WHEN MY DAD COOKED WILD GAME, he followed a strict ritual. First off, he’d dispatch me or one of my brothers to run up to the garage, which sat on a hill above the house, to turn on the deep fryer. To turn the fryer on, you just had to plug it in. The fryer did have a dial, so you could, in theory, turn it off without pulling the plug. However, my brothers and I weren’t supposed to touch the dial. My dad kept it locked at a trusty 375 degrees Fahrenheit, which he believed was the ideal temperature for all applications. The fryer had a red light, about the size of a human eye, that clicked off when the oil reached operating temperature. Usually my dad would make one of us kids stay next to the fryer until the light blinked out. Then we were supposed to run down to the house and notify him that it was time to start cooking.

Upon receiving word that the oil was ready, my dad would make a vodka martini and stir it with a wooden dowel. He’d then line a ceramic crock with paper towels and put whatever fish or game he was preparing into an orange Tupperware container with a white lid. He’d put his drink, the crock, and the container on a bamboo serving tray and march up the sixteen steps to the garage. Over the years, we ate venison steaks and goose breasts out of that deep fryer. We ate perch and bluegill and pumpkin seeds (a cousin of the bluegill) and goggle eyes (another cousin). We ate coho salmon, chinook salmon, pink salmon, and steelhead. We ate lake trout, brown trout, rainbow trout, brook trout. We ate smelt and sheepshead. We ate cottontail rabbit, snowshoe hare, black squirrel, gray squirrel, and fox squirrel. We ate wood duck and mallard. We ate black duck, black bear, and black sucker. We ate rainbow sucker and redhorse sucker, two species of bullhead, two species of catfish. We ate largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, speckled bass, and rock bass. We ate perch roe and bluegill roe. We ate deer hearts cut into cubes, and deer hearts sliced like onions. And we ate snapping turtle. All of it fried.

As the date of my Escoffier feast closed in, I longed for the simplicity of my father’s own wild game cooking procedures. With the industrial-strength deep fryer at my disposal, I could have cooked all of my wild game in a few hours, tops. To do it the Escoffier way would take about a week. And that wasn’t counting all of the necessary planning. Every day I figured that I should start making a menu and finalizing my shopping list, but I was having a hard time focusing on such a clerical task. After so many months of having my senses tuned to the whereabouts of fish and animals, it was hard for me to switch out of predator mode.

One day I sat down at my laptop with the intention of drawing up a menu and a plan of attack for the feast’s preparations. Just as I was getting started, Matt came home from work and said that he had just seen at least five hundred Canada geese fly down the Yellowstone River. I thought of how a few more goose livers might come in handy. That got me thinking about whether I had any goose loads for my shotgun. After digging through my boxes of shotgun shells, I played with my goose call. I let out a few toots, then remembered that I was supposed to be planning a menu. I went back upstairs and opened the new file on my laptop called “Tentative Menu.” I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the screen. In my peripheral vision, I saw a sparrow flit past the window. I ran out to see where it went. After looking around for the sparrow and checking the telephone wires for any pigeons that might be hanging about, I went over to the coop to palpate Red’s breast. He seemed to be putting on weight. Lil’ Red was growing a little fatter as well. I’d been gone long enough for the laptop to switch to sleep mode. Rather than start the computer back up, Matt and I drove down south of town and killed a few game birds.

One of my problems, I began to realize, was that the contents of the jam-packed freezers amounted to abstract, unknowable quantities. I was reluctant to take on the task of organization because I was overwhelmed by the chaos. At night I started going out to the garage for the sole purpose of staring at all the boxes and shelves of ingredients. I couldn’t imagine where to begin, so I decided to make a list:

Fish: bluegill, burbot, carp, eel, flounder, greenling, halibut, northern pike, Pacific lingcod, pompano, rockfish, smallmouth bass, sockeye salmon, Atlantic ray, walleye, whiting, yellow perch

Shellfish: butter clams, blue mussels, coonstripe shrimp, crayfish, Dungeness crab, horse clams, manila clams, spot shrimp

Fowl: Canada goose, chukar, English sparrow, European starling, Hungarian partridge, mallard, pheasant, ruffed grouse, squab, wild turkey

Red Meat: antelope, bighorn sheep, black bear, black-eared jackrabbit, cottontail rabbit, elk, moose, mountain goat, mule deer, wild boar

