portion of the Vermejo Park Ranch, provided us with the chance to watch Merriam Turkeys- including a gobbler with a couple of hens who obligingly strutted and called, elk- including a small bachelor band of bulls, one of whom already had three feet of velvet over his head, lots of mule deer, and a couple of bears. Apparently, this road is well known for providing bear sightings. After A asked if I wanted to drive up there to "see the bears" I explained that bears are pretty rare in NM, even where they do well, and that we'd be lucky to see one. A's previous drive up there resulted in a couple of bears, and, true to (her) expectations, we saw a couple on this drive. One was quite big, all black, and wary. The other was this young blond fellow, who found grazing on green things much more important than worrying about the pickup stopped on the shoulder of the road some fifty yards away:

He even grazed through the fence and got a bit closer:

The next day, we drove on through the Valle Vidal and saw more deer, another bear that, like the one above, was quite blond. He was, however, much larger and didn't hang around close enough to get his picture taken. We saw more turkeys, too. Three bears sighted in two days is exceptional, in my experience.

Snow is still in the shade, everything is green and there is water everywhere; very much like you'd expect the Rockies, even down in their southern tail, to look.

Goldilocks rifle

2010-05-20T12:10:00.001-06:00

A few years ago, dissatisfied with the rifle I carried for big game hunting, I purchased a brand new Savage Model 116, which is that company's long-action, bolt action, rifle made in stainless steel. One of the reasons I chose the Savage was that it came with the company's then new "Accutrigger", which features a center blade on the trigger that must be depressed in order to then press the trigger and fire the rifle. The Accutrigger was a big step in triggers available from factory rifles, as is not only adjustable, but is free of creep and breaks (that is, releases) very crisply. At the time, it was the best factory trigger available and it may still be. Another factor leading me to this particular model of rifle was the rust-resistance of stainless steel. In addition, it came with a synthetic stock, which does not cause changes to point of impact the way wooden stocks can as they minutely warp or flex due to heat or humidity. The actual rifle that I bought came as a package with a scope and nylon sling. The package was less expensive than just a bare rifle, though in the end all that remains of the package is the barreled action, one scope base, and the sling swivels.

The first season, I carried the rifle as-sold. Lucked into an elk, too. Before the next season, though, I got rid of the nylon sling and replaced it with a good leather Whelen sling. The Whelen sling is a simplified and somewhat lighter version of the military slings used for highpower rifle competition. Not only does it work as a carry strap, but you adjust the upper section to form a standing loop that you can slide on your upper arm in order to steady the rifle from a sitting, kneeling, or prone position. This is much more steady than a "hasty sling" and, if you have some time to set up your shot, will really help accuracy. The Whelen sling isn't as stiff as one of the aformentioned military slings and is a bit less complicated, made of less material and with fewer parts.

The second change to the rifle I made was to replace the inexpensive variable-power scope that came on it with a Leopold fixed four power model. The shorter Leopold scope required an extended front base, which intrudes a bit over the top of the action. This isn't ideal, but isn't really a problem. I was surprised to have to do it, though, given that the scope pretty far forward as I tend to crawl the stock a bit, particularly when shooting sitting. In any event, the fixed scope is brighter, more sturdy, and more simple than a variable.

In that guise, I carried the Savage for another couple of years and another elk. At some point, I replaced the factory recoil pad, which was a bit hard, with one of the Pachmayr "Decelerator" models. Even then, I could not warm up to the plastic stock. For one thing, when you shot the rifle the stock made a sort of harmonic "sproing!" note, which is just a bit odd. More importantly, the fore end is too flattened on the bottom and the corners of it are a bit too sharp, making it fairly uncomfortable to carry over the course of a day. To me, the plastic felt a bit cold. Further, the mold lines running down the top and bottom of the stock were also surprisingly annoying until I took some fine sandpaper and smoothed them down. Last, the stock is noisy when a branch or twig hits it. This is surely a minor thing, but still hunting is partly about confidence and minimizing every sound you can control. The extra noise from any source is hard on my confidence and, who knows, might make a difference.

Not being willing to finish my own stock and wanting to maintain the stability of a synthetic, I got a laminate wood "drop in" stock from Boyd's. Because laminate stocks are essentially plywood- thin layers of wood held together by glue, they don't warp or move with weather. While not nearly as pretty as a nice piece of walnut, laminates look better than plastic, to my eye, and are quieter, too. On the other hand they are heavier than most synthetics and natural wood, all that glue adding weight.

Unfortunately, "drop in" wasn't quite drop-in and I had to do a little work to get the action and barrel into the stock. Also, the Boyd's stock didn't have bedding pillars like the factory stock. The pillars are tubes of aluminum or steel that fit around the action screws (which hold the rifle in the stock) and which relieve stress on the action and generally improve accuracy. Off the rifle went to the gunsmith for pillar bedding (and to replace the thin pad on the Boyd's stock with another Pachmayr Decelerator. Once done, the Boyd's classic style stock, while not entirely classic in lines or materials, is much more comfortable to carry and shoot than the original stock.

In all, the Savage started out as a pretty light, fairly accurate stainless steel rifle with a good trigger. Now, all up, it weighs 8 pounds, 12 ounces, which isn't too bad, to my mind. It balances right about the middle of the action and, with that weight, the 30-'06 cartridge doesn't beat you around with recoil. I've spent about the price of the rifle on the new scope, stock, sling, recoil pad, and work, but the result is getting much closer to a rifle that, for me, is "just right".

pasque flowers

2010-05-17T06:23:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago we came across a nice stand of pasque flowers in a not-too-old burn.

Kind of appropriate given that one of the names for the flowers is "prairie smoke".

So, how many morels are in this picture?

Hope you didn't spend too long looking, as the answer is "none". This is a second spring trying to find black morels. We know they can be found in NM, if rarely. A local restaurant has a commercial forager that brought some in one time while we were there. He found them "at about 8,000 feet" in a mountain range that is fifty miles long and has at least that much elevation for pretty much the whole distance. So far, we've gotten some time on the ground and established places where the mushrooms aren't, at least at the time we were there, assuming that we didn't overlook them.....

flying viszla

2010-04-29T06:19:00.000-06:00

'Cause life isn't just about hunt tests.

Bacon

2010-04-27T16:25:00.006-06:00

According to the authors of Charcuterie, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, one friend and fellow cook, and many, many posts on the web, curing your own homemade bacon is easy and results in a very good product.

Having messed about a bit with meat and sausage and pate and cooking and such, I figured to give making bacon a go. For my first try, I got a couple of nice pork bellies that had the rind off and cured them as described in "The River Cottage Meat Book", using juniper berries, bay leaf, black pepper, brown sugar, pink salt and coarse sea salt. Each day, I rubbed the meat with a bit more of the cure and poured off any of the collected liquid. After a five day curing period the bacon (really pancetta, since it wasn't smoked) was good, but very salty.

Undaunted, I tried again. I've made duck prosciutto (directions from Michael Ruhlman here), which is about the most satisfying bit of meat curing ever, so bacon, reputedly easy, shouldn't be that far out of reach. This time, I cured the pieces of pork belly in a bag in the refrigerator with a generous amount of the same cure, but didn't pour off the brine. I used quite a lot of cure in the process and, after five days, rinsed the meat really well with cold water, then left the pieces of belly on a rack over a pan in the refrigerator overnight to dry some. The next morning, I set them out to smoke, using mixed apple and oak wood which I had soaked in water overnight.

A tin of water between the fire and the meat kept the temperature at 125 F and under.

Eight hours of smoke

The bacon came out pretty, slicing nicely and with good color.

Unfortunately, I'd let the smoke get a bit too heavy and this bacon was, again, very salty. Soaking the slabs for a couple of hours in cold water (changed once or twice) took care of both of those problems, but I still didn't get the result I was hoping for. Next batch, I tried a version of the cure from "Charcuterie" and the amounts suggested there, which was more sodium nitrite (pink salt) proportionally and only an ounce and a half of salt for a five pound piece of pork belly. Also, rather than the very strong sea salt I used kosher salt. For flavor I used brown sugar and black pepper, along with bay leaf. I cured the pieces of belly (this time with the skin on) for seven days in a bag in the refrigerator and didn't pour off the liquid. After that, I rinsed and dried them, let them air dry a bit, then smoked them for six hours at an even lower level- keeping the temperature down to around 100 F and keeping the fire down so that it only produced a trickle of smoke. This was both aided and complicated by a gusting wind- springtime in New Mexico.

This bacon, once cut from the rind, is harder to slice than the other slabs, as not as much liquid has been removed. It also cooks down a bit more in the pan. On the other hand, the flavor is what I was aiming for the first time. While somewhat more salty than commercial bacon it has just a bit of smoke to it and a nice, meaty flavor and texture- definitely good stuff.

So, another step on another learning curve.

