Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [10]
The booms don’t merely echo across the emptiness, they infuse it; what was bare and dismal is now pulsing, beating, full.
But still lonely. Later I’ll try and fail to approximate the sound on a cello, guided by an 1893 Science article that suggested beginning with a low G. But strings have too much presence, too much vibrancy; when stringed instruments sound lonely, it’s because of what they’re playing. The prairie chickens can’t sound any other way. “Some morning in the month of April,” author T. A. Bereman exhorted in Science magazine, “when the sun rises clear and the air is crisp and frosty, go out upon the suburbs of a prairie town, away from the usual noises of the village, and listen.”
Even the streaking shadow of a great horned owl can’t stop the cocks for long; they press themselves flat on the lek or flee into taller grass, but rise or return almost as soon as the predator is past. Now at least six of the large, black-and-white grouse scratch and stamp and turn. Raised pinnae feathers jut from their brows like horns. Spotted tail feathers fan and flare as they stamp their feet in rapid staccato, their stout, black-striped bodies level with the ground. Though their bodies are rounded and soft-looking, their tail feathers are stiff and straight. Every wing is locked tightly back.
People who have handled prairie chickens describe them as among the wildest of animals—wilder than badgers, than bald or golden eagles. Some of that explosive force is on display here. Though one cock stands entirely still except for an orange timpani sac ballooning at his throat, most rush fiercely at their counterparts, stamping as they square off. Sometimes they burst into the air, nearly chest to chest. One flips backward, landing awkwardly on the dust and short grass.
The booming rises, rises. Now, in their excitement, the cocks entirely ignore the northern harriers and short-eared owls hunting in the tall grass beyond the lek. At last the booms are answered by the high, sharp caw of an approaching hen. As one of the ornithology students whispers, it doesn’t sound like an American thing; it makes me think of a jungle more than a patch of low grass beside an Illinois cornfield.
It also makes me really hungry. A confession: watching almost any animal for long enough makes me wonder how it tastes. Eli is like this, too. We’ll wander the Monterey Bay Aquarium, watching awestruck as sleek tuna, graceful sea turtles, and sevengill sharks cruise through shimmering blue water and forests of kelp. Then we’ll go for sushi. This is a large part of what drew me to Twain’s feast in the first place; it’s when we use all our senses that we’re most powerfully alive, most engaged with the world that feeds and sustains us. Primed by Twain’s description of early-morning hunts, I naturally start thinking about making a meal of these rare, beautiful birds.
Of course that isn’t about to happen; I’ll almost certainly never taste prairie chicken. To do so I’d have to move to Minnesota, one of the few places with a healthy population, and enter a lottery to win one of the something like two hundred licenses that would allow me to shoot a brace of birds. Still, a number of historical descriptions let me imagine how it would have been to sit down to a plate of prairie chicken on John Quarles’s farm.
First off, the meat is dark. Just about everyone, from William Clark of Lewis and Clark fame to the author of a guide to America’s urban markets, calls it dark; the one chef who doesn’t, Charles Ranhofer of New York’s legendary Victorian restaurant Delmonico’s, calls it “black.” Prairie chicken is a species of large grouse, and so other grouse, like sage hens, probably offer the most analogous flavor (though Clark clearly preferred prairie chicken, finding sage hen by comparison