Meeting a Mountain Lion (on His Terms)

I should be turkey hunting right now, or at least on my way up the mountain.  It is 0446 and my alarm went off a little over three quarters of an hour ago so that I could get up, pull on my camouflage, check my pack for all my gear, drive to a turkey spot, hike through pine forests, call for strutting toms, and, hopefully, come home with the largest upland game bird in North America.  That is what I should be doing, but instead I am sitting here, processing what happened on my last turkey hunt two days ago.

I have never been afraid to hunt, fish, or hike alone.  Solitude and self reliance are important to me.  Don't get me wrong, I am a social animal.  I enjoy recreating in places I love with people I love.  Many times, there just isn't a hunting partner available to go with me.  Folks have busy lives and other commitments, even to other hunting partners.  Often, I hunt alone out of necessity, but I don't shy from the opportunity - I relish it.  My mind wanders both broadly and with depth when I hunt alone, but I also find moments when I am completely focused.  Whether I wander or focus, the result is cathartic.  I get to purge my busy brain, decompress from sudden and unexpected adulthood, and hope to get to that state my Pop and I have always referred to as "predator mode."

Predator mode is that subliminal moment when a hunter is 100% completely focused on his or her quarry.  In most successful, do it yourself, hunts, there is a time when everything converges; where hunter and hunted are in the same place in the space-time continuum, the hunted is unaware or off guard, and the hunter is completely focused on the hard conclusion.  Senses heighten and heart rate increases, but if you are in predator mode, the adrenaline doesn't lead to jitters, or buck fever, or panic.  For a moment, it makes you primal and deadly.

I didn't expect I would ever experience prey mode, on the receiving end of predator mode.  I didn't think I would be the sole fixation of what is likely North America's most fixated predator.  Puma, Panther, Catamount, Cougar, Mountain Lion.  No matter how you say his name, he is a frightening creature, at least when he has you on his terms.  Mountain lions are reclusive, silent, powerful, athletic, and absolutely majestic.  Now I know how it feels to be in his sights, caught unaware, or at least off guard.

I was hunting turkeys in fresh snow.  It had already been an eventful morning, but not on the turkey front.  I had hiked a couple of miles for a couple hours with no responses to my calls, but the morning was crisp and bright, and it felt good to be hunting while most of the Pacific Time Zone was barely filling their coffee pots.  Earlier, I had a close encounter with a great grey owl.  He watched me with suspicion, rotating his head further than seeems natural as I walked around and under the snag on which he was perched.  Naturally, I already considered the outing a success.  It isn't every day you get to see a great grey owl.   With only fifteen more minutes hiking to do, I heard a gobble in response to a yelping call.  That was why I was out there, for the hunt, and I thought "responsive toms are worth a few hours of vacation time."

I could hear three distinctive gobbles across a meadow.  My goal was to get within a 100 yards or less of the birds, and entice them into shotgun range with the calls of a willing mate.  Call, locate, hike, set up for a shot.  I repeated this several times, but the birds kept moving away from me, apparently not convinced my calls were truly those of a willing partner.  Finally, the gobbles drifted out of earshot.  I knew the birds had crossed above me, moving left to right, and I knew with fresh snow, I could follow them with more purpose and greater direction.  I trailed them for several hundred yards, through thickets and snow banks, around a curving ridge to the edge of a ravine.  That is when I got them calling again.  I thought they might still be in the bottom of the little drainage.  They sounded close.  I could hear clucking and putting and other turkey noises in addition to the volleys of excited gobbles.  This is when turkey hunting gets really fun..

Still, I couldn't get a bird to show himself.  I carefully crept to the edge of the ravine, which was littered with dead fall and noisy branches.  I could still hear the birds, but I then knew they weren't in the ravine after all,  rather they were calling from the bench on the other side.  I crouched and crept to a tree ten yards below the edge of the bench.  I knew this would be a tough spot to bring the birds in, with such a severe blind spot, but I couldn't go further without risking exposure.  Now the birds were hot, instantly responding to each of my calls, but still, they were hung up.  The blind spot made them wary.  With my head low, I moved across the face of the ravine to another tree twenty yards away hoping to change the game just a little.  I settled in with my back to a tree and started to call again.

