PUTTING AN ELK ON THE GROUND gives me a tremendous sense of relief. It feels good in an immediate way, like shaking an all-day hangover. And it feels good in a long-term way too, like knowing you’ve got some money in the bank. Once Matt and I had his elk out of the mountains and in the truck, we holed up in a motel for the night. When we woke up, we went out to the truck and took another long look at all that meat. There was plenty to get us by for a long time. Now we were free to do whatever kind of hunting and screwing around we felt like without having to worry about whether or not it was productive. To celebrate our freedom, we launched a trip for bighorn sheep.
In Montana, bighorn sheep permits are given out in a lottery; a hunter who puts in his name has only about a one percent chance of being drawn. But Matt got lucky and picked up a tag while I was putting together the Escoffier feast. I’d be excited to hunt sheep no matter what, but Escoffier happened to use a bit of mutton. The rare chance to eat bighorn would be complemented by some help from the King of Chefs.
Matt’s sheep permit was for a hunting district in the southeastern Gallatin Range, near Cinnabar Mountain. The sheep down there tend to spend their summers in the high country of Yellowstone National Park, up near Electric Peak. The park is off-limits to hunting, but as the weather turns and the snow gets deep, the sheep migrate downward toward National Forest land in the vicinity of Cinnabar Mountain. We made our first trip to the area the day after killing our elk. We still had the animal’s meat, packed in ice beneath a heavy wool blanket, in the back of the truck. We were hoping that the snow we’d seen in the Stinkhole Mountains had fallen in the Gallatin Mountains as well. It had, but not as much. That night we slept in a beautiful meadow beneath a crumbling thousand-foot cliff. The meadow was strewn with car-sized boulders that had broken free over the years and landed in our campsite. When I woke in the morning, I thanked Mother Nature for not squashing me. We then spent a day hiking around Cinnabar Mountain and glassing the ridges for sheep. By the end of the day the air had warmed and the snow was gone, and we hadn’t seen a single bighorn. We determined that the sheep weren’t coming down to the lower elevations yet, so we went back to Miles City to process our elk.
As soon as we turned the garage lights on, two things happened. First, the pigeons started cooing. The coop is positioned near the garage window, so the birds thought morning had arrived and woke up to resume their ongoing battles over who got which perch. The second thing that happened is Wes Munsell came over. Wes is the old fellow who lives with his wife, Agnes, next door to Matt. Wes is eighty-seven years old. Whenever Wes sees the garage light on after Matt and I have been out hunting, he comes over to see if we’re butchering an animal.
“What do you know?” asked Wes. He was carrying a bottle of beer for each of us. As usual, Wes was all dressed up. He was wearing Western-cut, brown polyester pants. Agnes had ironed a razor’s-edge crease down the front of each leg. He had on a brown satin jacket and a button-up dress shirt. Up on top, he was sporting his beige cowboy hat and trifocals. His face was lined with age, but he stood erect and bright-eyed.
I think Wes likes me and Matt because he’s hard of hearing and we talk really loud and clear for him. We like Wes because he’s a walking meat encyclopedia. He knows about wild game animals and domestic animals. He used to invest in livestock and he founded his own slaughterhouse in Miles City back in 1946. He’s butchered about everything that ever walked or crawled, and he’s done a lot of other bizarre, meat-related stuff. Back in the 1940s, Wes bought lame horses for five dollars apiece. He was fattening hogs back then. He’d take the horses into the pigpen and shoot them dead. Then he’d make all the skinning cuts on the hide, tie the horse’s head to a fence post, and pull the hide off with a tractor. Horse hides were going for three fifty. The hogs would take care of the rest. They could eat a horse down to bone in a few days. When the pigs were done, Wes would go in and gather up the bones, because the pigs would wind up crushing the bones and eventually choking on the splinters.
Another thing I like about Wes is that he doesn’t pass judgment on our informal butchering methods, which may not be up to the specifications of the USDA. Wes watched us pull the elk meat out of the game bags, and there were some pine needles and hairs that needed to be picked off. Wes didn’t comment; instead, he helped us pick the meat clean. This wasn’t as easy as it would be for your average eighty-seven-year-old man, because Wes is missing his right thumb. When he was in his twenties, he and a brother were cutting firewood on a saw blade powered off a pickup truck’s drive shaft. When Wes’s thumb fell to the ground, his brother picked it up and tossed it into the pigpen for the animals to eat. Now Wes grabs a piece of hair by pinching it between his index finger and the base of where his thumb used to be.