"shades of gray"

2010-04-19T06:15:00.000-06:00

I find it amazing how a good songwriter can use almost any subject matter. Fifteen years ago the Oklahoma City bombing was committed. To blow the song's punchline a bit, here Robert Earl Keen sings about the aftermath of that event; dealing with the subject tangentially, and respectfully, in the course of telling a darned good short story set to music.

the more things change

2010-04-12T06:43:00.001-06:00

"We had spent the summer in New Mexico, and, during a brief stop in Santa Fe, we had been grilled on why we live in New York by that group of Eastern-refugee remittance men the place specializes in--the people who half-retire at forty-two in order to devote themselves to talking about a novel they might write and and overseeing the repairs of any cracks that might develop in the adobe walls of their house and discussing water rights their land carries by virtue of the original Spanish land grand and raising a herd of twelve or fourteen particularly elegant goats."
Calvin Trillin "The Dance of the Restaurant Trotters" American Fried (1974)

Persistence

2010-04-09T06:20:00.000-06:00

So, last fall we were driving out after a slow day duck hunting when we spotted a drake mallard in a riverside drain. Uncharacteristically, the bird didn't fly, so we eased past it a good ways then walked back down the road to flush it. The drake went down wing tipped and swam for the bank. We got the dog on the spot and this is the video of the retrieve.

Booker located the mallard in a beaver hole. At about the two minute mark Booker starts digging and eventually gets the bird to flush from the hole, then runs him down. Unfortunately, most of the action occurs into the sun and behind a Russian Olive. Edited a bit for length:

getting the kinks out

2010-03-29T09:23:00.008-06:00

"Graceful" isn't really an option, how about "athletic"?

"Chesapeake rampant"

What's in your pack?

2010-03-26T13:15:00.004-06:00

What do you all carry for a day pack, if you do, when chasing elk or deer?

I'll go first (and here provide the disclaimer that, while this post has links to various companies selling bits of gear, that's just for illustration purposes- those products linked are things I've bought that work well for me- this is not meant to be a commercial):

This pack is an Eberlestock J105, designed to be a fairly low-profile day pack which can expand to carry out an elk quarter. I'm a big fan of the idea of saving a whole round trip from kill to truck.

Cinched down for hunting:

Then opened up:

Near or far, uphill or down, I'd rather make that first trip with a load on my back. On the other hand, you don't want something too cumbersome or that's noisy at all during the times that you're stalking. Nowadays there are a number of packs out there designed to carry fairly small going in and pack a load coming out.

For years I carried a Nimrod lumbar pack (an early version of their Pinnacle model)that had a pack sack that you could unroll, fasten to the shoulder harness, and then use to carry out a quarter. I adopted the Nimrod a bit too early, later models have some improvements that would make it more comfortable and functional. The biggest problems with the Nimrod are that it has a pretty limited capacity when the pack sack is rolled and stowed, the padding on the shoulder straps is too soft, letting them collapse and get uncomfortable, and, more importantly, under a load the hipbelt rolls and fails to provide adequate support. I think the hipbelt has been fixed in current models by the addition of vertical stays. The Nimrod is fairly light and doesn't get much in the way when going through brush, both of which are very nice. While it does provide a way out with the first quarter of an elk, you only want to carry a front quarter, with maybe the backstraps, as the model I have puts some pretty good hurt on you when it is loaded up. Later ones might be better.

As for the Eberlestock, I'm still making up my mind about it. For the cons, first off I'm not fond of wearing a daypack all the time, as, even cinched down, it hangs up more then a lumbar pack when going through brush or ducking under limbs in the p-j. Also, the darned thing is heavy (9.5 pounds empty!)- the inevitable price of a really sturdy structure and heavy duty fabric, as well as a wealth of pockets. For the pluses, it is quite comfortable, carries a hind quarter comfortably (I've packed out five elk quarters, four of them hindquarters, and an oryx hindquarter along with the backstraps and head all in one go, with this pack at this point- no really hard carries yet, though) and those pockets do allow you to stash gear you seldom access well out of the way and not have to dig through it. Also, two large pockets are on the outside of the pack and compression straps once the main compartment is unzipped and loaded, which keeps the bits of gear out there from getting crushed, much.

In the photos up above, you'll see a rectangular opening at the top of the pack- that's a rifle scabbard that lays along the back stays.

I've used it when packing meat a couple of times, but generally I feel more comfortable carrying my rifle in hand with a load. It was handy walking out in the predawn dark on a muzzleloader hunt, as the un-capped rifle fit all the way down to the lock and I had both hands available for stumbling. As to the gear in the pack, first off alongside the rifle scabbard but opening from the other side of the pack and also right up against the internal frame are two pockets, the upper with a hydration port for a water bladder and tube. I don't use a tube hunting- one more thing to hang on brush- but the pocket does locate a water bottle nicely high and right up against you:

Growing up, we never carried water or packs, just threw a couple of candy bars in our pockets, along with maybe an apple. Of course, waffle-weave cotton longhandles and Levis, along with cotton t-shirts and cotton flannel or wool shirts were also what we wore. As I got older and started staying out a bit longer and ranging farther, I started carrying a bota bottle. Now I use a Platypus water bottle. The advantage of a soft bottle like this is not only that you can tuck it out of the way in a corner of the pack, but that you can squeeze the excess air out of it as you drink so your water doesn't gurgle or slosh, making your stalk the much quieter.

In the little pocket below the water bottle pocket I stash my first aid kit and two lights- the first a little headlamp that burns a long time on three AAA batteries, the second a little halogen flashlight that runs through batteries very quickly but that casts a bright beam quite a ways. The little first aid kit is augmented by a couple of WMI's handy little cut kits, which have what you need to take care of a gashed finger or hand in a little envelope, and extra moleskin. Cutting myself while field dressing or developing a blister are by far the most likely injuries in my experience. I also have a couple of feet of (orange) Velcro tape in that pocket, as it is really handy for holding things together or tightening things up.

Eberlestock put two long pockets on either side of the pack that open from the top or the sides. A spotting scope or tripod fits pretty easily. Not carrying either of those very often, I don't get a whole lot of use from the pockets but stash a ditty bag in each side with things I don't get into very often. Note that the pockets have a light colored lining, another nice touch.

One bag is stuff for handling a carcass.

A number of pieces of parachute cord or thin rope are really handy when dressing an animal out by yourself. Not only is it useful to tie legs off out of the way, but three times I've had to tie off a carcass I was field dressing to keep it from rolling or sliding down the hill I was working on. Also, at least three fairly long pieces are handy for hanging quarters that you are going to come back for. That's also what the game bags are for, one bag can stretch over two elk quarters and will keep off dirt and flies while you carry the first load out. I may have a bit more cordage than I need, but I can't recall ever thinking "Gee, what am I going to do with all this rope?" whereas I've wished for another foot or two of line on more than one occasion. The little ziplock has two of the big, 2.5 gallon ziplocks and a couple of 1 gallon ziplocks folded up in it, all for carrying and keeping clean heart, liver, tenderloins, and other bits of meat. I carry a pair of nitrile gloves or the long plastic "field dressing gloves", not so much out of worry about blood-borne disease as for ease of clean up. Once your hands get gory, you bloody everything you touch and even wet-wipes aren't great at getting the blood off. The Wyoming saw isn't absolutely necessary, as you can dress an elk without one, but it makes the job easier and, if you kill a bull elk, it is far lighter to carry out antlers on a skull plate as opposed to the whole head. Another option is to leave the saw in the truck and bring it to the carcass after the first load of meat is out. The marking tape (usually two rolls) is for finding my way back to the carcass. I don't mark right up to my elk, as I don't want anyone walking away with one of my quarters.

In the other side pocket lives a bag containing a very basic "stuck overnight kit".

Metal cup for heating water, very light nylon bucket for holding water, two ways of making fire, firestarter paste, film canister filled with cotton balls soaked in vaseline, candle (also a form of firestarter), emergency blanket (2), dry socks (not pictured), Cyalume stick for a nighttime signal and a whistle for a daytime signal. As you can see, I'm pretty concerned with fire starting. That's because if I'm cold and wet on a cold and wet night, my fire starting skills aren't going to be at their best and dry wood hard to come by. If it's dry and pretty weather, a fire won't be nearly as big a concern and I'll just need one of those matches ;)

Also in that pocket lives a little Otis gun cleaning kit. It has a nylon covered metal cable that can work as a ramrod and the whole kit weighs four ounces. If you jam the muzzle of your rifle in snow or mud, you'll really want a ramrod for cleaning that bore. It's a seldom-used item but a nice bit of insurance.

In the top pocket of the pack, which you access from the harness side, I carry the myriad little things I might want to access at any time. Scope cover (which I seldom use and may go away), ultralight tripod (camera is usually in my pocket), bandanna (dressed in synthetics and wool, a piece of absorbent cotton can be really handy), some energy in the form of chocolate and power bars, compass, (maps, too, if I'm carrying any of that area), spare rifle cartridges, spare .22 cartridges if I've got a pistol with me for small game, short piece of cord for carrying such small game, spare knife (very light), bit of duct tape, toilet paper, wet wipes, fleece beanie, and gloves. A neat trick is the fact that thirty .22 long rifle cartridges will fit in a film canister and not rattle.

One item of clothing I always carry is raingear, usually stuffed down in the main compartment of the pack. Some of the breathable raingear is really nice- quiet yet still waterproof- and forms the layer I'm most likely to be pulling on and off as weather changes, as well as the most important wind-breaking and water-shedding layer should the weather go bad. Most of the time I'll also wear or carry a fleece pullover.

This is more gear and pack than I really want to lug, but so far I'm willing to pay the weight penalty. All-up, this weighs seventeen pounds with a full (1 liter) water bottle and a .22 pistol on the hipbelt. The gear is intended for a long day hunting by myself- out before daylight and back in the evening, with the off chance of having to spend the night out or having a problem a couple of miles from a road in rough country.

