Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [9]
Newton is a strange place to come in search of Twain’s feast; as far as I know, Twain never heard of the place, let alone set foot in it. But there are only about three hundred prairie chickens left in all of Illinois, and all of them are here. So: the cornfields outside Newton.
Besides, I’ve already begun to understand that when it came to the foods of the feast, the simple fact is that Twain knew what he was talking about. What, for instance, is so special about canvasback ducks from Baltimore or, by extension, from Maryland? Why is it so certain that the birds living near that particular place were what Twain loved, rather than a single Baltimore restaurant’s recipe? Here’s why: the vast waters feeding into the Chesapeake Bay are replete with wild celery, an aquatic grass (unrelated to table celery) that canvasback ducks gorge on. Such is the greed of the ducks for the grass that they’re named after it (wild celery is Vallisneria americana; canvasbacks are Aythya valisineria ). When able to feed with abandon, as they are in the waters near Baltimore, the result is birds so fat that a contemporary of Twain described them as filled with their own gravy.
I learned my lesson with the buckwheat cakes: I will not doubt Twain.
That’s why I’m soon trudging behind a Prairie Ridge guide named Bob across an icy field, flashlight in hand, toward a distant plywood blind. The freeze is recent, so in spite of the cold only a half inch of ice covers the wide, wintry puddles. This, I realize, explains why the one thing the taciturn Bob has said to me is, “Got rubber boots?” and why, when I said I didn’t, Bob was much amused. To avoid breaking through and soaking my feet, I have to stay on top of the clumps of frozen grass, jumping clumsily as though I’m crossing mossy stepping-stones.
The wind blows over the bare fields and straight through the five-inch-high viewing slot that runs the length of the blind’s front wall. I shiver on a long bench with a few dedicated birders, my arms tightly crossed, eyes squinted against the cold. The bench is long enough to hold six people, and it’s cold enough that I wish we did have that last body squeezed in here. The mating ground—or “booming ground,” or “lek”—is immediately in front of the blind, perhaps forty yards wide, a bit less than that deep. It was disked last fall, and the grass on it is as short as though mowed. But that’s all I can make out; except for the moon, the only light comes from a pair of radio towers blinking steadily across the fields.
Twenty degrees is cold. When I called to reserve the blind, Bob told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to leave it until the birds were done booming, which might be several hours. He insisted, Bob did, that I not drink coffee. At home I drink a lot of coffee. At home, right now, it is three in the morning. I’ve come a long way to hear the birds that even now, I remind myself, are stirring, figuratively clearing their throats, picking silently toward the dark lek. But the truth is that at this moment I would happily garrote a prairie chicken for an espresso. The wind through the viewing slot is picking up, icing my ears and nose. I have obeyed orders, I have drunk nothing, and yet I greatly desire to pee. I begin to suspect that coming to Illinois was actually sort of dumb—even dumber, maybe, than some of my friends thought, which was pretty dumb.
Then from behind the plywood blind comes a mournful, hollow cry, as though someone were blowing across the lip of a jug. At once it’s answered from across the lek—it’s a pair of male prairie chickens beginning to boom.
The booming ground is thirty or forty yards wide; the movement of the birds on the far side is just visible in the gray of the coming dawn. It’s like trying to make out crabs scrabbling under murky water. I guess that there are about four cocks there, though it’s difficult to tell;