Innards: bladders, caul fat, head, hearts, intestines, kidneys, livers, sweetbreads, tongues

Miscellaneous: frog legs, snapping turtle

With everything listed, building a menu became much easier. I just had to come up with forty-five or so dishes—fifteen courses per day—that would account for every item I had written down. There were some minor complications, or rather, considerations. For instance, I wanted as wide a variety of dishes as possible for each night. I didn’t want too many shellfish or too many organs to appear on any one night’s menu. Starting with appetizers, I would move into soups and sides and then on to main courses, alternating from fish to meat to shellfish to keep things interesting. Also, I thought it would be cool to end each night with a pièce de résistance, something big and glorious. For the first night’s finale, I’d serve a braised wild turkey galantine rolled with pistachios and sausage. For the second night, we’d have a venison saddle garnished with whole pears poached in red wine. For the third night, I wanted a finale that could serve double duty; along with being the pièce de résistance of its own meal, it needed to be the pièce de résistance of the entire festivity. These were demanding requirements for a dish. I decided that carpe à l’ancienne was up to the task. Of all the dishes in Le Guide, a creamy, truffled carp’s body with a real head most perfectly embodied the grand luxuries and artistic achievements of Escoffier’s brand of cookery.

For the third prong of the sacred trinity of classic French cuisine—caviar, foie gras, and truffles—I opted for a combination of morels and a type of truffle that is less swanky than the Périgord but also way less expensive. The kind that I purchased, an Italian type of truffle, was only about twelve dollars an ounce. I ordered four ounces of them over the Internet from an importer in Miami. They arrived in Miles City in decorative, fluted bottles with gold seals. In shape, the truffles reminded me of some hardened cysts that were surgically removed from my scalp a few years earlier. I had brought the cysts home and saved them in a jar of formaldehyde, so I was actually able to compare them. I was mildly disturbed by the similarity, but I figured if that’s what it takes to make a carp taste good, so be it.

I began cooking the next morning. I had just over a week to prepare forty-five courses, and here I was, ready for number one. Diana and Jen were out of town and Matt was working twelve-hour days, so I had the house and garage completely to myself. My knives were honed. The stereo was cranked. I was wearing an apron. Nothing could get in my way.

Or so I thought, at least until I had a thawed pig’s head sitting in front of me on the garage workbench. Next to the pig’s head, I had two translations of Le Guide Culinaire: the complete translation by Cracknell and Kaufmann, and the truncated Americanized version put out by Crown Publishers. But I couldn’t find a lick about headcheese. I had looked through the books before, hunting for information about pig heads. I was still holding out some hope that additional information was hiding somewhere in the book, perhaps a casualty of sloppy indexing. However, a thorough search did not turn up any headcheese information whatsoever.

I could see that cooking from Le Guide was going to be like studying Shakespeare in college. To study Shakespeare, you need to have the actual play in front of you, which scholars refer to as “the text”; and to ferret out the deeper mysteries and arcane innuendos of that Shakespeare text, it’s essential to have on hand a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary.

With Le Guide Culinaire as the text, I would discover that the equivalent of the OED is the trusty Joy of Cooking. The authors of the Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, say that headcheese comes from a calf, not a pig. But at least they explain the process. So I carried on, in spite of the head’s species of origin. Since I’d already skinned the head at Anna B.’s ranch, I just needed to take a meat saw and cut it into quarters. I did so, then cut out the eyes and removed the top of the esophagus. In the throat, I found some pieces of green clover—remnants of the pig’s last meal. I removed the tongue. With the tongue in one hand, I flipped through Le Guide for instructions. Escoffier spells it out, plainly and thoroughly. I brought the tongue into the house, boiled it until the skin peeled off (about forty minutes), then submerged the tongue in a bowl containing Le Guide’s recipe 269, which is “Brine, pickling for tongues.” The brine contains water, salt, saltpeter, brown sugar, peppercorns, juniper berries, thyme, and a bay leaf. I picked the juniper berries from a juniper growing up against Matt’s garage, then put the tongue in the fridge.

I went back to the quartered head. As I worked on the next step, “clean teeth with a stiff brush,” I couldn’t shake the feeling that a passerby would think he’d stumbled onto some kind of occult devil-worshiper ceremony. Once I had the head quartered, cleaned, cut up, and its teeth nice and shiny, I put the pieces into a large tub of cold water to soak. The water was supposed to draw out excess blood. I set the tub on a workbench. The temperature in the garage was hovering around the freezing point.