So, what's in your day pack?

daffodil

2010-03-20T06:11:00.002-06:00

First daffodil this year.

Update- and just 24 hours later:

Down in the Southwest we should never complain about moisture, and I'm not, but spring is a hard season to love.

consumption

2010-03-19T07:14:00.000-06:00

"Aldo Leopold once said; 'A wilderness without wildlife is of no use to me, a wilderness without wildlife is just empty country;' and he is right, and for some of us, walking on the land without tasting of its bounty is just empty walking. Some can survive on the sustenance provided by simple beauty, especially those that live far from the land. Others need to return with meat to feed their families and somehow justify the hours they spend in cold and lonely and lovely places. And yes, there are those that require the hides and horns of animals to substantiate their hunting tales, a brute addition perhaps, but a necessary addition, to their love of the silence and the beauty of the land. But we must all remember that whether we carry a gun or not, the strip-mine shovel digs for us. We are all takers. Takers removed by degree, not dimension, from the strip-miners, loggers and roughnecks. The only difference is in the giving back."

Bob Jamieson "Breaks", Gray's Sporting Journal, Volume Eight, Issue 4, Fall 1983, p. 46.

starting the week with cute

2010-03-15T12:10:00.000-06:00

My folks were in South Texas visiting my aunt and uncle recently and went out on a ranch looking to put a nilgai in the freezer. The nilgai didn't cooperate, but Dad did walk up on this baby scimitar horned oryx, which also range on and off of this particular ranch.

A bit too young to successfully run from predators, he laid very, very still and concentrated on being invisible while his mom hovered nearby and Dad got a few telephotos. Check out the bitty little horn buds!

pâté

2010-03-11T14:45:00.001-07:00

Before sausage, but in the same sort of category (as Brett of Trout Caviar points out in comments a bit earlier) we recently experimented with country style pate. For a dinner with friends we ended up trying three different variations. As a basis, we looked to the pigeon pate recipe from The River Cottage Meat Book.

The first version consisted of duck and goose hearts and gizzards, along with the breast meat off of a teal that was a bit shot up. This pate was flavored with dewberry jelly, white and black pepper, garlic, bay, and red wine.

The next was made with half of the breast off of a Canada goose (also a bit too pellet-riddled to be suitable for roasting or other treatment). It was flavored with juniper, garlic, bay, and port.

and the last was made with the meat of a slightly freezer-burned grouse. The grouse was flavored with apple jelly, thyme, bay, a bit of cayenne, cardamom, black pepper, and Calvados.

The mis:

We have a local source for good bacon, which they'll kindly slice very thin. You stretch those slices out even more thin, then line your mold with them.

Duck and goose bits:

You sauté an onion, brown the meat in the remaining bit of fat, then deglaze the pan with your choice of alcohol and pour the liquid over the meat, which you then grind (along with the onion) and mix with the jelly and spices. For fat in the pate, we ground our meat with some raw pork belly.

Once packed in the molds, you cover your pate with buttered parchment paper then bake them in a water bath in a slow oven.

Once done, the top of the bacon (which becomes the bottom of the pate) is nicely brown from the butter, while the remainder is quite white due to the water bath. You aren't done, though, as you leave the covers on, weight the pates, then let them chill for a day.

The process was a bit of work and somewhat time consuming, but not really that bad, particularly given how long a pate lasts and their suitability for freezing.

Final presentation. The grouse turned out to be a bit crumbly. The very dry meat of that bird needed more liquid than we had put in. A bit more highly spiced, it was an initial favorite with the tasters. All were good, though, and I think this may be the very best use for waterfowl gizzards and hearts.

robalo

2010-02-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

Snook have always been a fish of some romance in my mind.
Like Charley Waterman, I think their Spanish name, "robalo" sounds better then the oddity of "snook", which sounds like something that happens to someone on a felt-covered table, or an object of derision. Tell someone not fairly involved in the outdoor world that you'd like to fish for snook and you're liable to face the same expression as if you'd said you were off to hunt snipe. On the other hand, robalo sounds racy and a bit powerful, more fitting for a beach front cruiser and ambushing predator. Webster's traces the name "snook" to Dutch for a type of pike-fish. Fair enough.

Growing up and fishing a bit in South Texas, snook were rumors or memories, as they, along with tarpon, had pretty much disappeared. Fortunately, both have come back to some extent. Cold snaps like recent ones in Florida and Texas are hard on the populations, though. I'd read of snook in stories about Costa Rica and the Florida Keys and other warm waters. Heck, even Travis McGee fished for them. They lay under mangroves and docks and would cut you off in a minute. In the fall they'd run the beaches and passes. Mouth like a bass, strong, with razor-sharp gill plates. Those were the things you read about snook. My first couple trips to the tropics didn't lead to any snook, though. Bonefish and tarpon (sightings) along with seeing and throwing at permit were all plenty of excitement. The first snook I saw was a baby caught by a friend in the South Texas surf. Neat as a novelty, but not quite the explosive gamefish you read about, not until it added another foot of length or so.

I won't complain, though, because a few years ago, six now in fact, I caught my first and to date only robalo.

We headed down to Baja for a couple of days. It was our second trip and we stayed in San Jose del Cabo, which was busy sprouting condos where only a couple of years before nothing but beach existed. After some slow panga fishing, Dad and I took advantage of our mid-morning flight time to slip out to the beach at dawn on the last day, walking along and throwing plugs with spinning outfits. Fishing on the beach at that time is always exciting, the low light is flat and you can't see much, so it's easy to imagine lots going on out there even if bait isn't being chased to the surface.

I was using Dad's light travel rod and a reel with ten pound test to cast a chartreuse Top Dog out past where the waves were breaking. The beach was quite steep so we'd follow a retreating wave, cast, then back up before the next wave and start working our plugs. As my plug climbed the back of a breaker just yards off the beach it was suddenly sucked down by a mouth I could put both fists into. An interesting struggle with a couple of half-jumps later, I had her up on the sand and removed the plug. A quick picture, wade her out and revive her, and it was time to rinse of the gear, pack our wet clothes in plastic for the flight home, and leave on what for me will always remain a high note.
Hard to top:

Funny, growing up I don't think I ever daydreamed anything better.

and then the bits

2010-02-18T23:34:00.000-07:00

After making stock, we took three pounds of the oryx's liver (which was three quarters of that organ) and trimmed it up.

Then we took an equal amount (all we had) of trimmings that were too small for stew meat, added another three pounds of pork shoulder and a pound of fatty pork belly and made sausage.

Our amounts were dictated by the amount of trim we had and the amount of liver, as our goal was to make good use of the liver without just slicing and cooking it. A's not a bit liver fan. Besides which, liver makes a great sausage component.

Using the ratio specified in Charcuterie, we put together 3 oz. of salt and 1 t of pink salt, then went about our (own) spicing. For the 10 lbs of meat, that ended up being 4 T of black pepper, 2 T of half-sharp Hungarian Paprika, 3 T dried thyme, 3 T dried parsley, 6 bay leaves, ground fine in a mortar with a bit of the salt, and 4 oz, approximately 1 cup, of garlic. We mixed the spices with the chopped meat and let it season overnight.

Next day, we made up two batches of sausage in five pound lots, one with a cup of very dry sherry mixed in with the meat, the other with a half cup of water and half cup of red wine. The latter carried the garlic flavor a bit better and turned out better overall. The reason for two batches? You need to mix the ground meat together a bit to get it to bind, and five pounds is about the maximum amount the Kitchenaid stand mixer will comfortably handle.

Testing a bit of the meat for spicing:

The (natural, hog) casings had to be soaked for a while in cold water, then rinsed and rinsed out:

Threading the casings onto the stuffing tube is a tedious process lending itself to bad jokes:

Fortunately, this blog barely rates PG so you'll be spared any of those jokes. For the sharp-eyed readers, yes, the feed tube on that grinder does have meat on it. We had to take photos between batches because I forgot to do so at the start and, once you get going, you aren't taking photos unless you're ok with smearing up the camera with raw pork bits. I've made sausage by myself, but find the job is much, much easier with a second set of hands. In any event, 5 pounds in one long coil, then divided into links:

Pretty, aren't they? This is a fairly spicy, garlicky fresh sausage. It falls well short of being hot and the liver is only there in the background. I doubt anyone who didn't know about the liver would guess at its presence, a fact no doubt helped by the very mild nature of (all of the) game liver (that I have tried to date).

Ten pounds of sausage sounds like quite a lot, and a couple of hours work was involved in this process, but once you start parceling it into packages it doesn't add up to all that much. More interesting than the couple of pounds of burger and plain liver for the frying that we'd have had otherwise, though.

That's it for the oryx processing, though, now we're just down to cooking and eating.

so, bones

2010-02-14T07:33:00.000-07:00

After the meat, and a couple of big bones for the delectation of the dog, what about the other bones? Neck bones didn't make it out this time, two rounds through that portion pretty much wrecked any use out of those bits, but we still had bones from quarters:

Part of those bones were the knuckle ends from the shanks, lots of meat and sinew and such on those. Bones mean stock, building block for so many things. Bones and veg:

I'd leave the skin on the onions for color and flavor, but these were dirty and in bad shape. Beside, plenty of flavor from the leek leaves.

Some bones roasted, some raw, for a mix of flavor.