That is when I heard a noise of soft movement behind me and over my right shoulder, from a small thicket of dog hair timber.  My first thought was "excellent there is another tom coming in."  I raised my right hand to cup my mouth to slightly muffle the sound of my diaphragm call.  I let out a burst of yelps, the toms let out a burst of gobbles, and I heard a burst of movement from behind my right shoulder.  I actually froze at that moment.  In the split second, I thought I was going to see a sex-crazed tom turkey run right past me.  The only question was whether I would be able to swing my shotgun on him without him noticing.  The gun was laying on my lap, muzzle pointed to my left, where I expected the other toms to come into the open.  I was one convergence away from predator mode.  I turned nothing to the right but my gaze, and as I did, a primal fear welled out of my core when I saw the lion make the sharp turn around my tree with vicious speed.  My hand was still at my mouth from calling, so my arm was already in a defensive position.  The lion's right paw swatted me hard in the chest, and I pushed away from his chest with my raised arm and I screamed.  I didn't notice until I felt a bruise later on, but the cat must have hit me hard on the right shoulder as well.  I fell on my side and he reared back.  He must have been startled by my scream.  Turkeys don't make that kind of noise.  Turkeys don't weigh 235 pounds and they probably don't fight back all that well.  I guess he must have been startled by that too.  For a second the cat stood there just a few feet from me.  His tail was long and it was crooked at a couple of places.  His fur was thick and healthy, but it looked wet or at least oiled, not like the clean tanned pelts successful hunters hang on their walls.  I yelled again, "holy sh#t!," and the cat hesitated then retreated back to the thicket, looking confused.  I jumped up to face him, this time with my shotgun ready.  He stood in the thicket, only ten or fifteen yards below me.  He wasn't a huge cat, but he was an adult.  His length was remarkable, with that iconic long tail flicking the same way our house cat's tail does when he is agitated.  Lions can look confused and disdainful especially when an easy meal of nesting hen turkey turns out to be much more than he bargained for.

The cat slinked away, but my rush didn't go with him.  Those three silly toms gobbled again above me, apparently not dissuaded too much by the commotion below them.  I marched over the hill, thinking maybe there was still some luck in my bank.  Thirty plus yards away, a tom turkey popped his head up.  I aimed and fired, but my aim wasn't true.  Everything that day had converged in the space time continuum, except the turkey's head and the lead from my shotgun.  I suppose not being lion food was enough luck for the day.

In hindsight, the speed of the attack was what was truly frightening.  It wasn't the silence... I knew something was there.  It was the speed.  I was armed, but once I knew it was a threat, not quarry, there was zero chance of defending myself.  Even a sidearm would have been useless, other than for a potshot through the trees as the cat slinked away.  In the high of the adrenaline rush, I didn't feel scared, but truly exhilarated.  I had just counted coup on one of the most formidable predators in North America.  I checked for bites and scratches, but couldn't find much.  My chest was a little sore, and I had an almost indiscernible laceration on my right nipple.  I was lucky that biting wasn't the first thing that lion did to dispatch his poultry dinner.

Now, for the first time in my life, I woke up and thought twice about hunting alone.  After processing for a couple of days, I know now that was my most frightening moment, and I might need the buddy system when I go back to the woods.  I will hunt alone again and I will do it soon.  It is too important for me to have that solitude to let a scary kitty cat get under my skin.  I think I will probably look over my shoulder a little more now.  I know what it feels like to touch the wildest of wild, and walk away unscathed.  I would rather foul up a turkey hunt than meet another mountain lion on his terms.

The Mountain Man Recipe Projects

HHMM needs a project.  The way I figure it, since this blog is about hunting, fishing, gardening, and food, I might as well make the project about all of those things at once.  Really, it will be a series of projects, with each one aimed at gathering, growing, or concocting one of the important ingredients, then writing a story about it.  How awesome will it be to sometime in the near future enjoy a meal flavored not only by the delicious meats, seasonings, and vegetables, but also by the tales of a day or days spent afield gathering those ingredients?

