Geese began to trickle over the landscape about when you’d expect them to. I saw some crawling over the fields, not 30 feet off the deck of ravished alfalfa. They made for a field on the next section that had been planted in corn this year. Bill announced that he had decided to hang out near the woodstove, so Veggie and I went out into the blurred landscape. Geese were coming now in sporadic, irregular waves. Their calls were unrecognizable.
Veggie took one side of the barn while Rocket and I staked out the other side. It was incredible how low the geese traveled. But the birds were too far out. I crouched and duckwalked to a 1931 tractor that had been jettisoned to time. My hat blew off just when a group of 20 geese arced over my position. They were 15 yards away, easy shots. Rather than shooting, I ran to collect my hat from the barbed wire where it had been impaled. The next group flew past Veggie Burger. I heard his expensive shotgun popping in the wind. The geese sailed on untouched. While I was watching them, seven more floated on the gale right in front of me. I picked one out and pulled the trigger.
The bird stopped fighting the wind. He rose for a second as the flock pushed forward. My goose suddenly lost his battle with the wind. He didn’t drop, but was seized by the gusts and blown 40 yards into the alfalfa. Rocket cleared the fence on a line. The bird’s plumage, still under the spell of the winds, flapped and tussled in the dog’s mouth as if it were still heading out to the grain. It was the only goose we’d get that day. The wind became absurd, freakish.
We went to the only decent Viet- namese place in town and ate pho. The telephone lines were wavering, and the word was that a tractor trailer had been knocked over on Outer Drive in winds topping 80 miles an hour. Halfway through our lunch we remembered that we had left Bill out at the farmhouse. He’d get a ride sooner or later. Back at my place Veggie skinned the goose on the lee side. He stopped frequently to check his phone and update his status. It took him nearly half an hour to get the goose where it began to look like food. I had him remove the wings for our artist friend Kate O’Hara, who has become obsessed with waterfowl wings and spent the better part December paint- ing them, then refreezing them so they didn’t stink. On her cell phone she has pictures of the paintings, progressions of wings over wings. She was dating a much younger man who was a dead ringer for Nikola Tesla. He told her the feathers looked like swirls of stars. With that in mind, she barred her doors and tried to get the light right.
These two birds—the grouse and the goose—went into my freezer among the halibut steaks, the broth made of elk bones, the wild game jerky, and the last remaining filet of a yellow-eye rockfish that the captain told me was at least 40 years old when I hauled it up from a reef 200 feet below. The day after Christmas I took the grouse out and thought seriously about going for it with a sherry-inspired dish. I had been told in a bar in Glendo that the only way to cook a sharptail is to breast it and soak it in a bottle of white wine for two days. Onions were involved. I had left one wing on the grouse as the law dictates. Entombed in ice crystals and frost, the grouse didn’t look like much, certainly not the sum triumph of a hunting season.
“Cook it over coals until it’s just shy of medium,” said the Glendo guy whose name escapes me now. “It’s red meat.”
I wanted to follow his advice, as these sorts of avenues often yield knowledge and experience that may lead to what we call breakthroughs. But I didn’t have the heart. The season still had a little life in it, and I thought maybe I’d get another grouse to add to this one. The single bird looked lonely and unappealing in the freezer bag with the wing still attached. The frozen body looked nothing like the beautiful seraphim I’d taken from that field a few months ago, when there was sunshine to spare and trucks loaded with sugar beets trundling along the highways. The goose was another problem. Veggie and I had put the carcass in a black leaf bag, thinking we’d take it out in a few days and cook it as a Christmas goose. But Veggie has the first girlfriend he’s had in 10 years, and his concentration isn’t what it used to be. I tried to pin him down on when we’d cook the goose, but all I got was excuses. He no longer speaks in specifics.
I thought about those two birds as the winter pressed on and we Wyomingites became increasingly outraged at the blizzards and foundation-shaking gales. I know some hunters who keep game in the freezer as if it is money in the bank, but for me, it’s quite the opposite. I think of those creatures in the deep slumber of ice and plastic waiting to come back to life, or at least reimagined as curries and fricandeau. For these birds we’ve taken from the world, this is their final flush. We owe them much more than freezer burn. We owe them a glorious sendoff of spice and steam.
Then one weekend I awoke in an empty house, desperate. It was just shy of 3 a.m. I took the grouse and the goose from the deep freeze and submerged them together in a sink full of tap water. I needed some supplies if I was going to get this right. I put on my heavy camo jacket. My dogs thought this had something to do with hunting. They wagged their bodies and crowded the doorway. I fought my way outside and into the night to wander the aisles of our 24-hour grocer.
At first, the other customers looked like parvenus and perverts, dressed as they were in over- coats and pajamas. But then I realized I was dressed that way, too. I nodded at my CPA, who was wearing a yellow snowmobile suit unzipped to his navel. I bought an onion the size of a softball, carrots, celery. I already had garlic. There was a half bottle of forgettable chardonnay that I had saved for this purpose. All this went into a stockpot with the birds. I drifted back to sleep and slept until 10 or so, when the scent of bird flesh infiltrated my dreams and nudged me awake. At first I thought I was back in Scranton and the whole season lay before me. I was wrong.