The next morning I was feeling so enlivened by the previous day’s small successes that I began working on the holiest of culinary holies—stock. Basically, stock is a liquid created by boiling meat, bones, water, and seasonings together. Sounds simple enough. But according to Escoffier, stock is the foundation of the house, the binding of the book, the keystone of the archway. In fact, he opens his book with a dire warning on the matter of stock:

Indeed, stock is everything in cooking, at least in French cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one’s stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory result. The cook mindful of success, therefore, will naturally direct his attention to the faultless preparation of his stock, and, in order to achieve this result, he will find it necessary not merely to make use of the freshest and finest products, but also to exercise the most scrupulous care in their preparation, for, in cooking, care is half the battle.

I tried to estimate how much game stock I’d need. Many dishes, such as the sparrows baked inside a polenta and risotto cake, would need just a dash of stock. Other dishes, such as the wild turkey galantine, would need to be poached in copious amounts. And there were countless sauces to make, most of them built up from a base of stock. After fiddling with various calculations, I decided that I’d do what my mother always did when she thought a recipe wouldn’t yield an adequate amount: I’d make a double batch.

The preferred meat for stock is not the preferred meat for eating; because the meat is being simmered to extract its flavor, it doesn’t matter if it’s tender or not. In fact, Escoffier suggests using older animals and tougher cuts, which have a greater potential for deep flavor. I needed four rabbits. I had killed two cottontails a few days before, and they were still hanging in the garage. I gave their ears a tug, as though trying to tear paper, which is Escoffier’s recommended rabbit-aging technique. The ears didn’t give, so the rabbits were old. I pulled two more out of the freezer that had already been skinned and cut up. Back when I had killed those two rabbits, near Thermopolis, I had failed to properly test their age. So I didn’t know if all four rabbits were old.

But I did know that my sheep meat was damned old. By counting the growth rings on Matt’s bighorn ram, we could tell that the animal was eleven years old. Matt had also killed an old antelope buck. I needed two old pheasants too. A pheasant can be aged by the spur on the back of the bird’s leg, right above the foot: A young pheasant has a short, rounded spur, while an older bird has a developed, pointy spur, maybe a quarter-inch long. A couple of the pheasants I killed in the Breaks had long spurs. When I froze them, I had written Stock on the label. I dug through the freezer and pulled them out. I also took out a ruffed grouse that I had shotgunned in Alaska.

I set up my scale on the counter and began weighing out the red meat. I was supposed to use cuts from the brisket, shoulders, and neck. I boned out five pounds of antelope trim. From the mountain goat that fell over the cliff, I selected eight pounds of scraps. I then set to work on the neck of Matt’s bighorn sheep. It weighed almost twenty pounds. I didn’t need that much of it, so I roasted the neck in the oven for a couple of hours. Then I shaved off half the meat, chopped it, and mixed it with some Stubb’s Bar-B-Q. I set the other half aside and began browning the rabbits, grouse, pheasant, mountain goat, and antelope on roasting trays. While that cooked, I ate a couple of barbecue sandwiches.

I put two stockpots on the burners and stirred some chopped carrots and onions into a touch of hot oil. To each pot, I added water, sage, and a bouquet garni of parsley, bay leaves, and thyme, tied together with kitchen string and wrapped in little sacks of cheesecloth. I selected thirty more juniper berries from an upper limb of Matt’s tree, tied them in two pieces of cheesecloth, and tossed them into the pots. Once the meat in the oven was browned, I dumped it into the stockpots as well. I deglazed each of the roasting trays with a bottle of white wine and poured the wine and pan drippings into the stockpots. Once I had the stock cooking at a low simmer, I checked the clock. In three hours I would pull the pots off the stove, cover them, and move them into the garage to cool.

In the morning I went out to the garage to check on my projects. The stockpots were capped with a layer of fat that had hardened and risen to the surface, just like it was supposed to. The layer lifted up as easily and solidly as a Frisbee. Escoffier sometimes mentions using bouillon fat, and I assumed that’s what it was; I broke the fat into pieces and saved it. Then I ran the stock through a fine screen into clean, empty milk jugs. The skimmed stock smelled of roast meat. I froze the jugs.