Two twenty quart stock pots to start. The silver pot on the right has stock from a pan that was deglazed with red wind and that includes some roasted tomato paste, the black pot on the left is a simpler concoction of bones and veg. Both have bruised peppercorns and bay leaves.

Now, Michael Ruhlman says (in "Elements of Cooking") never to boil stock, that you'll lose to much flavor. Jacques Pepin and Julia Child and various others say "bring it to a boil". I'm of the latter school. A nice boil and skim off all the foam and floaty bits.

Cook for about six hours at what Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall describes as a "nervous shimmer", just short of a boil, then the clear stock is reduced by about a quarter, the dark stock strained, then reduced by a good third. The result?

.

So, about twenty quarts of stock in all. The light stock is very neutral, very similar to veal stock though without quite as much body. The dark stock is a bit more intense and is destined for a few batches of bordelaise with orxy and frites and other sauce, as the wine comes through despite all the cooking and reduction.

Next, yet more bits.

so, meat

2010-02-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

I'd guess a good sized oryx at running about 250 field dressed. Not so big as a good sized cow elk, but much bigger than any mule deer I've run into.

We quartered out our animal, saved the heart, liver, tenderloins, backstraps, and miscellaneous bits along with the quarters, then got to cutting. Dad and I got most of it done in a day and a half- deboned, silverskin off and sinew out, wrapped and in the freezer:

Even the dog has his bits stashed:

I've read, and heard from other hunters, that oryx is "the best wild meat you've ever eaten". We saved out a chunk and grilled it, just meat and fire, served alongside baked potato and relleno casserole with a green salad and a decent red (one of my all-time favorite meals, all in all) to see what we thought.

(yes, it's a little rare. Wild meat I've dressed and prepared myself I prefer cool to cold red in the center. You can taste it better that way.)

The meat is a lighter color than deer or elk and is also more mild. More mild, even, then well cared for antelope and with a coarser grain, closer to elk, than antelope. Wild meat for those who like their meat less wild. Can't say that it'll be my favorite, but I wouldn't be sorry to see oryx across the deserts of the southwest. It's not like the bighorns stand a realistic chance of refilling those ecologic niches.

Next post, dealing with bits.

Oryx

2010-02-09T14:02:00.000-07:00

Back in the late 1960's and after urging by archeologist and frequent African hunter Frank C. Hibben, the NM Dept. of Game and Fish acted on the idea of bringing oryx (pdf link), or gemsbock, into New Mexico to add another species to the Chihuahuan desert lands of the Tularosa Basin, essentially the White Sands Missile Range. The animals did well there, and now you can put in for and draw a tag to hunt them as they range freely on the missile range and beyond. The Dept. of Game and Fish estimates three to six thousand oryx roam south central New Mexico now. Since natural predators aren't doing much to control oryx numbers and Chihuahuan desert is apparently a bit more hospitable than the Namib, population reduction through hunting (and providing another hunting opportunity was the whole purpose of bringing in oryx).

We were lucky enough to draw tags last year for a once-in-a-lifetime hunt on the Missile Range for this past January.

On one hand, I'm tempted to bring out my inner Capstick:

The cerulean sky was marred by a crepuscular smear of cloud, dimming the hard winter sun and we crossed the many dongas leading down from the mountain like fingers and cut our prey's spoor. That spoor was wide and bold and our experienced tracker had no trouble. Past hunts allowed my eye to follow the bright splashes of lifesblood splattered on the hard stone of the unforgiving landscape easily as well- A kept overwatch in case it turned. Where the quarry had paused, viscous lakes of gore slowly filtered into the desert sand....

More realistically (and lacking much of a Capstick), we hunted pretty hard and, as two of a hundred hunters in an area the size of a couple of different states on the eastern seaboard, felt crowded. One stalk was ended when other hunters took an animal out of the bunch we were working, we passed a couple of others and figured we had things scoped for the second day, which turned out to be cut short for some sort of military exercise. That second day produced nothing much early on, except a road I wouldn't quite brave, and, on the way to a high point to eat lunch and glass, we saw a critter that present a shot which was a bit long but do-able. I shot too far back despite repeated warnings to the contrary, and a bit low as well, so A got to see how you follow a blood trail and we found our oryx a bit away in greasewood scrub studded with mesquites and cut by a lot of little draws. Once down, dressing and quartering started. My dad was along as observer, adviser, and factotum and headed off with the first quarter, A followed with a second and I finished dressing the animal and, once Dad made his return trip, we headed off with the rest of the meat, hustling to meet the national security deadline for getting off the range. The truck was visible, but a darned good little hike. Meat for the next year, the subject of a couple more posts.

good show

2010-02-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

Fred Eaglesmith came through town last night. Neil of AMP arranges good shows and this one was a bargain, $15 on a Friday night. We've missed Eaglesmith on his way through town before, so we jumped at this chance, though I saw the notice of the show only a day or so off.

You've probably heard a Fred Eaglesmith song before, even if you haven't heard of him. He's written lots of things that've been covered pretty successfully by various folk and country performers.

Eaglesmith explained how he was going to go to Nashville but had a standing date at the Red Mug in Minnesota and couldn't make it down there. This was my first time to his show and I was surprised how good his voice is, in a gravelly singer-songwriter alt-country (Canadiana?) sort of way. He talks, tells stories and jokes and generally has a good time so that you do, too. Check out his schedule, he's heading west from NM and then'll be back in points east and north. If he's in your neck of the woods you'd be lucky to catch him.

Not my video, but a pretty good representation of the show (although the sound is better live):

End of the Duck Season

2010-02-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

Last weekend saw the end of duck hunting, the end of fall, really, as I see it. We didn't get out, being busy with other worthwhile pursuits, but we did make a last hunt the weekend before.

We set up on the west side of the river, bad because you face back into the rising sun, but thorough camouflage and plenty of overhanging vegetation on the steep bank mitigated the problem.

The ducks liked the spot we set up pretty well, so we had some birds dropping in, mostly right over our heads. Hard shooting, but fun.

That banded bird on the end picked up his jewelry two weeks earlier and twenty miles away. Not a whole lot of info for the biologists, I'm afraid.

Since it runs ninety days, I always feel like I have worlds of time when duck season starts. Lots of weekends to get out, chances to tweak the set up, find different spots, adjust to the ever-changing river. All of the sudden, the holidays are done and only a day or two is left. Looking back, we didn't make all that many hunts after all. I think there is a lesson in there about taking advantage of a situation while you can.

Next year!

Goose, goose, goose

2010-01-22T06:44:00.000-07:00

Last year we happened into a Greater Canada Goose.

This year, we prepped a bit more, put out a couple of goose decoys just off the duck spread. I even packed a goose call and practiced my "her- onk!" a bit. Didn't matter much, as I didn't call at 'em. Another slow day for ducks. New spot, and the ducks weren't liking the spread. After an hour, though it was still prime time, we loaded up all the blocks and moved upriver a couple of hundred yards to where a couple of bunches had gone in. We were just set up when a small bunch of mallards landed at the tail end of the spread, then took off to a couple of hasty shots that didn't score. "Here we go", I thought "we're in the spot". However, the flights pretty much stopped and no more birds came in, to speak of.

We were standing up, discussing packing it in, when I looked downriver and saw a bunch of birds. Geese! We got down and watched them come- fourteen or so big Canadas. They didn't call, so I didn't call either, and they set wings and came right in.

One goose per hunter made for a pretty good day:

First goose retrieve for Booker, who seems to have left his limber tail woes behind:

Goose frites, goose leg confit, stock or soup. A morning of watching, a few moments of excitement, and a number of good meals to follow.

easy hunts

2010-01-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

This post has been kicking around in draft for over a year now and I haven't had much luck in massaging it into a cohesive essay. Since content is scant while life is busy, I'm going to throw it out in it's current, messy form. You have been warned.

I've written previously about a couple of successful big game hunts that I've enjoyed. Generally, those hunts were noteworthy in part for the physical challenge they offered and were the result of substantial preparation as well as years of honing skills (or at least tromping around in the woods with a rifle). I've also had some easy hunts. My last successful elk hunt turned out pretty easy.

Far more easy was a hunt many years ago in northern New Mexico, when I had a chance to get in with a group of guys for landowner cow tags on a large ranch. We were over-geared; loading daypacks with compasses, spare clothes, water, extra ammunition, and other sundries for a day in the woods far from the road. As it turned out, opening morning the guy working as a fence rider for the ranch led us to a winter wheat field at sunup and we walked over a little rise to see a couple of hundred cow elk that had been feeding there that night. Within fifteen minutes, half a dozen elk were down and the work began. Dressing, skinning, and quartering that many elk was work, not fun. Heck, the hunt wasn't exactly fun. I shot my cow in the back of the head from 150 yards- a nice, clean, instantaneous kill, but the hunt wasn't exactly a hunt. It was more truly a harvest.

Would I do it again? Perhaps, particularly if short on time and without other meat. Would I spend a lot of time thinking about it, or get particularly excited? No. It would not be an unpleasant chore, but it would be just that- a chore. Work. Putting meat in the freezer as surely as heading to the office is work in pursuit of putting bread on the table.

Certain hunts are more challenging, whether due to the scarcity or wariness of the game. Where challenge is lacking, you'll find some hunters raising their personal bar, limiting their effectiveness by using weapons, such as traditional muzzleloading rifles or bows, which lack range and require greater skill to master or by limiting themselves to taking only the largest, oldest, most wary animals. This is generally a good thing and reflects well on human spirit, in my opinion.