There are several cuisines that lend themselves well to a project such as this one.  The cuisines have to lend themselves well to wild versus domestic meats, or they have to regularly showcase such meats.  Cajun cuisine is perhaps the genre that first comes to mind.  I can't tell you how many times that I heard "well, you can cook it up in a gumbo" when the misfits of the game meat world - coot, squirrel, jackrabbit - were discussed.  If those misfits are accepted, even welcomed, in Cajun cuisine, then any game will be at home.

Gumbo is perhaps the most iconic of all Cajun dishes, and gumbo will be the my gastronomical muse for this adventure.  Sometime in the coming months, I will make an epic gumbo that will be rich, savory, spicy, and hearty (at least that is the plan).  In this gumbo, I will have crayfish, which I will harvest from my local waters.  The dish will also have andouille sausage, which I will mix, stuff, and smoke.  Perhaps if I am lucky, the sausage will be made from the meat of the bear I hope to harvest during this spring season.  The gumbo will have tomatoes, bell peppers, garlic, and onions, hopefully all of which will come from our garden this year.  Here is the recipe I plan to use (modified from the Creole Crab Gumbo in this book):

1/2 cup sliced onion*
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
1/2 pound wild game fish fillets*
1 pound cooked crayfish tails*
1 pound smoked andouille sausage*
1 pound okra, cut up*
5 cups canned tomatoes*
1 cup diced green pepper*
2 garlic cloves, crushed*
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons salt
Black pepper to taste
2 cups brown game stock*

The starred ingredients above are ones I ought to be able to acquire or grow on my own.  The way I figure it, even if I fail to produce one of these ingredients on my own, and I have to resort to acquisition of foodstuffs from alternative sources, at least I will have a story.  I will publish each one of those stories as a blog post.  It should be fun...

The Best Cider

Brewed. Blended. Bottled....

I finally put this cider to bed this weekend... it was a long road for this batch, very unlike the process I describe in http://hairyhippymountainman.blogspot.com/2013/01/easy-cider.html.  Oddly enough, a portion of the cider started as a batch of "Easy Cider" from a local orchard that must not have had the proper balance of juices.  It started as my first failure in the cider making business.  The batch in question was almost undrinkable - much too tart and without any balance.  Emily and I aged the cider for months in a glass carboy, without any marked improvement in the flavor.  We gave up and bottled the stuff in every growler we had sitting around the house, figuring we would use this bulk beverage for something down the road.  

As time went on, we tried a nip of the stuff here and there, and after a year or so since it was brewed, the cider started to mellow, get drinkable, and almost good, but it was still a little too much on the tart side to be called good.  Around the same time, we took a trip to a you-press cider operation (http://www.bishop-orchard.com/).  The must from this adventure went into primary fermentation with the best fragrance of any cider I had brewed.  Unfortunately, that is all that came out of the fermenter... fragrance .. the juice was relatively flavorless.  So now I had two poor ciders on my hands, and both were poor because they were too strong in one component of tasty cider.  So I mixed 'em.  Two gallons of the tart stuff and four gallons of the fragrant stuff.

I had read about the virtues of blended ciders, but this has been my only firsthand experience making one, and I couldn't be more stoked about the result.  The clear lesson is this: if you ever have a cider that doesn't come out quite right... save it.  For one, flavors will mellow with time.  Second, you never know when a strongly flavored cider in the cellar will balance well with a future boo-boo.

Salmon River Steelhead

I must be getting older, because never before had my hand been numb from just a couple of days of hard fishing.  The skin on my right thumb and forefinger was chapped and cracked, and the cracks had filled with the oil and grime that is an inevitability of days afield in the mountains in early spring.  The same grime filled the crevices and spaces of the cork handle on my favorite flyrod, though those deposits are the result of many trips and days and hours of chucking line laden with lead and weighted flies.  Many people go fishing to relax, but I had only just reached my zen, after two and a half days with no steelhead.  I had hooked a couple whitefish, validating that I hadn't forgotten how to drift a nymph and detect a strike, validating I wasn't a worthless fisherman.  The steelheading had been so slow, I was ready to try anything.  Normally we drift big black stonefly nymphs trailed by an egg pattern for these late season fish, but I decided to try a mix of swinging and drifting a gaudy purple articulated fly one of my technicians had tied up for me.  Swing, dead drift, swing, dead drift, swing... nothing, but the day was bright and clear, the air smelled like spring, and I was standing in the Salmon River with my Pop, so I was content.  Maybe that is what the river gods needed... my contentment... because that is when my indicator stopped and slipped beneath the surface in the way that only happens when a fish strikes the fly.