The quartered pig’s head had turned white in the water, like something that had drowned. Surprisingly, it was almost completely odorless. When I carried the head inside the house, the teeth scraped on the bottom of the tub with the rhythm of my steps. I boiled the head until it was so cooked I could pluck out a tusk from the jaw. I put the plucked tusk on the kitchen windowsill, for a souvenir. Then I peeled all the meat and cartilage and fat off the head, leaving the bones as dry and white as the bones you find out in the desert. I minced the meat and gelatin to the texture of hamburger, covered it with the cooking liquid, and popped that into the freezer.

I worked on stuff every day, getting dishes as far along as possible. I made fish stock with whiting from the Gulf of Mexico. I made some more fish stock with freshwater fish. To clarify fish stock for fish jelly, or aspic, Escoffier says to crack egg whites into the finished product. I did this. As the eggs cooked, they pulled the impurities to the surface and left the stock as clear and golden as lemon-lime Gatorade. The stock smelled of fish, but not like old fish or fresh fish. Instead, it smelled ageless, almost synthetically stable. With the stock ready, I boned two mallard ducks, ground the meat, and cooked it into a portion of the game stock to make a duck consommé. Then I laid a complete leg of boar into a cooked marinade of white wine, vinegar, and oil, with loads of seasonings and veggies.

Working along, I liked to taste things to see what they were like during their various stages of preparation. The stock wasn’t salted, so it tasted bland but showed definite potential. I dropped a piece of salted bear fat on a skillet. It gave off considerable oil and tasted delicious, like bacon minus the smokiness. After mincing the pig’s head, I tried a little nibble. It wasn’t seasoned yet, so it resembled hand lotion without the flowery undertones. The duck consommé, on the other hand, was fantastic. After tasting it, I called some friends to say that I’d just made the best thing I’d ever eaten. I hadn’t gotten as excited about something since I’d learned how to ride a bike when I was five. The flavor was rich and layered, like a mild, buttery beef broth at first, but that taste quickly faded and was replaced with a deep roast duck flavor that hung on for several seconds. I’d eaten scores of ducks over the years, but I suddenly thought of a mallard in a completely different light. It was like learning that your girlfriend, whom you already love anyway, just won a million dollars on a slot machine.

As for the turtle soup, I resisted the impulse to taste it. Just looking at the turtle meat made my lip curl. My memories were still fresh from my last batch of turtle soup, which stunk up my apartment and turned all my friends off to the idea of ever eating turtle again. In the months since that initial experiment, I had developed a number of theories about what went wrong with that first turtle: First, the turtle was fed ground meat while it was in captivity, which I believe tainted its flavor; second, I had failed to flush the turtle in fresh water before slaughtering it; and third, I’d cooked the turtle’s plastron and bones before picking off the meat, which I thought added to the off-taste of the finished product.

For this new turtle, I’d already remedied two of the problems. I didn’t feed the turtle anything during its two days of captivity, and I continuously flushed it with fresh water. At first, the water in the turtle’s tank would turn cloudy almost immediately. But after a few changes of water, I could have dipped a glass into the tank and had a drink. After dispatching the turtle with a hatchet, I removed the shell and skinned it. Still on the bone and uncooked, the meat was the color of raw, skinned chicken. I froze it under a layer of water in large plastic tubs.

Now I was ready to perform the next step on the turtle, so I thawed it. With a small fillet knife, I removed all the meat from the bones in thin strips. Cleaned off, the bones were rubbery and flexible. I discarded them. I simmered the strips in water until they were lightly cooked, then stored the meat in the cooking broth. Escoffier says that meat can be kept like that “for some time.” To finish it off for the snapping turtle à la Baltimore presentation, I would simply reheat the meat, brown it in butter, add seasonings and broth and arrowroot, then finish the dish with sherry. Voila!

—

By Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, I’d done as much of the prep work as I could. I was limited by concerns about freshness. For instance, I wanted the fish to remain in the deep freeze until I was ready for them. I couldn’t thaw a fish, mess around with it, and then put it back in the freezer. If you do that, fish will get mushy and old-tasting.