As we worked with Wes on the elk meat, I said, “Wes, as long as you’re here, I’ve got a couple questions for you.”
“What do you need to know?”
I described to Wes how some types of rabbits, especially jackrabbits, have this weird sort of membrane beneath the hide that you have to peel away before cooking them.
“That membrane is called the ‘fell,’ ” said Wes.
“Oh, cool. Do you know what caul fat is? It’s not the intestine, like a sausage casing, is it?”
“No, it’s the peritoneum—a membrane that surrounds the internal organs. It’s run through with strands of fat, so that it looks like a web. People used to wrap roasts in caul fat, to keep them moist while cooking. Agnes used caul fat on beef roasts. Now all of the caul fat, along with the entrails, goes to a rendering plant over in Spokane. There’s no market for it. We sometimes have to pay to dump it in a landfill.”
“Could you get caul fat off of, like, a deer?”
“Of course you could.”
“I’ve got one more question for you, Wes.” I went to the freezer and pulled out the bag of bear fat that I’d brought down from Alaska. “Do you think I could use this bear fat to make salt pork? And what exactly is salt pork?”
“It’s generally made from the back fat on a hog. Or the belly. The best salt pork comes from back fat, just like you got there. But it’s cured, with salt. People don’t cook with salt pork much anymore, you know.”
“I know.” I explained what I was up to with the Escoffier meal, and how I needed a whole bunch of salt pork to pull it off. Wes thought that the bear fat would work just as well, and he helped get me started on making it. I cut the pieces of back fat into long, one-inch-thick strips. I then made a brine of salt and saltpeter and put the fat to soak in the refrigerator.
“You can leave that in there for months,” said Wes. “It’s very stable with the high salinity, and the saltpeter helps cure it and give it color.”
Matt and I thanked Wes for the help, and I wrapped him up an elk roast to take home to Agnes. He folded the package under his arm and used his cane to walk back home.
In Montana, winter doesn’t usually begin in earnest until December. Starting in September, though, you get a lot of false starts, punctuated by blasts of Indian summer. As hunting season progresses, I’m always trying to anticipate the weather so I can decide what to do next. If it happens to snow really hard in both Canada and Montana, the ducks and geese might just fly through Montana without stopping for long. When that happens, I don’t get a chance to hunt them. If it gets supercold in Canada but stays mild in Montana, a lot of waterfowl might come down along the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers. Once the waterfowl do show up, the weather is just as important. If it’s overcast and rainy, ducks and geese will fly low to the ground, and they’ll stay active all day long. If it’s sunny and warm, they’ll fly high, out of gun range, and tend to move only in the early morning and late evening.
If the weather is bad for waterfowl, it’s not the end of the world. Instead it’s probably a dandy time for antelope. Antelope live in flat, open country, and good visibility is essential to finding them.
I went out for antelope during a warm, dry spell in mid-October, driving an hour west of Miles City and then catching a ranch road that led me up to a high plateau on the north side of the Yellowstone River. Montana’s pronghorn antelope season had already been open for about a week. The sagebrush on the plateau was low and stunted. Cattle had overgrazed just about every square inch of ground. The only places where the grass hadn’t been munched to the dirt was where prickly pear cactus kept the animals away. The soil was reddish-colored, with long, white meandering streaks of dried salts on its surface. The road was dusty, and clouds of dirt kicked up off my tires. From the air, my moving vehicle must have looked like a solid dot at the tip of a long, dusty exclamation point.
From the truck, I quickly spotted a herd of seven antelope moving in single file, way out across a sagebrush flat. Their heads were down and they were moving at a slow walk, paralleling the road well over a mile out. I could tell they were traveling. Unless something spooked them, they’d probably keep going like that for a while. I drove the vehicle down the road until I was a mile ahead of the animals, then pulled over. The sun made the ground hazy with refraction waves. Despite the disturbance in the air, I could still see the white patches on the sides and throats of the antelope. I drove farther, until I couldn’t see them at all. I parked, grabbed my backpack and my spotting scope, loaded my rifle. I headed out across the sage flat, jogging toward a place that I thought the animals might pass when they came through. I lay down behind some sagebrush, propped my rifle on my backpack, laid my binoculars next to it, folded my arms, and rested my head.