I set the hook hard: not the way you do when you are frustrated and anxious about the fishing, but rather the way you do when you know it is "fish on."  The way the fish came with the fly as I set the hook, I was convinced I had hooked another whitefish, and I declared such to Pop, who was re-rigging his gear on the bank behind me.  Almost immediately, the fish pulled harder, and I saw its bright red stripe.  "No! It's a steelhead!," I declared.  The fight was on, but the battle was short lived.  Spring steelhead like that one have already had a long journey - some 850 miles from the ocean, and the fish hadn't fed in several months.  The energy stores it had been surviving on had almost been depleted, and there wasn't much left in the tank for epic battles with flyfisherman.  The hen, on the small size for a steelhead at 23 inches, had an adipose clip, which meant she was born in a hatchery and was destined for a grill or smoker.  I dispatched the fish and cut her gills. The thick red blood flowed down a rock at stream's edge and diffused and disappeared into the flow of the river.  I imagine that blood was a microcosm of the diffusion of the waters of this river as it moves toward the ocean, first mixing with the major forks of the Salmon River, then the Snake, then almost washed away in the Columbia.

One of the other members of our fishing party, Jim, had come downstream to watch the battle, and he offered me a congratulatory cigar.  Jim and I sat on the bank in the Salmon Country sun watching the swirls of pungent smoke drift downstream, while Pop gave it one last try.  This wasn't my first steelhead, or the biggest.  It was certainly the hardest-earned fish of my life, but that sense of relaxation I had after a great trip with great friends in beautiful country made me feel like I hadn't worked all that hard for it in the end.

A hard-won steelie and a contented angler.

Enjoying the finer points of a boys' fishing trip with Paul.

Pop soaking up some spring sunshine in some of the finest country in the world.

How to Grill the Perfect Steak

I love to cook, and I especially love to cook outside over a grill.  I know it is a total cliche, but cooking meat over a fire is an important connection to our roots.  I would imagine one of the reasons grilled meats taste so good to us is that it has been an important part of our behavioral evolution since Homo erectus roasted a fat slab of woolly mammoth rump roast over a fire 400,000 years ago.  Maybe charred and browned bits of meat aren't the best thing for us, but they may be the oldest comfort food.

I come from a family of deliciously arrogant cooks.  My Uncle Philip believes he makes Italian meatballs "the right way," and all other practitioners are creating abominations.  My Granddad is the only one in the family capable of making "Granddad's Tomatoes," a oil and herb tomato salad.  My father makes the best chocolate chip cookies.  He has never once used a recipe, and I have never met a baker who can replicate them.  He knows they are the best, and he relishes the fact that nobody can replicate him.

My specialty... grilled game meat.  I always get a little nervous whenever somebody else grills my steak.  There are few things that bring out an anal-retentive streak in me, but grilling game meat is one of them.  You don't screw around with grilled game meat for a couple of reasons.  First, a free and wild creature gave its life for your dinner; you better respect the animal by not ruining its meat.  Second, when properly done, grilled elk, deer, or antelope steak is about as sublime as it gets.  Game meat is lean, yet full of flavor, and the properly prepared steak is almost never tough, gamey, or otherwise unpalatable.