Throughout the day, I received a number of packages for which I’d arranged last-minute delivery. I had accidentally left my pig’s ears and tail at Anna Baker’s mom’s house, so I had to make an embarrassing call and ask her to dig through the freezer in search of the pig’s appendages, then ask her to spend forty dollars to send them to me. My two pounds of American golden caviar arrived in perfect shape from Michigan’s U.P. I received two boxes from San Juan Island. The first was a package of smoked Pacific salmon that Pooder had made in his fish smoker. The second was a cooler full of five dozen oysters. Pooder was supposed to collect the oysters for me and send them out, alive. He’s got a good oyster spot on a small island near his home. Before he could get out there, though, a red tide (a naturally occurring biotoxin) had rolled into the area and Pooder called to say he couldn’t go collecting. I had to get oysters, I told him, because I’d already been flapping my mouth about them; I didn’t want my friends to accuse me of false advertising. Pooder gave me a number for an oyster supplier on an island that didn’t have red tide. I called her and ordered five dozen, and they arrived in a cooler, layered atop soft ice packs and still very much alive. In Matt’s garage, I used a bench grinder to modify a screwdriver into a serviceable oyster-shucking tool.

As I looked over my menu, I could see that I needed a helper. I had initially imagined the feast as a great, magnanimous task that I would tackle single-handedly for the enjoyment of my friends. I would swish in and out of the dining room with dish after dish of insanely interesting food, and the inner workings of the kitchen would be a mystery to all. But now, with my menus coming into shape, it was clear that I wouldn’t be swishing into the dining room with much besides half-finished recipes if I didn’t have a coconspirator.

My sous-chef would need to be someone with an unwavering temperament, someone who could handle long, tedious hours and seemingly arbitrary instructions. Diana was out of the question; she’d been off working in California where she had a writing fellowship at San Jose State University. She wouldn’t be coming into town until that night. I didn’t want to drop a bombshell on her when she showed up. Besides, I wanted her to enjoy herself as much as possible so that she’d come away with a positive image of eating meat. Most of my other friends would be out hunting during the day, not cooking. Besides, this was their vacation. It would be rude to impose on them.

It occurred to me that my friend Nina was the perfect person. Nina had recently taken a job as a technician for the Agricultural Research Service, where my brother Matt works. She moved to Miles City from Nevada, and we became instant buddies as soon as she arrived in town. She’d already pitched in to help with the feast a few times. She’d made several attempts to catch the sparrows at the bird feeder in her yard, and she’d gone pigeon catching with me. When Matt and Jen and I were out of town, Nina would look after the pigeons. But there was more to Nina than her willingness to chase birds. She possessed the perfect credentials for the demanding labor of cooking Escoffier, because she’s very meticulous and artistic. At the time, she was working on a series of paintings depicting battles among space-age robots, all done on the pelvis bones of elk. She also makes ceramic mosaics of iconic figures. She designs and paints greeting cards with cryptic, existential, and sometimes insulting messages stenciled on the inside. Once she collected hundreds of yellow butterflies from the front grilles of cars and laminated them onto white poster board in neat rows. She did another series with daddy longlegs. I reckoned that her animal-related artistic skills would come in handy for molding and styling such complicated and ornamental dishes as carpe à l’ancienne.

The only problem with Nina is that she’s so mellow and easygoing you can never tell what she’s thinking. When I called her to ask if she wanted to be my sous-chef, I was hoping she’d jump up and down and scream with excitement, like the people who get called to the stage on The Price Is Right. Instead she said, “Sure. That might be fun.” I suspected that she didn’t appreciate the magnitude of what lay ahead. To convince her how exciting this was going to be, I printed a copy of the first day’s menu and called her over for a staff meeting. She drove up in her white sedan, which was still bearing Nevada plates and had a few Elvis bumper slickers plastered on the trunk lid. Nina’s in her early thirties and dresses like a high school stoner. She was wearing a red T-shirt with a faded and peeling horse decal across the front. Her hair is short and tousled; she had it clipped above her forehead with insect-shaped barrettes. When she sat down and got comfortable, I handed her the menu. “Go ahead and peruse that,” I said, “and tell me what you think.”

