With the sharptail grouse season opening in North Dakota in just a couple of weeks it seems an appropriate time for this story from my file of Meals –To Be Forgotten.
I was hunting southwest of Mandan, North Dakota, a few years back. The distant buttes with their accompanying ledges and caves hissed "rattlesnake" every time I glanced at them. Just beyond where I was lying on my sleeping bag there was a long-forgotten grave yard. I could not get the image of the alabaster grave stones inscribed with Iowa Cavalry names erased from my mind's eye. I wondered what became of their horses.
All this was a perfect setup for what was about to happen. I was trying to get to sleep under the stars while being chased around the dying campfire by acrid cedar smoke. My English setter was asleep in my truck. And then he barked.
I had never heard my setter bark before. I figured his mother was mute. So he and his littermates didn't know they could speak. But this was a long, low, snarly bark starting deep in his bowels and fairly booming across his teeth.
The train of nose-to-tail coyotes which inspired this bark was now trotting past my fire. The red of the coals reflecting back at me in their eyes. "Jake", I screamed, "get out here and sleep on this Coleman bag. They're your relatives, not mine."
But try as I might, I could not get comfortable in that dog cage. Even in the fetal position. By dawn my eyes were as red as the coyotes'.
Somehow I felt better with a loaded 20 gauge in my hands. And off we went, down a stream bed that must have had water in it, oh, maybe during the Pleistocene Age. How could a sharptail make a living out here, I wondered. They must have studied abroad. In the Sahara. Under camels.
Yet there was my setter on point. Either that or he was peeing. After six years I still can't distinguish. I raced to the point, tripped on a Brontosaurus bone and fired off a wild shot as the bird flushed.
I've never learned to forgive Jake for that look of astonishment he gives me when a bird drops. We examined the grouse together. No blood. Not a single ruffled feather. Aha! I noted with glee, my death-by-fright shooting technique is still working.
After three days of shuffling across the ranch, this much I learned: sharptail grouse fly too far on the flush to consider hunting them a form of recreation.
Fast forward now to February. We're in my kitchen and tonight's delicacy is to be sharp-tail cacciatore. Three of my hunting buddies have locked their wives in their cars and are enroute. The fact that they are not here for the sautéing of the grouse is a good thing I'm thinking. Because my finely-tuned gourmand nose has detected either the local B. F. Goodrich plant is in flames or my entree is in trouble.
"I'll double the garlic," I thought, as I put a large exhaust fan in the window.
"Maybe some MSG to open their taste buds. No, that won't work." Thankfully, by the time my guests arrived, the rosemary, thyme and twelve bottles of Glade air freshener were winning. The offending grouse was safely ensconced under a pile of vegetables in a casserole in the oven. I had duct taped the lid just to be safe.
There must be a way to make these dark-meat dandies delectable but when I opened the oven, "Italian Stallion" came to mind.
At the dinner table I thought it strange that all my guests has turned vegan. You'd think at least my wife would have told me. "Wonderful tomatoes," Dave said. "Are these from your garden?"
"Exquisite wine. What year is it?" Lisa opined.
As I cleared the dishes I noticed every last scrap had been consumed. Except for all these small, brown, meaty chunks.
"Well," I offered, "anybody save room for desert?"
