Venison Sausage

Like many people I have known in my life, the longer I live the more I appreciate them. So it is with Grandma Beryl (nee Fitzgibbons) Munday. She was a tough old Scot-Irish Presbyter. When I was a child, I thought she was the meanest woman on earth. After Gramps died, however, and she no longer got up each morning at the butt-crack of dawn to cook him breakfast, she really mellowed.

Gram liked staying up late at night watching horror movies and reading, and for 50-some years of marriage she had been seriously sleep deprived. After Gramps died, she often sat in her chair with a cat on her lap reading until 1 or 2 in the morning, and then slept until 10 or sometimes later. When Jan & I lived nearby, we'd sometimes stop in after an evening on the town, and Gram was always ready for a glass of beer.

Gram didn't waste much. She cooked deer kidneys, picked a chicken carcass down to the bones, and made wonderful venison sausage. Here's the recipe.

You'll need a grinder. An old "armstrong" manual grinder like the one she left to me will work just fine:

For this batch, we'll use about 10 pounds of scraps left over from butchering a whitetail. Strips cut from the ribs, 1" - 2" chunks cut from the shanks, and anything else that didn't go into steaks, roasts, stewmeat, or stir-fry meat:

Add to that about 5 pounds of fatty pork scraps. Cheap bacon (our supermarket sells bags of bacon scraps) works well, and if you use salt pork you can use somewhat less:

Mix in a slew of spices and flavorings. Amounts are about 2 teaspoons for each of the spices, about a cup of dark brown sugar, and several (or more) hot peppers if you'd like:

Not shown are fennel seeds, about 4 tablespoons of which get added and mixed in before the second grind. Mix the spices, venison, and pork together and run through the grinder on a coarse setting. Gram's grinder has a single "plate" (cutter wheel) that reverses for fine and coarse grinding. Depending upon how sinewy and tough your venison scraps are and how efficient your grinder is, you might have to pause after every few pounds of meat, remove the plate, and clean out the sinews that are clogging things up. Here we are after mixing in the fennel seeds and switching the plate for the second (and final) grind:

This bulk or pan sausage is good for breakfast patties, and Jan likes it for dishes such as lasagna. Enjoy!

Going Elkless (Almost): Elk Hunting near Butte, Montana

There I was, combing the hills several miles from the road on the last day of elk season. I had grown entirely too smug about elk hunting, having shot bull elk four-out-of-five years that I hunted them, and having shot several cows within a mile or so of the highway. Not this year.

Season began with me at a conference in Washington, DC. Of course, conditions were perfect with cold weather and eight inches of fresh snow. The second week, I was complacent. My friend Don was coming to hunt the following week, and so I roamed the hills and even passed up a shot at a cow. Well, it wasn't a good shot, and as my friend and now-retired colleague Dennis Haley counseled, "Hunting elk in timber is a percentage thing. If you are patient and get into them six or seven times, then you will get the good shot you want. There's no need to take those "iffy" shots."

Here's AJ, crashed for a nap in the warm noonday sun after we climbed into a remote (and elkless) Pintler basin:

Meanwhile, I ate my lunch and waited for the tea to boil:

Don Kieffer arrived from upstate New York the first week of November. The weather was beautiful: warm, sunny, and lousy for elk hunting. Up high, the old snow metamorphosed, turning icy and crunchy. Down low, the snow melted away. But we had a great time hiking the hills:

Visiting some of my favorite elk haunts:

And of course enjoying a hot cup of tea come noontime:

As my old friend BAT (aka Bob Thomas) likes to remind me, hunting is a lot more than killing. Especially on those blue sky days when the weather is just too damned good for serious elk hunting, you can lie back and listen to the serenade of migrating flocks of snow geese:

And swans:

Don & I also saw a peregrine falcon, and visited the spot where indigenous peoples mined jasper for tools:

After Don left, I tried to get more serious about elk hunting, but still the weather was not conducive to it. Hunting at such times becomes a good excuse for hiking into spots that need to be visited from time to time, such as these logging-era cabins, probably built to feed the flume that sluiced cord wood from the Big Hole valley to the Anaconda smelter:

And when the elk are hard to find, there is the occasional moose; here, a cow and calf on a remote, windswept ridge along the Continental Divide (folks don't think of moose as mountain animals, but they are in Montana!):

And the occasional fool hen (this one, felled with a rock, made a welcome and savory supper that night):

Finally, though, right at the end of season, conditions turned favorable with new, quiet snow and consistently cold temperatures. I spent a day or two hunting a spot that I had hunted many times over the years with Brent Patch and Dave Carter. In those years, I had not learned the lessons of a good "black timber" hunter, and wasted a lot of time peeking into parks and coursing through open stands of lodge pole pine.