Nina adjusted her glasses and studied the sheet carefully as she fiddled with her barrettes.

huitres natives au caviar—raw oysters with whitefish caviar

côtelettes de saumon—salmon, prawn, and morel cakes shaped like lamb chops

fromage de tête—wild boar headcheese

Cyrano consommé—duck soup with mallard quenelles

matelote à la marinière—smallmouth bass, walleye, eel, bluegills, and crayfish in a broth of white wine, brandy, and fish velouté

mousse froide d’écrevisses—crayfish mousse

soufflé de foie gras—soufflé of goose liver and pheasant

fritot de raie—marinated and fried stingray

sweet meat—Escoffier does not offer a cool French name for this dish, a loaf of sweetened, fruity meat baked inside a crusty puff paste

mauviettes à la piémontaise—sparrows baked inside a polenta and risotto cake

anguille fumée—Ray Turner’s smoked eel

caneton rouennais en chemise—ducks poached inside bladders

pâté de lièvre—pâté of brandy-marinated cottontail rabbit and salted black bear fat

pigeonneaux en crapaudine—grilled squab with diable sauce and gherkin garnish

dindonneau en daube—a rolled galantine of young wild turkey, venison sausage, and pistachios

When she finished perusing, she had a puzzled look on her face. “And there are three of these? Three days like this?” she asked.

“Yeah. Three.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I’ve done a lot of that already, you know. Like prep work,” I said.

“How much of it?”

“Well, I made the duck consommé. The headcheese is about halfway done. And I made all the stock—fish stock and game stock. The tongue’s ready. The turtle’s coming along. That’s about it, though.”

Finally Nina said, “There’s no way two people are going to get all that done. Three days in a row? No way. I mean, wow.” She shook her head.

When Nina left, I thought of another potential helper whom I might enlist. One of my buddies, Julian the Hairy Hedonist, was coming from Helena, Montana. Among my friends, Julian is known for two things. First, he’s known for being hairy. When Julian’s drinking, he sometimes strips off his shirt and flaunts his pelt for the enjoyment of any women who happen to be around. We were all loaded one night, playing charades, and Julian was supposed to do Curious George, the monkey. He simply took off his shirt and scratched his head. One time he stripped down and wrapped a bear rug around his waist like a caveman. When he did this, my brother Matt observed that he could tell where the bear ended and Julian began because the hair got thicker.

Second, Julian’s known as a highly capable chef. He just plain loves food. He’s worked in several pretty nice commercial kitchens. He grew up on a hydroponic vegetable farm near the coast in Northern California, so he knows veggies and seafood inside and out.

When I called him, I said, “I need your help, Jules, badly. There’s no way I can get everything done without you.”

“Just tell me what to bring,” said Julian.

“Your knives and your talents,” I said.

The last thing I did, before Miles City started to shut down for the holiday, was make a massive liquor run. Escoffier wasn’t shy about pouring spirits into his recipes. I bought a truckload of liquor that would have impressed Al Capone: Madeira, port, Grand Marnier (César Ritz named this orange liqueur after its creator, a friend of his named Monsieur Marnier Lapostolle), bottles and bottles of red and white wine, sherry, Cognac, stout beers.

Matt’s house started filling up toward evening. Diana and Anna Baker and Drost all came in from the Billings airport. Eric Kern and his wife, Deirdre, arrived. Danny and his girlfriend, Lauren, had driven up with them after flying from Alaska into Denver.

In the days leading up to the arrival of all my friends, I thought that I’d have plenty of time for partying once everyone got to town. Instead, I found myself to be in a reclusive, abstemious mood on the eve of the first day of the feast. When everybody went out that night to hit the Montana Bar, down on Main Street, I hung back in order to worry and fret. The cool and collected feelings I had been having that morning were long gone, and I was feeling as though I’d invited all these people out to witness a culinary flop. I had pulled several trays of stuff out of the freezer to thaw, and as I looked at the ingredients, I just couldn’t fathom how it was all going to turn into what I wanted it to turn into. I ran recipes and measurements and procedures through my head as though I were cramming for a chemistry exam, but my hands felt tied by the overwhelming nature of what lay ahead. I couldn’t get a grip.

And where was Julian the Hairy Hedonist? I wondered. He should have gotten to Miles City an hour before. I called his cell phone.

“Julian? What’s up? Why aren’t you here yet?”

“I’m running late.”

“How far are you?”

“I’m not. I haven’t left.”

“Damn, Julian. Get it together.”

“I’ll be there. Probably real late. Just don’t lock me out of the house tonight.”

There was nothing else I could do, so I went down to my bedroom and thought about the enigma of Vatel, who ran himself through with his sword rather than face the embarrassment of a botched banquet. I could sympathize. I fell asleep waiting for the sound of Julian coming through the door, but I didn’t hear anything. Diana came sneaking in real late and assured me that everything would go slick. I tried, but I couldn’t believe her.