One of the rubs with a hunter using weapons which are more difficult to master or otherwise imposing handicaps on himself is that the chance of wounding his prey is increased. While each is easily capable of taking game humanely, bows, muzzleloaders, and pistols all require more precision in range estimation and generally deliver less immediately-lethal projectiles over shorter ranges than modern hunting rifles Their use requires more practice, skill, and discipline on the part of the hunter. One of a hunter's ethical obligations is to take his game as cleanly as possible, without causing any more suffering than absolutely necessary. Emphasizing again that ethical kills can be and are made with each of the above mentioned weapons, their use is somewhat in conflict with a hunter's obligation to kill game quickly.

In turn, the obligation to make quick, sure kills leads to the query, why not take all possible advantages in hunting? Rather than condemning hunting over feeders as antithetical to appropriate hunting skills, why not advocate for the practice as an efficient way of ensuring relaxed prey which is not distressed and can more easily be instantly killed? Rather than condemn high fence hunting operations,* why not embrace them to the extent they accomplish the same goal?

This point was made (quite some time back now) among the comments in a earlier discussion on Norcalcazadora's blog regarding hunting programs on television in which the comments got going on hunters' behavior and ethics. Phillip of The HogBlog makes a point that "There are those who would argue, and somewhat soundly if you stop and listen, that taking every advantage over the game we pursue is actually more ethical than drawing arbitrary rules around the means of take and limiting hunters to difficult and overly-challenging methods. An animal unaware and feeding over a bait pile at close range is going to offer a much better opportunity for a clean, quick kill...especially if the hunter is armed with the most efficient and accurate equipment with which to make the kill." He goes on to write "My personal standard falls somewhere in the mix of all that.... But the thing that stays in my mind throughout it all is that what I'm there for is to play my role as predator, and in the end game, it's all about killing meat for my table."

A good while back Steve Bodio put forward a nice, clear perspective in a blog-comment, (on a slightly different topic) stating: "I think restraint (including in pursuit of game) should be encouraged, and excess discouraged, by custom and peer pressure.
I do NOT think most of this should be law-- and my inclination on this goes beyond hunting-- ie, I don't believe in compulsory anti- smoking, to pick an issue at random, but I DO in manners.
Bag limits are (or should be) compulsory and biologically determined. The rest is culture. It may be too late to promote good manners and sportsmanship in this society but I am willing to try."

Opposite the idea of using every advantage to humanely and efficiently kill game is the thought that, at some point, advantage over our prey offends the idea of fair chase. Game must have an opportunity to escape and cannot be in a "sure thing" situation, or the activity isn't hunting and, from the perspective of sportsmanship, isn't ethical. If you're always going to win or succeed, who would keep trying for long? The discussion is complicated by the fact that the ideas of "sportsmanship" and "sport", emphasized in older hunting and fishing literature and seemingly assumed as part of the chase are approached warily by today's hunter/fisherman speaking to those who neither hunt nor fish. Admitting to enjoying hunting, which inarguably (at least if you read Ortega y Gasset and agree with him at all) culminates in a death, or fishing for the pot, is a dicey business in many circles.** Leave the killing stuff to people paid to do it. This is part of why, when in some social circles, many of us emphasize that we hunt for the meat.

Regardless of talking to others who don't hunt, among ourselves I think most hunting should be elitist and aspirational. Not in terms of game pursued, or the expense of the tools used, but in terms of our approach. Rabbit hunting is considered pretty easy, at least here in the western US, but it can provide quite a challenge. Change the venue slightly and it can be more so, given limitations on your approach. Check out Hubert Hubert's blog and archives for good writing on the challenges of air rifle hunting for rabbits in England. Regardless of your quarry, your approach to the hunt makes all the difference. A good example of the sort of meditation and inevitably personal resolution we come to with respect to ethics can be found here. Another nice example is in this discussion of "varmint hunting" at Querencia.

While I won't turn down a cow elk standing just uphill of the road, or complain about the days when the ducks just bomb the decoys, the fact that those are rare occurrences makes them both memorable and something to take advantage of. Dry runs and miles walked without game, hours spent scouting and more hours spent driving to places to be scouted all balance those occasions out. So, I'm not out there just for meat. I do hope for a challenge, which can come in many forms and can vary depending upon my skill level. I won't set out to make things hard on purpose, but generally enjoy myself more if I've had to sweat a little.

*I will state that I do not personally believe that a high fence around a property renders a hunt on that property unsporting or unethical, provided that the area enclosed is sufficient to allow the animal to flee and escape. At a first thought, I'd guess that area as being somewhere around 2000 acres, depending upon terrain and vegetation.

**If you want to light up a strict "catch and release" person, tell them that they're guilty of playing with their food and point out that they likely kill one in every twenty or twenty-five of the fish they catch and disfigure more. Some of those folks need lighting up, a personal peeve is the "I only use a three weight" (cue condescending voice) types who have enough skill to bring in a big but exhausted trout and then release it to die. Use a six weight, up the leader a bit, and release a feisty fish, you tools. Not that fishermen are necessarily any less concerned with the ethics of their sport than hunters- Finspot (Langdon Cook) put up a post about a wild steelhead which was legally caught and kept, to considerable condemnation by the angling community, which is concerned that the regulations are too permissive and that all wild steelhead should be released. On the other hand, there are always bad eggs.

Limber Tail

2010-01-03T22:10:00.000-07:00

I've read about it before, but now can claim first hand experience with a dog developing limber tail (also called cold water tail). After a hunt this weekend that featured a couple of pretty extended retrieving efforts, we got back, cleaned birds, generally picked up, then noticed that Booker the Chessie was walking funny. I thought he had a cockleburr caught in an indelicate place, but an attempt to check his tail brought a cry from him, the first I've ever heard. His back end was extremely tender and he generally felt down. A bit of internet research suggested an anti-inflammatory. Fortunately, he seems much better today after a little ibuprofen and some rest, though he'd still prefer to lay around and isn't his normal active self.

Normal tail:

Broke-looking limber tail:

We're hoping a week's rest will have him back to form.

out of the oughts

2009-12-31T19:28:00.000-07:00

and into the tens or teens or whatever. Happy New Year to you all!

foreboding

2009-12-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

"It was still hot back in Mississippi and in Texas, where I used to live, but it was already cold up in the mountains, up in the North, in this place where I was going to start a new life. The immediate, pressing problem, I realized, was that winter was perhaps a month away. I knew nothing about winter. I had never seen it before, and I felt dizzy with fear, giddy with wonder, anticipating it.

The dogs, I could tell, were worried too, and missed Mississippi. I could tell they thought I was making a mistake."

Rick Bass, "Winter"

pheasants

2009-12-14T07:46:00.000-07:00

Back for a third trip to the Texas Panhandle to chase pheasants. The birds were doing better up around Dumas, so that's where we went this year. Another good time.

First morning, it was a balmy 6 degrees Fahrenheit by nine o'clock, very cold by our standards. It eventually warmed up to the low thirties. The birds were flushing pretty wild but we found enough slow ones to fill our bag.

The next day we started in the teens, much more pleasant, and had some birds hold close right off. We ended the day hunting wastewater pits full of brush and weeds and, on some of them, the birds would boil out all at once, making picking out the roosters and getting a shot quite a challenge, sort of like a really big quail covey rise, only with the birds going in more directions and the limitation of having to pick out roosters over hens.

It's interesting hunting such an unfamiliar landscape. Almost everything in agriculture, mostly flat, enormous amounts of food on the ground right now in the form of waste grain and seemingly very little cover at all. The number of owls and hawks you see in a day is surprising, too.

If you're looking for a good hunt on wild birds in northern Texas, these guys have good land leased and run a nice hunt.

cooking by the weather (and a lazy man's hint for butchering)

2009-12-04T06:45:00.000-07:00

We've had a bit of weather blow through and more on the way. Colder weather lends itself to some very satisfying cooking- stews, soups, braises, long roasting and other slow techniques. In much the same way, some of the tougher cuts of meat are more fun to mess with. A chunk of backstrap is a wonderful thing. Sear it or grill over a hot fire, dressed only with a bit of salt and pepper, and you have a nice meal. Tougher cuts, though, that take some cooking, seasoning, and tenderizing, are both more challenging and, in some ways, more satisfying. Not that I'll be giving up (or giving away) backstrap anytime soon.

In any event, the last elk I put into practice a technique I'd been thinking about for a while. Instead of trimming the shank all the way out and turning it into stew meat or cutting out the big tendons and grinding it for burger, I used a saw cut a couple of the shank portions across the bone and froze them, bone, sinew and all, for braising. I never got around to cooking those during cold weather last spring and now it's the right weather to braise. That and we're about down to the odds and ends of that elk.

Pretty, aren't they?

Steve Bodio wrote about cooking elk shank a while back so, with that in mind and a glance at a couple of osso bucco and daube recipes, off we went.

I browned a half of a pig's foot in some olive oil first:

While it was browning, I tossed the shanks in a bit of seasoned flour:

Once the pork was brown, I removed it and browned the shanks on all sides. In turn, they were taken out and replace with a head's worth of garlic cloves and couple of onions.

A bit of browning for the veggies, then I deglazed the pot with a bottle of (inexpensive, not very good) wine. Once the wine began to boil I added a couple of cups of elk stock and returned the meat along with a bouquet garni of rosemary, sage, and oregano.

