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By Root 600 0

bounty of the Quarles table, roasted prairie chicken was perhaps the most rooted, the most fundamentally local. Where tallgrass prairie thrives, with its prairie pinks and “fragrant and fine” wild strawberries, prairie chickens thrive also; and when the grasses vanish, so do the birds. When Twain was a boy, there was still more than enough tallgrass to shelter the prairie chickens, and he remembered well the mornings spent hunting them and other grassland creatures: “I remember . . . how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often I regretted that I was well enough to go.” Once in the woods, the party “drifted silently after [the dogs] in the melancholy gloom. But presently the gray dawn stole over the world, the birds piped up, then the sun rose and poured light and comfort all around, everything was fresh and dewy and fragrant, and life was a boon again. After three hours of tramping we arrived back wholesomely tired, overladen with game, very hungry, and just in time for breakfast.”

But when Twain wanted prairie hens in later years, he thought first of those from Illinois—Illinois, where there was little but prairie, where thousands of years of grass growing and burning and dying, then growing again, had left a bounty of soil among the deepest and blackest ever found, at any time, anywhere in the world. In 1861, when Twain left the Mississippi River for Nevada at the age of twenty-five, fleeing before either North or South could force him into service as a steamboat pilot, he knew that he was leaving behind the howl of the steam whistle, the splash of the paddlewheels, and the long journeys to New Orleans from Cairo, Illinois. He couldn’t have known that there would never be more Illinois prairie chickens than there were at the moment he went west. The young pilot left behind a countryside that would soon be leached of some of its abundance; many would feel the loss, but few as powerfully as did the aging, elegiac, haunted Twain.

That, more or less, is what I tell Eli. She kisses me; she gets it. I kiss her back, and I’m off for Illinois.

PRAIRIE CHICKENS

Cut out all shot, wash thoroughly but quickly, using some soda in the water, rinse and dry, fill with dressing, sew up with cotton thread, and tie down the legs and wings; place in a steamer over hot water till done, remove to a dripping-pan, cover with butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, place in the oven and baste with the melted butter until a nice brown; serve with either apple-sauce, cranberries, or currant jelly.

—Mrs. Godard.

—ESTELLE WOODS WILCOX, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, 1877

Newton, Illinois, has three thousand people and two power plants. It has a motel with weekly rates for men who ignore the No Smoking signs in their rooms, having driven from Carbondale and Vandalia and Terre Haute to work in the plants for five days at a time. It has a bowling alley, the Parklane, that serves the only breakfast in town, eggs and potatoes and biscuits and bacon. But the Parklane doesn’t open until 5:00 A.M., which is still a half hour away when I drive off from the motel and out into the country darkness.

On this April morning, it’s twenty degrees in Newton. Outside town a steady, freezing wind pulls across winter-naked soybean fields and fields stubbled with ranks of cornstalks—stalks cut down to their last spare inches, looking elastic after a winter under snow.

Scattered among the hundreds of thousands of farmed acres are perhaps twelve hundred of broken-up prairie—a few acres here, twenty there, a hundred more here, acquired piecemeal whenever money and opportunity presented themselves. The plots of prairie are marked on my map: small, irregular blocks covered in cross-hatching like braille. But even to my untrained eye, even by the light of a two-thirds moon, the grasses are obvious as I drive toward Prairie Ridge State Natural Area. What seems a flat, featureless landscape will rise suddenly high and ragged against the pale