In the timber, you keep your nose to the wind, move slowly and quietly, and check out all those stumps and rocks that look very much like elk:

Two Butte boys, hunting a park along the ridge line, flushed a bunch of elk from the north-side timber just below the ridge. I smelled them out ahead of me, found their tracks, began repeating my mantra ("I will honor your spirit and use your flesh well."), and began still hunting. One mile into the chase, they passed through a stand of dense Douglas fir, meandered about, and I thought sure they would bed down. It took me an hour to track them slowly and carefully through a half-mile wide thicket, sometimes crawling on my hands & knees to be quiet and stay below the branches. I could smell them and knew they were not far ahead. They continued through and fed in a small park. This told me they were relaxed and not worried about a predator on their heels. Very encouraging.

And then there they were, heads tilting and ears twitching, bedded in some thick, snow-covered firs at the park's edge. In timber, one seldom sees a whole elk. Because of the roll of the slope, I could not see any elk shoulders or ribs, my preferred shot. I usually avoid neck shots, since if you don't hit the spine there is not a quick death. But the elk were just seventy yards or so away, and I had a good rest on a tree limb. She never moved from her bed:

An hour or so later, I had the carcass split into two halves, dragged well away from the gut pile where the coyotes and ravens would be less likely to feed on it, and covered with pine branches until I could return:

The heart, liver, tenderloins, back straps, and tongue I laid out on the snow to cool:

Together, they made a forty pound load in my little rucksack. By the time I reached the road, three miles distant, the load felt like one hundred and forty pounds.

At the Check Station, I learned from the nice biologist that there was a Forest Service road within a half-mile of where I killed the cow. The next morning AJ came along to help me, and his good company and a sled made for a pleasant down-hill drag:

"I will honor your spirit and use your flesh well." This promise began with a supper of elk liver and onions last night, the heart is ready for pickling, and there are already plans for barbecued ribs, grilled tenderloin, back strap schnitzel, and roasted tongue with huckleberry glaze. Elk are great animals, and deserve the honor of a great (and arduous) hunt.

Yellowstone National Park: Wolf Watching, Elk Whistling

The morning we were to leave for a weekend in Yellowstone National Park, the local newspaper headline read, "Area wolf pack exterminated."
[http://www.mtstandard.com/articles/2007/09/27/butte/hjjcjahcjhijij.txt]
Mount Fleecer, visible from Butte and a popular local elk hunting spot, will be "wolfless" for the time being. It won't take long for another pack to move in, given that the area serves as winter range for hundreds and sometimes thousands of elk and that it's heavily grazed by cattle. And it won't take long for the new wolves to kill their first cow calf, after which they will again be exterminated like the mice that inhabit a kitchen.


How strange, then, to cross the magical boundary into Yellowstone. Just a line on a map and meaningless to wolves, but to humans it is more like prison walls. Escaping prisoners -- especially when they are buffalo or wolves -- will be shot on sight.*


We joined a big group of friends to camp in the park and listen to the bull elk whistle as they form and defend their harems in competition with other bulls. Our first night in the park, we were not disappointed. From dusk to dawn, elk music filled the air. The dominant campground bull -- we quickly learned to recognize his distinctive, full bellied 5-note whistle followed by deep grunts -- kept his cows in the woods during the day, allowing them to graze in the open only at night:




A lessor bull hung around closer to camp. Though we heard his whiny, croaking, whistle throughout the night, we never saw him approach or challenge the big bull. No wonder it is the big dominant bulls that often die in late winter, starved to death while floundering in deep snow or eaten alive by wolves. While the dominant bull spends all his time (and energy, and fat reserves) chasing and breeding cows, the lessor bull spends the time filling his belly with grass and putting on more weight for winter:

Of course, the really big bull herds his harem around the green grass at the park offices in Mammoth:



