“It is true, I came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself….” (Henry David Thoreau)

I spent last weekend in the company of six heavily armed women at Madroño Ranch.

Don’t worry; we’re not training up a secret army of Sarah Palin clones. No, these Hill Country Dianas were attending “Hunting School for Women,” our first ethical hunting workshop of the new season. Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club decided to limit the enrollment to six rather than the usual eight, since five of the six were first-timers and he wanted to make sure they received as close to a one-on-one experience with a guide as possible.

The weekend was a huge success, at least from our perspective, and while I know I shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations based on such a small sample size, I couldn’t help concluding that most women are more likely to “get” the whole ethical hunting thing, and more willing to listen and learn, than most men. (Of course, if I simply substituted “inexperienced hunters” for “women” and “experienced hunters” for “men,” that statement would be equally true; perhaps the most important factor in making this school so successful was the fact that five out of the six attendees were novices, not that all six were women.) For whatever reason, though, the weekend was as far removed as possible from the boys’-night-out mentality that prevails in some hunting circles, for which we’re grateful.

The ringer in the group was our dear friend Valerie, an experienced hunter and a regular customer of Jesse’s at the Sustainable Food Center’s Saturday morning farmers’ market in downtown Austin. In addition to her hunting expertise, Valerie brought a wicked sense of humor to the proceedings; she was the one who affixed the full-page PETA ad of Sir Paul McCartney proudly proclaiming his vegetarianism to the Madroño Ranch refrigerator, just below the inspirational magnet pictured above.

Helping Jesse and the multitalented Tink Pinkard make sure everything ran smoothly were Morgan Angelone, the phenomenal Dai Due “camp chef”; our daughter Elizabeth, the assistant chef; Jeremy Nobles and Josh Randolph, the trusty guides; and our son Tito, the assistant guide.

As if that weren’t enough of a hunting vibe, we also had two residents at the ranch: Jackson Landers, a hunter/author from Virginia, and Helena Svedberg, a student of environmental filmmaking at American University who is filming him for her master’s project.

It was, in other words, a fairly bloodthirsty group. But as Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, told the guests, we provide an opportunity for them to hunt; we do not, and cannot, promise them that they will kill, or even see, an animal. In the event, five of the six guests did register kills from our blinds, and all six went home with coolers full of venison and/or hog meat.

All in all, then, we’re happily counting Hunting School for Women as a win. But coming on the heels of our second bison “harvest,” it has us (again) thinking long and hard about our somewhat vexed attitude toward meat eating.

Now, I take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of meat. Morgan’s bison burgers (a Friday night hunting school tradition), Jesse’s charcuterie, Ben Willcott’s pork Milanese at Texas French Bread—these are among my very favorite things to eat. And we happily accepted Valerie’s invitation to come over for dinner once she’s turned the 130-pound feral hog she shot into pork curry or some other delectable dish. But neither Heather nor I is a hunter; the only animal I’ve ever shot was an obviously deranged raccoon, presumably rabid, that we encountered staggering along the road at the ranch at midday on a scorching summer day several years ago.

In other words, while we certainly hope to make enough money from the sale of our bison meat to help support our residency program, and while we understand the need to control the deer and hog populations not just for the sake of a balanced ecosystem at the ranch, but for the good of the animals themselves (no one likes to see the starving individuals that result from overpopulation), we are a little, um, squeamish about doing the deed ourselves. Instead we are, in effect, allowing Jesse and Tink and Robert and the hunting school guests to do our dirty work. Does this make us hypocrites? Wouldn’t it be more honest for us to take rifle in hand and take care of this business ourselves?

Well, yes. Honestly, I don’t think I have a huge problem with the general concept of killing a feral hog, or even a deer, though I’ve been warned about the dreaded Bambi effect. (The bison, I confess, are a different story; they are so big, so magnificent, so valuable, that I’d be intimidated if I were the one required to shoot them.) What bothers me is the possibility that I might not be a sufficiently good shot, despite the numbers of beer cans and paper targets I’ve blasted over the years; I would agonize over the possibility that, due to my incompetence, the animal might not die instantly.