So how is it done?  I am not a trained chef... and there may be techniques that accomplished chefs would eschew (I know my Uncle Phil would), but this works.  I have cooked game meat this way for the accomplished palate and the neophyte game eater alike, and both sing the praises of the HHMM steak... (the implicit assumption is that these people aren't just being polite).  I have had many wonderful game steaks cooked other ways than described below, but I still like my own recipe the best.  Here is my approach:

Step 1. Harvest a game animal, then butcher the tasty critter yourself.  A steak will taste much better if you do all the work to put it on your plate.  In a pinch, commercially processed game meat or game meat from a friend will certainly get the job done.

Step 2. Baste all sides of a backstrap/loin (whole or cut into steaks), sirloin, or any steak-quality cut, with a mixture of:
3-4 tablespoons of olive oil
1 tablespoon of Kosher salt
 4-5 (or 8-10) cloves of chopped garlic
A bunch of course ground pepper
(note: I never measure anything when I am cooking meat, unless I am making a snooty French sauce to go on the meat. Quantities listed above are both approximate and relative).

Make sure you save any of the left over mixture.

Step 2.  Start the fire.  While your meat is resting on the counter in a bath of oil and spices, get charcoal going nice and hot, but only on one side of the kettle, as shown below.  In my not-humble opinion, charcoal is the only proper way to grill a steak (remember what I said earlier about me and my family).  Again, in a pinch, gas will work, but charcoal sears and browns the meat better, and it is easier to concentrate and control the heat by moving your meat relative to where your pile of coals sits.  Whether you are using charcoal or gas, the only time you should clean your grate is when it is piping hot.  Use only a wire brush and scrape the grease and crusties off from the previous cookout.  The hot oils will quickly develop a patina on the metal, much like what is on cast iron cookware.  This patina will prevent food from sticking on your grill, and who knows, maybe it adds to the flavor to have a homegrown seasoning on your cookware.

Step 3.  Put the meat directly over the hot coals, where the heat is the most intense.  You are going to sear the meat, which seals in juices and develops that wonderful browned meat flavor.  The oil will help with this browning process by sizzling on the meat.  It will also help prevent sticking, it will keep the meat (which has very little fat) from drying out, and olive oil tastes really darn good.  Besides which, it helps with the patina described in step 2.

Step 4.  After the meat is seared on  to your satisfaction, take some of the remaining oil-seasoning mixture and baste it on the seared side.  Once all sides are seared, move the meat off of the heat to the side of the grate with no hot charcoal underneath.  Close the upper vents on your grill lid.  Here you can cook more slowly, in the smoke of the charcoal until it is cooked to desired doneness (more on this later).  Continue basting at regular intervals throughout the entire cooking process.

Step 5.  Remove the meat from the grill a couple of minutes after your last basting.  In my mind, the one easy way to ruin game steak is to overcook it.  Cuts of meat with lots of connective tissue and sinew (i.e. neck meat, shoulder roast, shank meat), should be cooked very slowly at low temperature in a moist environment (i.e. braising).  Steak and other cuts with low amounts of connective tissue are tender to begin with and should be cooked quickly over high heat, and they should never be cooked beyond medium rare, period.  In my household, meat cooked beyond medium rare is known as "ruined."  This is because the meat is dryer, has less flavor, and it starts to get more chewy, less tender. When I use a meat thermometer, I like to take the meat off at an internal temperature of 120 for "purple in the center" (which is delicious) or 130 - 135 for rare to medium rare, but make sure you calibrate your meat thermometer to your true desired doneness.

Step 6. Slice, serve, and enjoy.  The outside of the slices should be a salty, garlicky shell around savory, succulent centers.  This is as good as red meat gets.  I think beef is greasy and flavorless in comparison.  Wild meat is the King of steak meats.  Doesn't that photo below make you want to bust out the best red wine in the cellar and celebrate?  Yet, it only took a few minutes to prepare and cook... The flavors are simple, yet full.  Olive oil, salt, and garlic cooperate quite nicely with these meats.  (Actually that steak was slighltly over-done for my taste, but it was really darn good!).

Spring.

The peppers are looking up in the basement seedling operation.  The chicks are using their training run, getting used to the outdoor life.  The Mini-HHMM is running around the yard in his shorts.  Peas are coming up in the garden.  It must be spring and I can almost taste the sweetness of homegrown life.  Definitely living the dream...