After fifteen minutes I started watching for the antelope. Nothing. Fifteen more minutes passed. I saw a white patch emerge on the horizon. It was the first animal. The rest of the animals came into view behind it, one, two, three…. They were still in single file, but it was clear that they wouldn’t pass within range. Either they had altered their trajectory, or I had screwed up my positioning. I started to crawl along, dragging my backpack. I thought I might be able to get to a place where they’d pass within three hundred yards. I moved a ways and then raised myself up on my elbows to scan the horizon. I saw several antelope heads poking up from the sagebrush, much closer to me than the antelope I was originally after. These new antelope were bedded down. Three of them. On one I could see a blackish cheek patch and two stubby horns. It was a buck.
It took over an hour to reach them, as I had to belly crawl the entire way. I’d reach ahead of myself with my rifle, my arms outstretched and my chin to the ground, and then I’d pull my body up. By watching ahead of me for prickly pear cactus, I was able to veer to the left and right of most of it. Every so often, I had to reach back and pluck a quill or two out of my knees. I cursed myself for not sewing leather kneepads to my pants, which is something I always think I’ll do without ever actually getting around to it.
By staying down below the sagebrush and using thick clumps to block my outline, I got within easy range of the antelope. Two hundred yards. But they were still lying down. I moved closer. One hundred fifty yards. The animals were still lying down.
Old-timers used to carry a white flag with them while antelope hunting. The animals are curious and gregarious. Supposedly, if you flash a white flag at them, they’ll come in to see if you’re an antelope. I’ve had caribou walk hundreds of yards out of their way in the Arctic to see what I was, but most caribou live their whole life without ever seeing a man. They don’t know any better. Antelope live in cattle country, which means they know all too well about people.
I got a few yards closer. One of the does finally saw me. She stood up and stared at me. I centered the crosshairs of my scope on her brisket, but I didn’t want to hit her there and ruin a lot of meat. It’s better to shoot clean through the ribs on broadside shots. After staring at me for a while, she folded her legs and lay back down.
If I’d stood up, those antelope would have run to the next county before I could have made a shot. But because I was staying low, they couldn’t tell what I was. Once the doe lay down, the buck stood up. He was acting nervous and agitated, but he still couldn’t see me. He walked a little closer and turned broadside. I slowly, slowly moved the barrel of my rifle toward him. I found the center of his rib cage in my rifle’s scope and touched the trigger. The antelope disappeared. The other two jumped up, unsure of where the noise was coming from. They paused just long enough for me to fix the closer doe in the scope. I found the center of her rib cage and touched off another round. When the recoil settled, I could see a couple of legs and hooves poking up from the sagebrush.
Antelope are smallish, and the buck weighed under a hundred pounds. I gutted and skinned it where it fell, then cut it into quarters. I put three of the quarters into my backpack and fixed the fourth to the outside with bungee cords. I packed that load to the truck and went back for the second animal. A turkey buzzard was already circling overhead. As I gutted the doe, I remembered something I was supposed to do. Before I sawed through the pelvis bone, I pulled the bladder up through the gutting incision. Once I snipped it off and drained it, it didn’t seem big enough to hold a tube of lipstick. How the hell was I supposed to fit a whole duck inside there? I bagged it up along with the heart and kidneys, and then walked over to the other gut pile and looked for that bladder. I had nicked it when I split the pelvis. I went back to the doe. I put on my raincoat to keep my shirt clean, and lifted the whole doe up to my shoulders. I carried her to the truck as the sun set.
An hour later I was back in Miles City. I flicked the garage light on. The pigeons cooed. I covered a workbench in butcher’s paper and started working on an antelope saddle with a large hacksaw, trimming the spine down to a size that might fit into a roasting tray. Just as I got started, someone knocked on the door.
“Smells like antelope in here,” said Wes Munsell. He was wearing his beige cowboy hat and carrying two beers.
It’s common for old-timers in Montana to be prejudiced against antelope. They often call antelope goats, and they won’t eat them. I don’t understand why. Maybe old people ate too many antelope during the Depression and got sick of them.
