WE DON’T KILL A LOT of birds because I’m not a very good shot, but we end up with enough simply by dint of being out in the field so often, and so long.
A thing that speaks to me of autumn even more than the hunting and shooting (or not shooting) of the birds, and even more than the changing colors of the leaves and the first hard frost at night, is the waning-dusk ritual of plucking the bird we’ve gotten that day. (Needless to say, it doesn’t happen every day; that’s one of the things that makes it special.)
I’ll sit on the porch steps looking out at the woods to the west, plucking the soft feathers from the still-warm breast, and plucking them from the back, the legs, the wings—everywhere. You can still eat the skin of birds from western Montana, from the forest, though the government advises avoiding the skin of birds from eastern Montana, so saturated with the residues of herbicide and pesticide.
Nonetheless, I pluck them all, as sacrament—to merely jerk the skin free and pull out the breast seems disrespectful—and I cook them, eastern and western both, with the skin still on, to help keep in the juices and the taste of the body; though with the prairie birds, it’s true, I don’t eat the skin, but feed it to the dogs after cooking it, especially to old Homer and Ann, who already are pushing eighty, and who no longer need to worry about such things.
I save the ornate tail feathers (whether grouse, pheasant, or Hun) and put the rest of the feathers and entrails in a bag, which I dump out in the woods, to return to other animals, and to the soil, to return to the sky.
The crops, however, I examine closely, to see what each bird has been feeding upon.
Clover. Kinnickkinnick. Snowberries. Wheat. Barley. Crickets. Grasshoppers. Fir needles. Huckleberries. Rose hips.
The crops filled with snowberries are breathtaking, looking like a clump of pearls, and nearly as rare; it’s always a thrill to open a crop and see nothing but beautiful white berries.
Usually in these woods, though, in the autumn, the crops are bulging with bright red kinnickkinnick berries, and the bright green leaves from the same bush.
Tom and Nancy save the crop from each bird they kill and set it on the windowsill to dry translucent in the sunlight—a globe, a ball, filled with Christmas colors, perfect red and green; and then in December they hang these as ornaments on their tree.
For the eastern birds, the crops are almost always filled with wheat. It’s a strange and exotic sight, to be sitting there on my porch steps way deep in the rainy backwoods of northwest Montana, and to find small handfuls of wheat in the crop of the bird I’m holding. As if, for a moment, I’ve returned to that foreign, distant land—not just in memory, but in reality, because look, there is the proof in my hand.
Colter will usually be running restless laps around me while I pluck the birds, excited by the scent again, and perhaps hoping that, against all odds—like producing a rabbit from beneath a handkerchief—another bird, a live bird, will somehow erupt from out of the scent of all those swirling feathers. He comes up on the porch, snuffles his nose into the feather bag (loose feathers stick to his nose), then nuzzles his bony head in under my elbow, trying to be petted while I work.
I don’t save the crops. I toss them out into the yard, perhaps in the way the old pagans used to hurl entrails at the ground, in an attempt to forecast the future. From a sitting position, I fling them out across the gravel driveway, across the stone wall, and into the yard, where the native fruits from the grouse—snowberries, wild rose, kinnickkinnick—will take root, and grow, in wandering, random patterns.
And even more amazingly, in subsequent years, grouse and other birds will sometimes venture into the yard to feed on the fruit of these crop-birthed plants: strutting around in the yard, feeding on berries grown from the plants that their ancestors had been feeding upon when they died. Pecking around in the yard, pecking at those snowberries, those kinnickkinnick berries, it’s as if reading the wandering words of curling sentences, little stories, out there in the yard.
At the edge of my gravel driveway, up against the rock wall, stands the only patch of wheat in northwestern Montana. One of the crops from an eastern bird must not have made it all the way into the yard, and the yard would have been too wet and shady for wheat to grow, anyway: but in the artificial, well-drained habitat of the gravel driveway the wheat has germinated and prospered.
It’s just a little patch, not much larger than a wheelbarrow. But you’d have to drive three hundred miles to find any other wheat in Montana. And I like looking at it, and knowing how it got there.
We are farmers of a kind, Colter and I.