Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [23]
“The red, running buffalo,” Frank says as the flame makes its way toward a copse of burr oak. “That’s what the Indians called it. And we do the same thing they would, letting the red buffalo run.” I ask how they would have stayed clear of burns set by others, or by lightning. “They pretty much held to the river courses,” he says. “But listen to that now.” Again the fierce crinkling, like breaking glass. “You’d have heard that coming on the wind. If I hear that coming, I got matches with me. And I’m dropping a match and following my own fire out.”
Soon the fire is roaring down the slope, pulled higher and hotter by its own wind. Red-tailed hawks circle before the fire line, hoping for rabbits or quail to dash from the blaze and onto exposed ground.
Behind us the ground is black, and smoking, and clean. It’s ready to grow.
Two
A BARREL OF ODDS AND ENDS
Possum and Raccoon
BERKELEY RACCOONS ARE BIG, fearless, sewer-swimming bastards. One has begun sneaking in through our supposedly impregnable, magnetically locked cat door; once he left muddy footprints next to Erik’s bed. My latest confrontation with the raccoon ended with me, naked, brandishing a Maglite in one hand and an umbrella in the other, as the foul beast ate a bowl of our cat’s food. I bellowed—I swung the umbrella like a sword.
The raccoon yawned. It looked better than three feet from nose to tail. When it yawned, I saw its teeth. I must say again—really, I find, I can’t stress this particular point enough—that I was naked. What’s more, I felt naked, like I’d never in my life worn clothes. It came to me, then, that I did not greatly desire to fight the raccoon, or to do anything that would increase, even marginally, the chances of my fighting the raccoon. Maybe I was being rude. I shone the flashlight on the floor, so he could eat in peace. It didn’t seem to make any difference either way; the raccoon ate calmly, picking up cat kibbles individually or by the pawful, leaving, in its own leisurely good time, with a final, disdainful slam of the plastic cat door.
It was a scandal: a disgrace. For a few days, we considered repellents, motion-detecting sprinklers, even a dog.
For some reason it did not immediately occur to us to try eating him. But there it is! Right there on the menu—“coon,” tucked neatly between “’possum” and “Boston bacon and beans.”
Eli says, “No.”
I hadn’t asked. But she knows that there’s a chance I’ll try to follow through; though I’ve eaten neither raccoon nor opossum, I have eaten muskrat, and after muskrat, raccoon sounds like freakin’ pumpkin pie. When I was cooking Twain’s breakfast biscuits, I used a recipe given to me by archaeology grad student Alison Bell on Flowerdew Hundred Plantation, deep in the Virginia Tidewater. The plantation is named for an early colonist, Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley (“Hundred” was a way of implying, falsely, that the settlement could support a hundred men-at-arms); through the centuries it’s been the site of both Native American and English palisades, a colonial tavern, and the pontoon bridge that carried Grant’s army as he tried to outflank Lee near Petersburg.
When I worked on excavations at Flowerdew during my college summers, it was home to country ham and angel biscuits and Rabelaisian breakfast spreads and brutally hot weather relieved by hammering James River thunderstorms. The professor who ran the dig was a guy named Jim Deetz, a native Marylander who looked (speaking conservatively) forty years older than his actual sixty-five and who thought of his years spent at UC Berkeley as an eon of exile. For one month a year, Flowerdew was a place for him