I could tell by the look on Wes’s face that he was just that sort of old-timer. He had no desire to butcher an antelope. Undeterred by this display, I asked Wes about sweetbreads, the word sweetbread being a more appetizing way of saying thymus gland. Sweetbreads are considered to be a great delicacy. Escoffier says they are “one of the finest delicacies provided by the butcher and may be served for any meal, no matter how rich or sumptuous.” I knew the thymus was located along the esophagus in the animal’s neck, but I hadn’t had any luck in finding one. I gestured to the antelope and asked Wes how to extract one.
“You get sweetbreads from veal,” said Wes. “From steers that are less than six months old. My God, are they good. Any later than that, the sweetbread turns to wax. Fatty wax.” He contorted his face into a look of disgust and nodded his head toward the antelope. “You don’t want to eat any sweetbreads from that thing.”
I didn’t want to push the topic of antelope any further than necessary. I acted like I was conceding to Wes’s opinion and that I appreciated his sparing me the wasted effort. I asked him what the different types of sweetbreads were. He said the thymus gland was it, the only gland that was any good. I opened up my copy of Le Guide Culinaire to ask him to look at something for me. I pointed to a passage. Wes adjusted his trifocals on his nose and followed the text with his finger. It read, “Veal sweetbreads are of two kinds, unequal in shape as in quality. They are the Noix (heart sweetbread) which is round and plump in shape and of superb quality and the Gorge (throat sweetbread) which is longer in shape and inferior in quality to the former.”
This puzzled Wes. He stood there and ran his finger across the passage about five times. He lifted his hat and scratched his head.
“Is there a sweetbread next to the heart?” I asked. “Like some other kind of gland?”
“No, there’s not. But I think I might know what he’s talking about.”
A couple of days later, Wes called to tell me to meet him at his slaughterhouse the next morning at nine a.m. “We’re doing ten steers tomorrow,” he said.
I drove over. The slaughterhouse sat on the bank of the Yellowstone River. Outside, there were loading chutes and stockades. I could hear cattle bellowing. Inside, the floors were bare concrete. Wes wouldn’t let me walk to the killing floor, because of safety rules about nonemployees. As I waited, a fresh dead steer came swinging through the door. Its head was gone, but it was still steaming hot. I watched one of the meat cutters give his knife a quick flick with a sharpening steel and then remove the four legs. He did in seconds what would have taken me five minutes. He reached into a slit along the animal’s throat, near where the head had been removed, and made a couple of quick cuts with his knife. He walked over to me and Wes and tossed two thymus glands into a tub. The glands nestled in with six other sweetbreads that Wes had already collected. He admired the tub.
“My God, are these good,” said Wes. He said it as though he was humbled by the sweetbreads.
“What do you guys usually do with them?” I asked.
“Ninety-nine percent go to the rendering plant.”
“What about the other one percent?”
“I eat some, but that don’t amount to much. We keep a box here, in case someone orders a case. When they do go, they go to Indian country.”
“What do you mean, Indian country?”
“Around Indian reservations, south of here. Crow, Northern Cheyenne. Indian people will eat sweetbreads. Indian people will eat beef tongue. They know how to cook it. Whites don’t. Or won’t.”
Wes lifted one of the glands from the tub and placed it on a clean cutting board. The gland was white, about half the size of a chicken breast. It was run through with thin veins of purple. All in all, it resembled brain.
“Here’s what that book of yours is talking about,” said Wes. He showed me how the gland is actually in two parts, connected by a translucent membrane. He separated the glands by pinning one down with the back of a boning knife and pulling the other one away from it. One of the parts was heart-shaped. The other part was longer, like a cylinder. “Your book must treat these two halves as different. That’s what he calls the noix sweetbread, and that must be the gorge sweetbread. I’ve eaten many, many plates of these, and I’ve never noticed a difference. Agnes cleans them and cleans them, and gets all that gristle and connective tissue off. My God, she cleans them nicely. Maybe that’s why I can’t taste the difference.”
Wes gave me the sack of sweetbreads to take home and see what I thought about them. In return, I extended an invitation for him to come to the Escoffier feast.
“You’re not going to make me eat that antelope, I trust.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t completed the menu yet.”
Red the pigeon had no way of knowing it, but when I brought those sweetbreads home, he had already entered the final month of his life. Thanksgiving weekend, the official date of my Escoffier feast, was just four weeks away. I was essentially finished collecting ingredients; I had pretty much exhausted my resources, and my time was running out.