Our second night in the park, something happened that brought a long silence to the early morning. Up until 3 a.m., the bull elk whistled, the cows and calves barked, and the song-dogs (coyotes) trilled and yipped and howled. Then, a single booming howl reverberated across the hillsides. After that, all was silent as the coyotes and elk feared letting the wolf (or, more likely, wolves) know just where they were. This didn't prevent the coyotes from making pests of themselves during the day, however, as they scrounged from campsite to campsite for human food:




Brent and his kids, Kenia and Adler, and I spent our first morning on a firewood-gathering expedition outside the park. On Forest Service land, we stumbled upon a former cabin site that entertained the kids with curious items such as a curtain rod and baseball bat, and provided Brent & I with a fine pile of fence posts for use as firewood. Meanwhile, Jan and some of the other folks hiked to Steamboat and some of the other sites in the Geyser Basin:

Back at camp with the firewood cut, split, and stacked, we headed down the hill for a soak:

Nothing like "taking the waters" to soothe sore muscles, melt away worries, and prepare our apetites for Karina's pozole:

Next morning, a group of us left in the predawn chill (low 30s deg F) to spend a few hours wolf watching. On the way to the Lamar Valley, this black bear was along the road eating rose hips:



After a false start with a group of folks at Slough Creek with their spotting scopes all set up expecting to see the pack they watched the previous day, we joined another group just west of Druid Peak. They had spotted a pack with their pups nearby. Alas, we just missed them as the pack had split and the pups went into hiding after some over-zealous photographers got between the pack and the cub. But not to worry: "Alpha Dog" directed everyone to move down the road one mile. Most did so, with just one or two persons per super-sized SUV or RV rig.


I', m not sure how far it was, but we pulled over the next place where a big gang of folks were set up with spotting scopes. Sure enough, the wolves were just across the Lamar River, maybe a quarter-mile away. They were howling and generally putting on a good show for the tourists. Again, some knuckle-head photographers moved too close to them, and the wolves trotted off. Once a half-mile or so away, they relaxed and re-grouped. We could count at least 4 blacks and 5 grays, thanks to Dave's good spotting scope. Even with compact binoculars, they were great fun to watch, especially as they began stalking and surrounding a buffalo cow with two calves. The buffalo wisely moved away and toward a bigger herd, and the wolves moved downriver until they came to a high, sunny bench above the river.


Watching wolf watchers is nearly as much fun as watching wolves.** Just at there was an Alpha Dog in the group that others took their cues from, so was there an Alpha Bitch. Never mind that she didn't seem to know her ass from a hole in the ground, she liked to exert dominance, especally if others were talking. "Shhh... they're howling and we don't want to disturb them." (Never mind that the wolves were easily a mile away.) "Shhh... they're howling." (Never mind that it turned out to be a flock of geese she was hearing.) "Shhh... they're howling." (Never mind that there was a diesel RV backing out of the parking area and all you could hear was the clatter of its engine valves.) "Shhh... they're howling." (Never mind that the guy she was "shushing" was a Vietnam Vet with a hearing disability who (A) could not hear her, and (B) didn't care if she was shushing him or not. At that point, I could no longer contain myself and burst out laughing. After a few shushes directed at me (which triggered yet another round of laughing), I quieted down, fearing that she might clobber me with her spotting scope that's worth more than my old pickup truck:

On the way back to camp we watched some bighorn sheep on a cliff:

And had to pause for the usual buffalo roadblock or two:


All of this is good fun, but also raises a serious point. To what extent does the ease of viewing wildlife in Yellowstone National Park undermine our appreciation for wildlife? Normally, wild animals fear humans as predators and as competitors. Normally, even in wilderness areas (where hunting is allowed), you must work very hard and have good stalking technique to see big bull elk or wolves. In Yellowstone, all these critters are right there along the road--you merely need to drive up to them. Occasionally, as with the wolves, you might need to walk through the sagebrush for a hundred yards or so in order to set up at a good location. Park "wildlife security guards" are there (sometimes) in their fluorescent green and orange vests to keep tourists from getting to close to the critters. But, other than a few gallons of gasoline and the willingness to rise early, it doesn't take much effort.


Given the abundance of and ease of viewing wolves in Yellowstone, most people simply will not care whether or not the Fleecer pack -- or any other wolf pack outside of Yellowstone -- is exterminated. But perhaps I am wrong, and Park wildlife help people appreciate nature more. Perhaps the abundance of and ease of viewing wildlife in Yellowstone National Park will help them demand better management, less wildland development, and more diversity everywhere--including their own back yard.