Covered, the whole thing was banged in a slow (250 F) oven for the next few hours. Once the meat was fork tender I took the lid off the pot and let things thicken up a bit, adjusted the seasoning, and added a precious half-cup of elk demi glace I'd made a while back. Meanwhile, rolls went into a much hotter oven.

Along with a nice red wine, mashed mixed root vegetables, and a green salad, a very good meal for a cold night.

The first few elk and deer I processed on my own, I didn't have access to a grinder and cut everything into stew meat. Getting enough sinew and silverskin out of the lower shanks took a long, long time and the waste about outweighed the meat recovered. Even once I started grinding my own burger, the shanks were more than a bit of a chore. You can't grind the big sinews in them and all that silverskin hangs up the grinder. This way, that connective tissue was cooked into submission and contributed to a rich, winey stew. I'll cheerfully trade a few hours of running the oven for hours of knife work, especially with such a nice result. Next time, a few mushrooms added wouldn't be amiss.

Various river scenes

2009-12-02T06:44:00.000-07:00

We've been down on the Rio a few times recently. We still don't have that many ducks down here and the hunting has been a bit slow. Good fun, though.

A and her Ruger Red Label, sunrise:

Long time friend, good cook, and occasional commenter Matt on his inaugural duck hunt:

We had a good hunt, even if not too many birds were around and our shooting wasn't quite up to par. A few birds in the bag and nice weather- nothing to complain about. Unlike the next.

Fortunately, there's no video to go with this one- me, working on my balky autoloader. Can't imagine why it was acting up. Getting set up early doesn't do much good when you have to work on your gun in the dark. Having a single shot makes you really concentrate on the bird for your one try, too.

Booker, posing with bad grace next to a banded bird. That bird traveled all of seven miles from the banding site, not many northern birds down yet. Books was busy watching the sky and wanted to go find more, not fool around with cameras and a bird in the hand:

Last, a bittern in a riverside drain (may have to click on the photo to see anything). He had the good grace to act exactly as reputed, putting his beak in the sky and mimicking a reed or stump, rather than flying off.

relative absence

2009-12-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

Not much blogging lately, a trend that's likely to continue. A house on the market, a sale, moving & consolidating and various other things have cut down on time on the 'net. Heck, you can see the dog is neglected, pushing his ball under the fence in a vain effort to coax some fun out of a day of cleaning up the yard. No complaints, though, we've been having some fun as I'll detail in the next few posts. More on the horizon, too.

quote

2009-11-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

"Most modern hunters, good and bad, just want to hunt--not explore and debate why they do it and how they do it and what other think of them for it. Yet today, no thoughtful hunter can afford to just hunt. In order to defend what we do--to ourselves, our families, our friends, and, especially, to an increasingly urbanized, denatured, domesticated, and virtualized populace--in order to improve hunting ethices and invite and inspire tomorrow's hunters and assure that hunting has a tomorrow...for all of these reasons and more, hunters must ask themselves: Why?"

David Peterson "Heartsblood"

progressing

2009-11-17T19:24:00.000-07:00

Last year, my sister's Micky was all feet and fuzz. This year, he just passed his NAVHDA Natural Ability Test (2nd Prize). Now his sights are set on the Utility Test.

I hear he'd also like to try on some wild birds. Hmmm, there's a dove split going to open before too long in Texas.

really vintage

2009-11-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Scotch buried in ice since 1909 to be retrieved. Bound to be well preserved. I'll bet Shackleton and his men were missing a stiff drink at many, many points on their journey home.

eclipse plumage?

2009-11-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

A is out of town on business and, my work being closed yesterday, Booker and I went out to chase ducks. We found a few, with a bunch of mallards and a bunch of wigeon each trying to land on us twenty minutes after legal shooting hours and just as the light got good enough for me to be comfortable shooting. We knocked down a bird out of each bunch and then proceeded to wait and watch as nearly everything quit flying. We passed a hen mallard that didn't try to come in and then were passed in turn by another half-dozen wigeon. After a couple of hours a bird came down river flying low and slipped right over the decoys. The bird backlit, I saw green on the head and decided "drake mallard" and shot, knocking it down. Booker began a less than spectacular retrieve.

Here he is barely keeping the bird in hand, as it were:

When he got it to me after a quick re-position I figured I had a hen mallard. On closer look, the bird had the yellow bill with black tip of a drake, a black tail with curly tailfeathers, and a streak of bright green on either side of the head, fading up toward the top. Apart from that, it sported the mottled feathering of a hen mallard along with the dark blue speculum that you'd expect. Perhaps a bird that had remained in eclipse plumage (though that shouldn't be, so far south and this time of year), or a hybrid, or a "manky mallard". The bird is still alive in the last photo and I was a bit uncertain about putting it up. If folks think it's inappropriate, I'll pull it. In any event, by the time Booker had gotten all the way in, the bird had expired. No surprise, given the obvious head wound.

No closeup photos for the 'net, they were all a bit too gory. Interesting bird, anyway. The green on the head was a lot more prominent in hand.

The only other adventure for the day came when a slipped in ankle deep water while moving a couple of decoys and managed to go down, losing the shotgun off my shoulder and dunking it completely underwater and into the mud. Curses ensued. With any decent luck at all, that's an entire season's worth of falling in water right there. Once again erect, I took off my right glove (full of water) and unloaded, pouring water out of the barrel, magazine tube, receiver and (hooray, plastic!) stock. Back on dry land I wiped off the mud, checked the barrel, then blasted it interior of the receiver with "One Shot" cleaner and dry lube. WD-40 would have been a better choice under the circumstances, in terms of hosing out bits of grit and removing water, but the Hornady stuff worked well enough to keep the gun functioning. I've used it before to keep a balky autoloader running more smoothly, but this was a significantly tougher test. Also, dry lube is a good choice in this country of blowing sand.

Once home, I had over an hour of breaking the gun all the way down, cleaning it very thoroughly, then lubing and reassembling. Probably could have used a good cleaning, anyway.

another quote

2009-11-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

"I'd much rather my guns wore out in a dozen years than my dogs. There's something wrong with a world where even a good pair of boots lasts longer than a good gundog."

"The Big One One", Robert F. Jones, The Hunter in My Heart

more blogroll additions

2009-11-05T23:36:00.000-07:00

Alt-country music, food, & bird hunting with Eight More Miles.

Environmental recovery, hunting and tramping about in and around Butte Montana with Ecorover.

Outdoors, books, movie reviews, & much more at Macaroni. Check out the sea caves of Lake Superior.

Fishing, duck hunting- is that a Chesapeake? Wait, no, a chocolate lab. Huh, never seen one of those before.... Sorry, Chessie revenge for the approx. 300 times I've heard "is that a chocolate lab?" over the last two years. General wandering around in hills and hardwoods in NE Iowa with Wandering Owl at Wandering Owl Outside.

season delay

2009-10-31T17:11:00.000-06:00

Today marks the first weekend of duck season in the region we hunt. However, we won't be on the Rio. Our wide retriever is temporarily disabled.

He claims he can get in the game and play a full four quarters, but we're keeping him on the bench for a while in hopes of preserving the rest of the season. Also, dog boots are on order so we can arrange some protection of the wound. Going down to the Rio without the dog to hunt ducks is kind of unthinkable at this point.

Maybe next weekend.

Elk Season

2009-10-30T07:56:00.000-06:00

This first image is of the sky on the first day of this year's recent Colorado elk hunt and represents the majority of our days, which set a new standard for bluebird weather. It was the warmest hunt I can recall in twenty-some years of September, October, and November elk hunts. Each morning I walked out to hunt in only shirt sleeves.

We had a bit of frost the first day, but even that went away.

My father and I got to the mountain in the afternoon and got busy turning the full pickup into the camp set up.

Cabela's tents, like this one, have really started appearing in the woods- rivaling military surplus and traditional canvas wall tents in popularity.

The next day, Chris and Chris arrived from points farther east and got arranged, easy camping marred only by a balky, annoying, and soon useless chainsaw. At least we got most of the wood needed (not much in such pleasant temps) cut to length before it gave up on me. A sale "bargain" Ryobi, it started having troubles in its first ten hours of operation. Next saw will not be the same.

The recession affected this hunt in the form of fewer hunters. About half as many camps as usual appeared to be up there and I didn't see as many other hunters or track in the woods. Not a bad thing for us, but you have to feel sorry for all the folks who've had to give up their hunt.

It's a great pinyon year in this part of western Colorado, the ground under the trees littered with fat nuts and more still clinging to the cones. Lots of birds were taking advantage of the easy food and nice weather a birder would have had a field day. Unable to identify any but the most common species, I just enjoyed hearing and seeing them all. I saw dark eyed juncos, western tanagers, crows, ravens, Clark's nutcrackers, red shafted northern flickers scrub jays, stellar jays, pinyon jays, and nuthatches and a bunch more that would have required a field guide and spending time looking more at birds than for elk.

Here's a ponderosa pine marked with a Forest Service plaque, noting the tree's historical significance. I had to do a little research on "Ute Scarred Trees" to figure out what they meant.

I've seen ponderosas with similar scars before, but never realized what I was looking at.