It was hard for me to comprehend that I had only one squab after all that effort. A couple of months had passed since Matt had allowed all the birds to escape. After the two yellow-banded birds were reunited, they continued to ignore each other and never again joined up in the nesting box. Even if two of the adult birds in the coop had decided to breed at that very moment, there wasn’t enough time for the egg to hatch into a squab before the beginning of the feast. My attempts at animal husbandry had officially failed.
I set a goal to at least double my squab population before the feast. That might not seem like an overly ambitious goal when doubling the population meant catching just one squab. But I had learned by then not to be too optimistic about squab hunting. Nonetheless, I went out for several nights in a row, using a ladder to survey all the known pigeon hangouts around Miles City. After flushing a few pigeons from atop a sheet metal box that housed an air-conditioning unit, I pulled myself up there to take a look. There was a nest, and in that nest was a squab. The bird looked almost old enough to be on its own, and I had it weaned and eating solid grain within two days. After fitting the new squab with a red band, I named him Lil’ Red and moved him into the coop with Red. Then I started to pour on the feed.
I once knew a guy from Arkansas who trained falcons to hunt game birds for him. He could tell when a falcon was ready for a hunt by testing the bird’s body fat: A skinny falcon hunts harder than a fat falcon. The guy tested the fat by feeling the bird’s keel, which is the ridge of the breastbone. I pulled Red out and palpated his keel. Rather than testing him for how good he’d hunt, I was testing him for how good he’d taste. He felt plump and tender. For the sake of comparison, I pulled H&G II out of the coop and felt their keels. They were not as fat as Red. I quickly put the two birds back in the coop, because Jen would have had a fit if she’d seen me touching them. Whenever I tested Lil’ Red’s keel, I felt nothing but skin and bone.
I wasn’t sure how far the two squabs would have to stretch, because I still hadn’t finalized my guest list. I’d put so much effort into scrounging ingredients that I hadn’t thought too much about who was going to eat it all. With the date drawing near, I started an aggressive promotional campaign. Initially, I’d been reluctant to set the date for Thanksgiving weekend. I was concerned that the traditional, Pilgrimesque trappings of Thanksgiving would overshadow the highbrow theme of my Escoffier feast. But I wound up using the holiday weekend because everyone had the time off from school and work.
As I called friends around the country, trying to rally attendees, I manipulated the Thanksgiving date to varying effect, depending on whom I was talking to. For my less-traditional friends who are easily bored by routine, like Anna B., I argued that the feast would be a good break from the boring blahs of the standard turkey dinner. I guaranteed a once-in-a-lifetime dining experience that would never be replicated in the history of the world.
For more traditional folks, like Wes and his wife Agnes, I promoted my feast as being in tune with some of the less-acknowledged facets of the true Thanksgiving story. For example, the original Thanksgiving of 1621 lasted for three days. The Escoffier feast would last exactly that long, not just the one paltry day that modern, time-strapped Americans give it. Also, I argued, it’s quite possible that the turkey tradition of Thanksgiving is a sham. There is no solid evidence that the Pilgrims actually ate turkey. At the time of the original Thanksgiving, American colonists tended to refer to all wildfowl in the same way—as turkey. So, in essence, we would be having many kinds of turkey: ruffed grouse, pheasant, chukar, Hungarian partridge. One thing the Pilgrims certainly ate was venison, which my Escoffier feast would include in ample portions. Also, the Pilgrims ate a variety of seafood from the waters around Plymouth Rock, such as clams and lobster. The Escoffier feast would include ample seafood.
For anyone who remained reluctant to violate their own traditions by coming to the Escoffier feast, I had this one final clincher to seal the deal. “For argument’s sake,” I would say, “let’s say the Pilgrims did actually have turkey as we know it. Well, you can guarantee that they didn’t have some damned Butterball. They would have had a wild turkey. And it just so happens that I have a wild turkey on the menu. Matt killed a nice young turkey here in Montana this April, and he’s graciously donated the bird to the feast.”
Even this rigorous logic of mine couldn’t convince some people to come to the feast. Moisan, newly married and relocated to Seattle, wouldn’t budge from his obligation to go to the new in-laws’ for the holiday. Dee, who originally gave me the copy of Le Guide Culinaire when I needed a turtle soup recipe, couldn’t bear to separate from her aging parents. Still, I had about fifteen more-or-less-confirmed attendees, so the pressure was on.