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* I owe this metaphor of national parks as prisons to Thomas Birch, "The Incarceration of Wilderness," Environmental Ethics 12 (1990).

** Cf. Montag et al, "The wolf viewing experience in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park," Human Dimensions of Wildlife 10 (2005).

Twin Lakes Backpacking

I had a few days for a backpack trip last week, and friend Dave & his daughter Chelsea suggested Lake of the Isle/Twin Lakes area on the west side of the Great Divide. We ended up going to a long valley just north of LotI, a place I've wanted to visit, just over the ridge (Continental Divide) from 10 Mile Lakes. Here is the cirque, a bit distorted by my amateurish photo-stitching:

Soon after leaving the Twin Lakes trail, we ended up bushwhacking through some difficult deadfall in the mid-elevation forest. Hmmm... I thought there was an old packer's trail into this place. Here are Chelsea, RTD, and I--happy, before the grim reality of cross country hiking in the ugly stuff set in:

Well, we did see lots of critters to cheer us on,

such as this curious mule deer doe:

and this curious elk cow:

I suspect both had young hidden near by, and were reluctant to flee. I thought we would see goats for sure, but found nary a sign of them. They were once common in this area, but seem to be suffering from the constant snow machine harassment that occurs throughout the winter.

Well, lots of bear sign, though (some critters are more tolerant of humans than others),

old:

and fresh (note the hair--this guy recently ate an elk calf, I think):

And we saw a bear, but like so many ursine meetings it was fleeting, no time for a photo.

Here are my companions at an old logger's cabin (the ACM raped the timber out of this area, too, a century or so ago):

The 90 degree F heat made the alpine basin feel especially good. Few trees can match the beauty of the alpine larch. They grow in incredibly harsh conditions, on scree, avalanche chutes, and wind (and lightning) blasted ridges:

There were an extraordinary number of tiny yellow violets dotting the open ground covered by snow drifts just a few weeks ago:

A supper of grilled steaks, baked potatoes, and asparagus looks pretty good too:

ATV trail violations are increasingly a problem in this area, as everywhere. No wonder, given the Forest Service policy of trying to close old roads rather than reclaim them. A big wide road is a big wide invitation to ATV riders, and the pitiful closure efforts mean nothing, as you can see by the illegal bypass:

Putting trails across old roads on clearcuts makes for hot hiking too--as with Dave & Chelsea here on the trek out:

Home Ranch Campout: Montana Beauty

RTD & I mostly car camp this time of year. The June weather and large lingering snowfields make getting around in the high country (i.e. backpacking) difficult at best. As a quick get-away last week, I headed to the Home Ranch:

On a large tributary of the upper Big Hole River, this place has it all. Excellent brook trout fishing in a handful of nearby creeks, and some very good rainbow trout fishing, too (the 'bows spawn in these tribs, and some large fish hold over at least until creek levels drop in mid-July). Lots of sandhill cranes, a few herons, the occasional osprey, etc. And gorgeous views to the Pintler as in photo of the old barn at the Home Ranch (above).

Firewood close by (here, a rack of lodgepole):

Elk cows and calves (usually, the elk stay several hundred yards away; this momma let RTD & I walk a short distance away since she seemed to think she & calf were invisible). The mother is in the willows at the lower left, and the calf is in the grass laying flat with its head down (look for the reddish-brown):

Where the deer and the antelope play (these two does ran off with their fawns, but then returned and posed after hiding the little ones):

And of course wildflowers: elephant's head, lupines, sunflowers...

The Home Ranch and Mule Ranch were former Anaconda Copper Mining corporation holdings. In addition to raising mules for the Butte mines, the company pastured sheep here--moving them back and forth to the Mill/Willow Creek area in the shadow of the giant (500 feet+) Anaconda Smelter stack. In this way, the ACM could maintain the illusion (and legal pretense) that arsenic and heavy metals fallout from the smelter did not harm domestic stock. This was an important element in the ACM's ability to prevail over the Deer Lodge valley ranchers in the "smoke wars" of c. 1900 to 1920--efforts by the ranchers to obtain compensation for harmful pollution. The properties became state property after the company had no further use for them, and they have benefitted enormously by limiting the degree of cattle grazing.

Alas, even a few years ago there were many grayling in these creeks, but let's not ruin my mood.