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By Root 577 0

prairies and the great societies that lived on them. In A.D. 1200, thirty thousand people lived at Cahokia, the mound city in the prairies a hundred miles west of Newton. Thirty thousand people—that’s more than there were in London at the time, just fifteen years before the Magna Carta. Thirty thousand people hearing the prairie chickens boom at dawn in the surrounding cornfields, feasting on the meat of hunted birds, then adorning themselves with bones and barred feathers and quills. Later the Blackfoot and Shoshone and Sioux and Cheyenne all danced prairie-chicken dances in praise of approaching spring, celebrating as the booming echoed over black, newly burned grasslands. In 1805 William Clark wrote of “a Cloudy morning & Smokey all Day from the burning of the plains, which was Set on fire by the Minetarries for an early crop of Grass.” It was a common experience for newcomers. The birds were always deeply American, dependent on a land the first nations helped make with fire.

That the young Sammy Clemens never directly confronted a prairie fire, a wall of flame advancing as fast as a horse, was all to the good as far as his safety and that of his uncle’s farm were concerned. But by damping down the burns, the settlers were ending an ancient pattern of destruction and renewal, a pattern that animals like the prairie chickens depended upon to create the blend of grasses they used for nesting and the open ground they needed to mate.

Mating, after all, is why the chickens boom and call, and I’ve been hoping to see a pair coupling.2 But they never do, at least out in the open. Each hen typically spends five days on the grounds, moving through stages of indifference, awareness, flirtatiousness, seduction, and reception. Though the season as a whole is winding down, I’m probably seeing these particular birds on one of their first days; they still feign disinterest, like seventh-graders at their first dance.

One by one the remaining hens fly off. When the last is gone, the booming soon fades. The cocks sink onto the grass. Lying on the lek, pinnae and tails lowered, orange throat sacs deflated and invisible, they seem like entirely different birds—diminished, depleted, and humble.

The last hen is gone; we’re free to leave without fear of disturbing them. When I shuffle out and swing the plywood door closed, the sky seems vast and bright and open. Though the puddles have frozen thicker since dawn, as I make my way along the path toward the Prairie Ridge offices I stay on clumps of icy bunchgrasses to avoid the deepest.

As I crunch from clump to clump, the booming still fills my head. I’ve seen something strange, a flamboyant performance that couldn’t be seen anywhere in the state save for our quiet, frozen blind. And it brings me low to think how sad that is. I reach the Parklane Bowling Alley very hungry, and just in time for the last of breakfast.

PRAIRIE CHICKENS STEWED WHOLE

Skin the birds, cut off the head and feet, draw them without breaking the intestines, and truss them so that they will be short and plump. Put them into a large saucepan with sufficient butter to prevent burning, and brown them; when the birds are brown, add for each one a tablespoonful of dry flour, and stir them about until the flour is brown. Then put in a gill of tomatocatsup for each bird, enough boiling water to cover them, and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper, and cook them slowly for two hours, or until they are tender. Serve the birds with their sauce and plain boiled potatoes.

—JULIET CORSON, Practical American Cookery and Household Management, 1886

Late in boyhood, years after leaving his uncle’s farm for the last time, Twain finally, reluctantly, abandoned his dreams of piracy and joining the circus. One “permanent ambition,” however, he clung to—that of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi River. In the five years that he lived his greatest and longest-lasting childhood dream, surely Twain often heard the booming of prairie chickens in grasslands along the shore, thrumming in the silence after the howl of the