Of course I also understand that for us hunting would be a luxury, as it is for many enthusiastic hunters, and not a necessity; we are lucky to have other people who kill and process our food before we buy and cook and eat it. Moreover, not everyone can, or should, be a hunter; a healthy human ecology requires diversity and balance—vegetarians and vegans as well as carnivores; urban hipsters and rural rednecks; multinational corporations (well regulated, please!) and corner stores; butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. There should be room at the table for all.

That said, however, I believe firmly that every carnivore should, at some level, confront the meaning of meat: the death, blood, evisceration, and butchering that are inextricable parts of the process by which this chop or that sausage ends up on our dinner table. We’ve seen that process up close and personal during bison harvests and hunting schools at the ranch, and at the processing facility in Utopia that turns our bison carcasses into stew meat and steaks. But we haven’t actually pulled the trigger or wielded the knife ourselves—not yet, anyway. Perhaps we never will. But I hope we will always be uneasy about that fact, and thankful for the animals whose flesh we eat, and for those who allow us to do so.

What we’re reading
Heather: The Sun
Martin: Anthony Trollope, The Warden

… doubt not, therefore, sir, that angling is an art, and an art worth your learning. The question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it?

Inspired by the recent Freshwater Fly-Fishing School at Madroño Ranch, I’ve been rereading Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler: or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, Not Unworthy the Perusal of Most Anglers, first published in 1653. Despite that rather daunting subtitle, and a certain tendency toward the pedantic (it is basically a conversion story, in which Piscator convinces his new friend Venator of the superiority of fishing to hunting), it is a charming and gentle book, of interest to anglers and non-anglers alike. (I’ve interspersed some of my favorite quotations from it above and below.)

Thomas McGuane, in his introduction to the 1995 Ecco Press edition of The Compleat Angler, compares Walton to Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes, and to Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne, but finds Walton a more serene and comforting companion than either. “Even in the seventeenth century, there was the need of a handbook for those who would overcome their alienation from nature,” notes McGuane, adding that “learned, equitable Izaak Walton, by demonstrating how watchfulness and awe can be taken within from the natural world, has much to tell us—that is, less about how to catch fish than about how to be thankful that we may catch fish.”

Freshwater Fly-Fishing School, held on May 13–15, was the third in a series of ethical hunting and fishing events at Madroño Ranch, all put on by our friend Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due supper club. (We had Deer School in December and Hog School in March.) It was, like its predecessors, a thoroughgoing success, and we hope to offer many more such schools in the future.

Give me your hand; from this time forward I will be your master, and teach you as much of this art as I am able; and will, as you desire me, tell you somewhat of the nature of most of the fish that we are to angle for; and I am sure I both can and will tell you more than any common Angler yet knows.

The idea behind these schools is to bring eight paying guests out to the ranch for a three-day weekend, during which they receive instruction from Jesse and his buddy Tink Pinkard, a former fly-fishing and hunting guide in Montana, in basic hunting or fishing techniques and processing, butchering, and cooking the animals they kill or catch.

Not incidentally, they (and we) also enjoy a series of incredible meals prepared by Jesse’s “camp chef,” the amazing Morgan Angelone. (Her Friday night bison burgers have become a tradition, and Saturday’s dinner is always a multicourse feast featuring various preparations of whatever animal is the weekend’s designated victim, followed by her soon-to-be-world-famous Basque cake.)

… this trout looks lovely; it was twenty-two inches when it was taken! and the belly of it looked, some part of it, as yellow as a marigold, and part of it was white as a lily; and yet, methinks, it looks better in this good sauce.

The Saturday night feast at Fly-Fishing School featured fish prepared in a multitude of ways: in soup with aioli croutons, en papilote, grilled whole, fried, grilled “on the halfshell” (unscaled), in breaded cakes… truly, it was an amazing experience; by the time the last piece of Basque cake had been shoveled down, we were sitting on the porch of the Main House at Madroño in stunned silence. Shock and awe, baby.