The Thanksgiving legend has it that the Pilgrims were overwhelmed by how many Indians showed up for the feast at Plymouth Rock. The Pilgrims invited the “family” of several friendly Indians, but the Pilgrims and Indians had different definitions of the word. Scores of Indians showed up. Once it was determined by the Pilgrims that their stores of food could not sustain everyone for three days, Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, dispatched his own hunters to bring in the necessary amounts of food.
As October went into November, Matt and I launched a last-ditch gathering excursion of our own. We’d finally gotten some snow in the high country, so we went again to look for bighorn sheep on the eastern slopes of the Gallatin Range. On our second morning in the mountains, we found five rams. They were bedded down on the edge of a grassy bluff, almost a wide ledge on the side of the mountain. A craggy ridge rose above the bluff. Beneath the rams, the land broke away into gullies and steep drops. We stalked the sheep for hours, crawling on our bellies in the fresh snow and coming at them from the same elevation they were on. The rams were gearing up for their breeding season. As we stalked them, a couple would now and then stand up and square off. They’d rise to their back legs, fold their front legs against their chests, and tip toward each other, running until their curled horns smacked together. The crashing of the horns sounded like rifle shots. The largest ram would try to sit these fights out, but the smaller rams would hook his horns with their own and drag him to his feet. Then they’d crack his horns, and he’d lie back down.
When the big one stood up, he never walked clear of the younger rams. We waited and waited for a clean shot. An hour passed. We were getting wet from the snow, and Matt was afraid that he was getting too cold to make a good shot. We wedged an extra jacket under his body for insulation.
The big ram finally stood, and the two rams behind him started fighting a little and dropped down the hill. The second they were clear, Matt touched the trigger. The ram staggered and then stopped. Matt shot again; the animal tipped over. It started sliding down the snowy mountain, leaving a trail of bare grass in its wake before it vanished from sight. The other four rams chased after it and vanished as well, then came running back up the hill. When they got to the bluff, they formed a single file and headed up toward the ridge, back toward the safety of higher ground. Matt’s ram was just down the hill, hung up in a patch of sagebrush. “That’s a lot of mutton lying there,” Matt said. The animal weighed over three hundred pounds.
After that, we made our last big trip of the year when Eric Kern and Pooder came out to canoe down the Breaks with us. One of Montana’s most famous places, the Breaks are a long string of badlands in the upper-central part of the state, along the upper Missouri River, where the land of the Great Plains “breaks” away into the canyon of the river. Their renown comes from the fact that nothing ever really happens there, and hardly anyone goes there. Long after horse rustlers were exterminated from most parts of the West, a few renegade thieves were able to hide out in the Breaks and continue their business. The land is desolate and heavily eroded. It looks just about the same as it did before Lewis and Clark traveled up that stretch of river on their excursion from Saint Louis to the Pacific Ocean. One big difference, of course, is that the buffalo and wolves are gone for now.
But at least there are still mule deer. Lots of them. We glassed for deer from the canoes, and we hiked up to sandstone outcroppings and looked for deer from up there. We followed herds of deer through canyons and stalked groups of deer that came down toward the river at night. Matt and I killed a buck and a couple of does. We cut pieces of caul fat from the animals before butchering them, and we saved the bladders. We put the meat in mesh sacks and stacked the sacks in the bottoms of the two canoes. The water that dripped from our paddles collected in puddles in the sterns of the boats. At night we dumped the water out, or it would have frozen solid while we slept. We hunted pheasants on islands that were carpeted in willow and crisscrossed with beaver trails. We shot mallard ducks as they whistled up and down the river. I killed a Canada goose that waited on the water a few seconds too long before deciding that it should fly away.
We got to the takeout on a Wednesday afternoon. We passed a familiar cluster of islands and rounded a familiar bend, and there was the road and the bridge and Matt’s truck. I snapped a few end-of-trip photos. We chased after a cottontail rabbit that was hiding under the truck. We loaded gear and scrubbed mud out of the canoes. As we worked, I was surprised by how good I felt. Usually the end of a hunting season settles over me as a heavy melancholy. The sadness lasts for a month or so, as I adjust to regular ol’ life and sleeping indoors all the time. I guess I thrive on the uncertainty and the labor of hunting. And that’s why I was feeling so good this time: The uncertainty and labor of hunting was passing seamlessly into the uncertainty and labor of cooking Escoffier. The greatest challenge of the year was still to come.