A couple of us hunt grouse while we're up there, not while waiting for an elk or stalking in the early morning, but making our way back to camp in the afternoon or the like. There weren't a lot of birds to be found, but we got on the right side of a few. The pistol is a High Standard "Field King" made between 1950 and 1953. Unlike the more commonly seen (at least in my case) "Sport King", the Field King features an adjustable rear sight and a medium-taper barrel. I found this one with a 6 3/4" barrel and then got a 4 1/2" barrel (not in the correct configuration for this particular model, but that fits) for carry. Heavier than my little Smith and Wesson, it has better sights and is easier to hit with. First game with this gun.

The grouse were taking advantage of pinyon nuts as well, along with rose hips, grouse whortleberry, and the usual spruce needles.

The above sequence shows that some of the grouse made it into the Dutch oven, to be joined with biscuits. My father put the grouse dish together, I made the biscuits and managed to burn the bottoms. Oak coals are harder to regulate than charcoal and seem to burn a bit hotter. The top two-thirds were pretty good, though. Clearly, more practice (on site) is called for.

One of the Chris's got his cow the first evening of the hunt, a nice big specimen that wasn't too awful far down the canyon. We got to her about seven pm and had three quarters back in camp by ten. Chris retrieved the remaining quarter the next morning. With meat on the pole and demands of work and home, we were ready to knock down camp just a couple of days later as the weather blew in.

Not any too soon, in terms of getting out before the storm. By the time Dad and I had made it to the good road, the rain was snow and sticking well. Fresh tracking for the guys staying until the end of the season.

Another good trip to the mountains. It's pretty hard to spend any time up there at all without learning at least a little something. Even if it were, time with friends and family tramping about the country would be more than worthwhile.

addition to blog roll

2009-10-23T08:44:00.000-06:00

Long time commenter Dan has a new-ish blog with lots of fantastic photos and back country adventures in Newfoundland. Check out Out On The Rock!

Back from CO and elk hunting, I hope to post about it here pretty soon.

scarcity

2009-10-08T20:19:00.000-06:00

"As we crowd more and more on to public hunting lands, that nebulous something one of my friends calls The Quality Outdoor Experience grows more rare. As more people use less, more laws are passed, some to preserve that quality and some to preserve anything at all, stifling the freedom that is an intrinsic part of The Quality Outdoor. This crowding and regulation doesn't only apply to hunting. These days we have to apply a year ahead for reservations to camp in Yosemite National Park, and something very similar is going to happen to Yellowstone very soon. AS public forests in the East grow not just crowded but actually dangerous to hunt in, more and more hunters come West, to hunt forests already crowded by folks who moved to Wyoming and Idaho and Montana to get away from a crowded California.

And so it goes. Those of us who were lucky enough to be raised somewhere close to the land, with a sense of self-sufficiency and (dare I say it?) The Quality Outdoor Experience, just go deeper. That can mean hiking farther into the Wind River Range, moving to Alaska, or just hunting something not so damn popular, like sage grouse."

John Barsness, Western Skies

near frost

2009-10-05T07:37:00.000-06:00

The gardens got nipped a bit a couple of days ago. We did end up picking basil and making a couple of batches of pesto, which have been stashed to brighten up some winter meals. The bit of freeze is a little early. A's beans soldier on, while the squash and peppers got bit pretty good:

Meanwhile, Booker continues to beg raw green beans, the Chessie-approved vegetable, as they're snapped and prepared for the deep freeze:

Food thoughts and food tv

2009-10-01T20:30:00.000-06:00

Cooler weather turns the mind toward cooking. We're still enjoying some of the tag end of summer, with a couple of weeks of home-grown tomatoes to go and a few peaches still at the grower's market. However, fall is pretty much here, as evidenced by the really good apples also at the grower's market and chilly nights that have me eying the basil plants- they don't stand anything approaching a frost and so are destined to become pesto soon, thus preserved for the freezer but marking the end of pizza margherita. Getting the eyeball, too, are a couple of elk shanks left from last year are going to come out of the freezer and meet up with a bottle of cheap wine and a long stay in a slow oven, a dish that requires cool weather to really enjoy.

In the vein of thoughts on food, I went over to Ruhlman's blog for the first time in a while and, once there, found an essay on the movie "Jules and Julia", with links to a Michael Pollan essay inspired in part by the movie, and an older Bill Buford article on the changing style of food tv.

One thought running through that writing is the conundrum that Americans are still cooking less and less while paying more and more attention to food matters, as reflected by the changing style of cooking shows from the seminal example of Julia Child's "The French Chef" to popular competition cooking shows like "Top Chef" and just-plain-eating shows, where you watch some host travel around eating at restaurants. Separate from the subject of television, the theme of actually cooking vs. being "into food" appears to be current, Hank Shaw just announced his book project centered on "honest food" in which it looks like he'll detail his amazing energy and efforts in producing and processing intricate foods and dishes in part to try to inspire folks to take the same level of care with their ingredients and tackle some significant preparations.

In one of the above-mentioned articles, Buford's last lines are "Never in our history as a species have we been so ignorant about our food. And it is revealing about our culture that, in the face of such widespread ignorance about a human being’s most essential function—the ability to feed itself—there is now a network broadcasting into ninety million American homes, entertaining people with shows about making coleslaw." In another, Pollan asserts toward the end of his essay that "The question is, Can we ever put the genie back into the bottle? Once it has been destroyed, can a culture of everyday cooking be rebuilt? One in which men share equally in the work? One in which the cooking shows on television once again teach people how to cook from scratch and, as Julia Child once did, actually empower them to do it?"

Rulman, appropriately I think, takes some issue with the idea that people are cooking less, perhaps placing the nadir of American cooking a bit behind us and pointing to the food blogs as heirs to Julia Child-style information sharing. However, Pollan's essay makes a pretty convincing case that while millions of people are watching food shows and reading about food and are, perhaps, getting into more exotic ingredients, many aren't following up by going into the kitchen regularly and cooking themselves. It does seem very, very strange.

For some fun cooking stuff, check out the new addition to the blog roll.

Book reviews

2009-09-24T07:20:00.000-06:00

The best reviewer of books with trees in them (and other books as well) is hitting the reviews.

In celebration, I reprint one of the all time greatest book reviews, by Ed Zern,

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoorminded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways of controlling vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book can not take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping."

from "Hunting and Fishing from A to Zern".

Cohos

2009-09-21T07:11:00.000-06:00

I didn't make it up to Alaska this year for the silver fishing, but I hear the guys that did had a good year. I'm glad they got into them.

Here's a video of my father and I messing around a bit last year, catching fish more or less at will:

Let's be careful out there

2009-09-18T07:17:00.001-06:00

I'm cautious around snakes, but not particularly scared of them. Unless he crawls right across my boot, I pretty much always identify a snake, at least as to poisonous/non-poisonous and further than that if I can.

On the other hand, it is a little creepy how little a bush is needed to hide three feet (estimated) of rattler:

Sorry for the shaky and poorly framed video. That guy was nearly three inches across the back of his head and I was pretty distracted checking out all the other weeds in the near vicinity to make sure they didn't harbor another snake. We'd seen another rattler just a couple of hundred yards away, but he was more aggressive or threatened and didn't get his picture taken. Clearly a good evening for reptiles.

Edited to add: there's some interesting information about why & how rattlesnakes rattle in Rigor Vitae's archives.

watched pots

2009-09-14T07:30:00.000-06:00

One thing about being gone for a week, you notice some things that have accumulated a bit more. It's now quite dark when the morning's alarm goes off. Another thing, A's garden decided to really put on during our absence. Bunches of tomatoes and nine pounds of green beans, the latter trimmed, blanched, and frozen to brighten up winter meals:

Fifty-five degrees F. this morning. Fall is just about here.

back from

2009-09-10T07:06:00.000-06:00

There was water; this is the view from the porch:

The dark stuff in the foreground is turtlegrass, frequented by sea turtles that managed to escape photography.

Various aquatic crabs, including the hermit:

and land crabs by the thousand:

and fish:

So, given the fish, how was the fishing?

Slow, for us:

Fugu, anyone?

More seriously, it was a new place that required some scouting out. About the time we were starting to get some ideas, it was time to leave. We had some success:

Out island of the Bahamas- Long Island. It's really amazing where a long day's travel will take you.

Back from...

2009-09-07T17:06:00.001-06:00

Large spiders:

Loud frogs:

Lotsa lizards:

and those critters that dispense with legs for locomotion:

Links

2009-08-28T13:09:00.000-06:00

Just a couple. Light(er than the scanty normal) blogging now and for the next bit, I anticipate.

Article by Grant Aschatz on "diner envy", which details the difficulties he's found where diners at very high end restaurants see others getting extra courses and such. "Gee, we got the 97 course tasting menu but the table over there had an amuse bouche that we didn't. We were cheated! We'll never return!"

Forthcoming books by author/bloggers here and here. Either's a pretty safe bet as a great read.

Here's Labrat's review of a fun, fat, speedy-reading paperback, "Monster Hunter International", a first novel by gun-blogger Larry Corriea. I enjoyed the book and the review.

Here's a question I don't really think has an answer but which is fun to investigate anyway: Where to find the prettiest outdoor photos on the web: John Carlson's Prairie Ice, Cat Urbigkit's contributions to Querencia, or Russel Graves' blog?