… he that views the ancient ecclesiastical canons, shall find hunting to be forbidden to churchmen, as being a turbulent, toilsome, perplexing recreation; and shall find angling allowed to clergymen, as being a harmless recreation, a recreation that invites them to contemplation and quietness.

Fly-Fishing School presented a different set of challenges than did Deer School and Hog School. For one thing, the guests weren’t wielding firearms, so while they still ran the risk of wounds from stray hooks and filleting knives, the chances of serious injury or death were minimized, though one guest cut his thumb cleaning a fish, and another scraped his hand on a fall in a creek. (Walton called fishing a “most honest, ingenious, quiet, and harmless art,” which I guess is mostly true if you’re not a fish.) For another, while most people have at least a vague grasp of how to shoot a rifle, even if they need coaching in safety and accuracy, fly-fishing requires a set of not necessarily intuitive skills in manipulating rod, reel, and line—not to mention tying flies (Tink devised the “Madroño Ranch caddis,” made entirely from materials sourced at the ranch), hatch-matching, etc. Thus, Jesse and Tink were simultaneously more relaxed than at Deer or Hog School, and more exhausted by the intensive instruction required at Fly-Fishing School.

… you are to know, that as the ill pronunciation or ill accenting of words in a sermon spoils it, so the ill carriage of your line, or not fishing even to a foot in a right place, makes you lose your labour….

And is there really enough water, and fish, at Madroño Ranch to make such an undertaking feasible? Absolutely. But don’t take my word for it; here’s Tink’s assessment: “Madroño Ranch offers one of the most pristine backdrops for fresh water fly-fishing in Texas that I’ve ever had the privilege of visiting…. [I]t offers spring-fed creeks and streams that empty into a beautiful lake loaded with red-breasted sunfish, crappie, red ear sunfish, bluegill, and largemouth bass.”

Just so. The guests also enjoyed phenomenal weather, as a cool front blew in on Saturday morning. The wind didn’t actually do much for the fishing, though the anglers had better luck when they abandoned the lake, which is fairly open and exposed, for the sheltered banks of Wallace Creek. Still, even though I would characterize the fishing as good rather than great, the guests seemed happy just to be out in a beautiful place, in beautiful weather, practicing what was for most of them a new form of fishing.

I envy not him that eats better meat than I do, nor him that is richer, or that wears better clothes than I do; I envy nobody but him, and him only that catches more fish than I do.

Actually, that’s the thing I’ve always loved about fly-fishing: even when you don’t catch any fish, you’ve still spent the day standing in or near a body of water, which is its own reward. And in my admittedly limited experience, the physical movements of fly-fishing are not only beautiful to watch (at least when someone more competent than I is making them), they are almost magically calm-inducing. Indeed, I imagine that casting a fly rod can induce something pretty close to a Zen state, and a day of fly-fishing on which one catches no fish is only slightly less enjoyable than a day of fly-fishing on which one catches many fish.

… this day’s fortune and pleasure, and this night’s company and song, do all make me more and more in love with angling.

I suspect that the beauty of Madroño Ranch, along with Jesse and Tink’s light pedagogical touch and Morgan’s jaw-dropping cooking, would be enough to convert anyone to fly-fishing; my friend and hiking buddy Bruce Bennett didn’t stand a chance. Bruce is a devoted, even fanatical, fisherman, spending virtually every free weekend fishing off the coast of Louisiana, and while he had never been fly-fishing before, he took to it so quickly that Tink threatened to hire him as an instructor for the next Fly-Fishing School. Indeed, Bruce spent most of the weekend in or on the water and “in the zone,” largely oblivious to everything except the arc of his cast and the location of the fish. When he finally, reluctantly, came back to reality, he said, “This has been the greatest weekend of my life.”

Somewhere, I feel sure, old Izaak Walton was nodding and smiling.

What we’re reading
Heather: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Martin: Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler: or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, Not Unworthy the Perusal of Most Anglers