The American hero and poet Jim Harrison nattered on about how he used 20 pounds of roasted wild bird bones for soup stock. I believe him only because he’s Jim Harrison. Anyone else would raise serious doubts. My pot of grouse and goose, a few peppercorns, a dash of olive oil, was doing its best to resurrect the mood of the country. It had been a gloomy forecast for all of us, and the bird stock was my personal line in the sand. I called Kate to see if she was teaching yoga that night. She was revising a pair of widgeon wings, trying to get the light just right. I invited her to help build my gumbo. “But you’ll have to follow my lead,” I said, for make no mistake, gumbo is built, not merely cooked. And gumbo is more of a notional idea. It is not a specific thing. She agreed, more or less.
At noon I turned off the heat. Henderson invaded the kitchen, and I told him to get out. He sat at the perimeter, edging in once in a while until I snarled at him. The meat fell off the bones. I dragged the garbage pail close to the stove so I could separate bone and cartilage from meat. A few bits of feathers floated on top with the fat and oil. The dogs flowed between my legs in earnest now and threatened to upset the whole deal. I lost my cool and said things to Rocket that I now regret, but in the name of cuisine and in the moment of battle, they seemed fitting. I rescued the tiny wishbone of the sharptail from the vat and placed it on a windowsill to dry.
Kate arrived, her bag-lady tote brim- ming with bottles of Reiki water, an organic coconut and some dark chocolate that she envisioned as a dessert. There were flecks of paint in her hair. I let her watch the stew while I went back to the store. The lighting had changed. The snow piled in a huge solemn hill seemed less dirty. It leaked a streak of meltwater across the parking lot. Inside the store customers were more refined than the ones I’d encountered at 3 a.m.
Things here seemed respectable, functioning, even for Wyoming standards, but when a guy from the college administration tried to corner me near the mouthwashes to talk budget cuts, I told him curtly that I had better things to do. In my arms I held the Cajun trinity. He looked at the green peppers, the celery, and the onions and smirked. I had a pack of andouille sausages tucked under my arm like a paperback.
“Are you making salad?” he said. This from a man who controlled a good-sized chunk of Natrona County’s education budget.
“Yes, salad,” I said, and jetted off for- getting the okra altogether, but saving my spirit and staying true to the line I had drawn.
Back at my house I had to fess up about forgetting the okra. Kate suggested I go back and retrieve it. She has a graceful, anserine neck and an accent that suggests she migrated here from Old Money. But I know she’s from Kansas. She accused me of forgetting on purpose. I admitted that there was something to that. She knew I was am- bivalent about okra. But my mistake was honest, or it was buried so deep in my subconscious that I had no idea what else lurked there. Rather than argue about the okra, I changed the subject.
“I ran into Stan Cunningham,” I said. She made a face. She’d taken Stan’s poli sci class years ago before his big promotion and had yet to recover from the heebie-jeebies. She suggested I go to one of the other stores to get the okra.
“To hell with okra,” I said. Okra can get slimy if you overcook it. The wild bird meat was the main idea. I never understood the big deal with okra. Kate resisted and we complained about each other until it started to get personal. I told her to keep stirring. She told me to kiss her ass. I made the point that if your main attraction—your Meryl Streep, if you will—is present and forthright, then you have nothing to worry about. The rest is just supporting cast.
“Are you comparing Meryl Streep to okra?” Kate said. Her true prairie twang emerged, just for a second. We plated the gumbo over heaps of white rice and hit it all with generous blasts of Louisiana hot sauce. You could taste the wild indifference of both birds in the sauce, in the broth that sheened with butter and bird fat. The little chunks of bird thigh were delicate and dark. In the back of the dish, way out beyond where the roux and the vegetables blurred together, you could see the just-visible scrubby hills over Bessemer Bend when the storm is coming on and the geese are doing their best to beat the headwind. Surely they can’t fly in this. The dish was a painting, and also a poem. It had lost farms in it, wild grasses coming back de- spite years of absence. The flavors came in layers, stanzas. Kate and I didn’t say much while we ate. Afterwards, I asked how the paintings of wings were going.
“You would be amazed,” she said, and commented that she needed to get back to them. She was particularly interested in the whorls of feathers near the joints. There’s so much to it, she insisted. She gathered her tote bag to leave. We decided to skip dessert, but she forced me to keep the coconut. I placed it on the sill beside the wishbone. Wild strands of coconut wool fuzzed the scene. The two items seemed to get along.
Kate took the lion’s share of the gumbo home with her when she left. I turned out all the lights and let the dogs out into the yard. People still had their Christmas lights up. The wind was battering the decoration, scattering Nativity scenes across lawns. I stood on the porch and called my dogs’ names. The stars swirled above. I thought I heard waterfowl overhead, their thin whistle of wings cutting fathoms of air. My dogs’ tags jingled in the darkness. They took their sweet time out in the inscrutable blackness. Were there geese flying over, mixed in with the wind and stars? Were they flying south or hanging around for the winter with the rest of us? I wasn’t sure.
Dave Zoby is a freelance writer and regular Gray’s contributor living in Casper, Wyoming. He teaches English at Casper College.