Tons of fantastic images in each case that reflect not only artistic eyes and speedy reflexes but many hours outdoors.

character

2009-08-21T07:18:00.001-06:00

"One old-timer I hunted with by the North Dakota border advised me to never, ever get hold of one of those Chesapeake dogs, because he'd had one back in the thirties that was so stubborn and ornery that it finally refused to get out of the back of the pickup one day during a sharptail expedition. My friend finally tried to lasso the dog and drag it out by main force-and almost got his hand bitten off for his trouble. It's an image that attacks me on the verge of sleep some nights: a leather-faced cowboy whirling a rope around his head on an empty prairie ridge, preparing to toss the loop at the head of a bull-necked Chesapeake Bay retriever braced sullenly in the back of an ancient Chevrolet pickup-probably at the same time another hunter, a couple of thousand miles to the southeast, ate a leisurely sandwich from the lunch box of a mule-drawn wagon, while his well-trained pointin' dogs searched for yet another covey of quail."

John Barsness, Western Skies (again)

Isn't it ironic

2009-08-17T07:00:00.000-06:00

"The suburbanite's desire to hunt must be deeply instinctive if it isn't buried by a world according to Trump. But the corollary must be that when modern America decides to hunt, it wants a sure thing. A place where your dollar always buys satisfaction, where if you pay for three pheasants you by God kill three pheasants.

.... The modern urban American hunter wants something certain, and in modern America a few dollars searching for something can find it. That's the law of the marketplace, and the marketplace has created Natty Bumppo as comparison shopper."

John Barsness, Western Skies

(Irony; the sole Amazon review for this most excellent book states: "Just a pleasant read and not informative of where and how to put a hunt together. This appears to be the author's intent, however most of us are in the execution mode, not the live/read about other lives mode." In other words, "just tell me where to go and how to do it, don't waste my time with your stories or 'philosophy' and please, please don't make me read closely and draw some of my own lessons".)

classics

2009-08-14T08:28:00.000-06:00

Lots of food on the blog lately, but not much in the way of outdoors or gear. Hmmm. Let's talk guns.

I believe a large part of the fascination for those of us who like guns is that they represent interesting and, frequently, very well made pieces of machinery. Ergonomics have been a concern of gunmakers from the very beginning and the tension between creating a weapon that can be easily handled and aimed and a mechanism which is strong, easy, and fast to use resulted in all kinds of interesting designs.

One of the thread of those designs is the pump or slide action shotgun.* Any article about pump shotguns will nearly invariably talk about how they're an American invention and mention market hunting and perhaps farm equipment, which they are said to invoke. I don't know about farm equipment; however, pump shotguns, particularly the older ones from when the designs were being ironed out, are fascinatingly mechanical. Whereas a double gun is (ideally) sleek and self contained, a lot is going on with a pump as the action works- bolt flying back and forth, shell popping out of the magazine tube and lifted- clicks and clacks and metal sliding on metal (all of which Hollywood uses most inappropriately).

Here's a good example (and bad photos) of the sort of old pump shotgun I'm thinking about:

30 inch barrel, full choke (before it was opened) lots of drop on the stock, complex milling of a steel billet to turn out that rather baroque receiver- check out all the angles:

square lug on the bolt fits into a cut on the top of the receiver:

a Stevens Model 525, built from a Browning design

This is the first variation of the design (sliding inertial release on the slide lock) and was probably made in the first decade or so of the twentieth century. It has been refinished, so it doesn't have any collector's value. However, it works just fine.

If a person chose to create a "collection" it'd be a fun project to take $1,000 and see how many different pre-war (WWII) pumpguns in decent shape he could get for that money. Of course, "decent shape" is unlikely to be anywhere near mint condition, since working guns they generally survive pretty battered. Lots of shotguns from that era. I'd pick up a Winchester Model 12 in 16 gauge (they sized the frames for each gauge). Then there are three Remington pumps: the Model 10, the Model 31 "The ball bearing repeater", and the Remington Model 17 (another John Browning design made only in 20 gauge that, with modifications, became the Ithaca 37). The Ithaca 37 is still, after some hiccups, in production today and early models are easy to find. Less common are the Marlin Models 17, 30, 31 and 43. In addition to the Winchester Models 93 and 97 (each begun in the 19th Century and correspondingly more expensive) I'm sure there are half a dozen others I haven't mentioned as well. While none of this collection would appreciate much as an investment, likely every single one could be pressed into service.

I'm not curmudgeon enough to claim old is necessarily better. Nonetheless, while few will call a pumpgun graceful, slender, corncob forearms and nice bluing create an attractive package to my eye and, with the exception of the current production Ithaca 37s they're not making anything like those old repeaters these days (geez, looking at "the best new shotguns for 2009" at the link all I can think is "not for me").

*That Wikipedia article linked here is wrong in one respect. John Browning did not invent the slide action shotgun, Christopher Spencer did. His shotgun came out in 1882, a decade before the Winchester Model 93, designed by Browning, was produced.

political

2009-08-07T14:00:00.000-06:00

"If ever there was an opportunity for 'liberals' and 'conservatives' to come together it is with programs such as the CRP. The Right is right: incentives are preferable to government coercion in protecting the land, the water, land the wildlife. We've gone as far as we can go (perhaps too far) in forcing people to care for the natural world."

M.H. Salmon "Catfish as Metaphor"

for clarification, see "CRP"

Zucc

2009-07-31T07:41:00.000-06:00

Growing up, zucchini squash was never much of a favorite. Toward the middle or end of summer, everyone had lots of the squash and it became a ubiquitous side dish. In aid of using the surplus we'd have it boiled (not great), fried (good) sauted (good), in chocolate cake (ok- lots of chocolate) and in bread (very good). It also appeared in soup, salads and on crudite platters. Back then, if anyone had told me I'd pay $.99/lb for zucchini, I never would have believed them.

As an adult, I'm much more fond of zucchini and eat it quite a bit. I haven't seen anything new to do with zucchini in a long time, barring its appearance in vegetarian lasagna, at least until perusing the below mentioned "River Cottage Cookbook". There, Fearnley-Whittingstall counsels to cook zucchini very slowly in a bit of olive oil and salt until the liquid has largely been cooked out and it is very soft. He then uses it as a base for soup, souffle, or pasta sauce. The latter is completed by adding a bit of cream and Parmesan cheese to the zucchini pulp. Having a couple of plants producing, we gave it a try.

It takes a long time to cook down, but you don't want to brown it:

A very little bit of cream and some grated cheese:

makes a very nice pasta sauce. The green, fresh flavor of the squash comes through nicely and the texture is creamy and rich, despite being largely vegetable. I'll bet you could feed this to almost any kid without complaint.

veg

2009-07-18T10:12:00.000-06:00

"I think of fruits and herbs as essential luxuries: joyous ingredients that I would never be without. Whereas vegetables are luxurious essentials; the primary building blocks for most well-constructed meals that I could not be without. When vegetables take center stage, even meat may become a spice."

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall "The River Cottage Cookbook"

covers

2009-07-11T14:02:00.000-06:00

Listening to music, one of my favorite things to discover is a well constructed cover of a song- one that manages to overtake the original version or, perhaps better still, to reimagine it. In searching the web for links to performances of a couple of my favorite examples, I came across an entire blog devoted to covers performed in the folk/acoustic style, a time sink of the very first water. Of course, the web being what it is, I then found a whole bunch of such blogs.

Buying a tribute album or other collection of covers is fraught with the danger of mediocre takes messing up favorite songs (or at least it used to be, before you could preview nearly any album on Amazon.com) so the best covers are generally those of songs that you're not all that fond of in their original version.

For example, having come into pop-music consciousness in the early 80's, I couldn't help but be aware of Prince, though I had little use for his music apart from conceding that he was good at writing pop songs. Those songs just didn't do much for me, whether performed by pretty girls or the guy who kind of looked like he wanted to be a pretty girl. Back then I was listening to more music from the non-psychedelic strain of 60's rock, with The Police, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and a few others thrown in.

That aside, Prince's "When Doves Cry" (note the link is to the original video, in all it's overwrought and risque glory) was a pretty big hit and is a pretty good pop song. Compare, though, the Be Good Tanyas' version (and this link is to a place to listen to the song, music videos seeming to have largely passed from this earth, except for the homemade sort). It seems to me that this is as much an homage as a reworking of the song. A great bit and a favorite of mine.

Another Prince hit which I can take or leave (mostly, leave) in the original is "Kiss". However, Richard Thompson's driving solo acoustic version of this song is pretty amazing and another of my favorite covers. Incidentally, Thompson is not only a great songwriter in his own right, he isn't afraid of covers at all. Perhaps we should be afraid.

Another big name in the 80's that I've never been partial to is Bruce Springsteen. Apart from the moving and perfect album "Nebraska", I just don't care for Springsteen's bombast. However, he does write some good songs. He just needs someone else to sing and perform them. Someone like Cowboy Junkies. Margo Timmins is much nicer to listen to than Bruce, see this cover of "Thunder Road". Mostly, though, the songs are just better stripped down.

Incidentally, Cowboy Junkies play Santa Fe tonight.

follow up

2009-07-02T19:13:00.000-06:00

The truffle benefactors also gifted us with some black morels. While you can read about morels and look at pictures of morels, any numbers of paeans to them don't really do justice to actually trying fresh morels in cream sauce, in this instance on a bit of pasta with some cold sliced leftover elk. Wow!

I know morels lurk in the mountains around here, so far I just haven't been able to figure out where. One of these days, though.