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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
My life list is in no way comparable to Sandy Frazier's, and I hope that anyone reading this will not even faintly imagine that I am presuming otherwise as I go on to mention my own modest history with eccentric food. In this field, Sandy is an idol--certainly my idol, probably your idol. He it was who improved his understanding of wild trout by filling his belly with brown-drake mayflies, chewing thoughtfully while they fluttered on his tongue ("If you're into mayflies, it's hard to eat just one"). He it is whose acquired tastes run to things like grasshopper juice and cricket thighs ("the feel of the cricket's toothpicky legs between my teeth"). A gift of chocolate-covered ants and bees appealed to him less for the chocolate than for the "chitinous crunch." Long known in these pages as Ian, a name unfairly thought to be a sign of personal aggrandizement, he reads Leviticus for the sheer pleasure of its culinary attention to "unclean creeping things." That phrase belongs, Lord knows, to Leviticus, for it could never be from Sandy, who is incapable of writing such a description of anything, anywhere, that can qualify as protein.
I am simply not in his league, and prefer my place on the sidelines, admiring what I see. I mean, yes, when I was eight years old in the Vermont fish hatchery I used to swallow little two-inch whole trout--toss them high in the air and stagger around under them and catch them wriggling in my open mouth--but I never reached the point of eventual development implied by that early promise. When Sandy eats something that you don't find at ShopRite, at least not for sale at ShopRite, he does it for the art of it--in his word, the "show" of it--while I only do it for a living. I've eaten things like dock, burdock, chicory, chickweed, snapper eggs, porpoise, and mountain oysters, but almost always in the line of duty--on-the-job consumption. If I am out working and some novel thing is set in front of me, I'll eat it. But some novel thing is not often set in front of me, which is one reason that I defer so completely and uncompetitively to Sandy's amazing record, beside which I'd have little to show but several pounds of grizzly bear.
Its taxonomic name is Ursus horribilis, but that, for sure, is not how it tastes. About thirty years ago in Alaska in early spring, Mike Potts, a trapper, asked me to help him write a brochure for dogsled trips he wanted to sell to tourists from the Lower Forty-eight. Since I wouldn't take his money (in part because he had none), he paid me in food. One evening, the fare included fresh shoulder of grizzly, fried in its own raging fat by his wife, Adeline, and set on a table in their cabin, in Eagle Indian Village. A couple of days earlier, Potts and another trapper had been on the Fortymile River, and returned to Eagle by canoe, a journey that took them out of Alaska and into Yukon Territory and back into Alaska on the Yukon River.
The bear was walking upwind, downriver, looking the other way--just on the Canadian side of the border. The two raised their rifles, fired, and knocked it into the United States. Halved at the waist, it has been hanging in Potts' butchery, a few steps from his cabin. . . . Burgundy is the color of the grizzly's flesh. With the coat gone, its body is an awesome show of muscular anatomy. The torso hangs like an Eisenhower jacket, short in the middle, long in the arms, muscles braided and bulging. The claws and cuffs are still there. A great deal of fat is on the back. The legs, still joined, suggest a middle linebacker, although the thought is flattering to football.
Adeline would not eat the shar-cho--in Hungwitchin (her language), the brown, or grizzly, bear.
She will eat lynx, she said, which is "just like turkey," and wolf, which recalls canned beef. But not this, never this meat. There might be taste but there was terror in the bear.
Adeline cooked a platter of moose and set it on the table beside a platter of bear--two large mounds of sliced meat at least eight inches high. In addition to the three of us, a couple of other people were present. You reached for the meat with your own fork. Steadily, the pile of grizzly meat diminished, not so the moose.
The moose was tough. I ate little of it. The grizzly was tender with youth and from a winter in the den. More flavorful than any wild meat I have eaten, it expanded my life list--muskrat, weasel, deer, moose, musk ox, Dall sheep, whale, lion, coachwhip, rattlesnake . . . grizzly. And now a difference overcame me with regard to bears. In strange communion, I had chewed the flag, consumed the symbol of the total wild, and, from that meal forward, if a bear should ever wish to reciprocate, it would only be what I deserve.
The rattlesnake was canned. The flag of Alaska is dark blue behind gold stars that form the constellation of the Great Bear.
Soon after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was passed, in 1971, which resulted in the reorganization of Alaskan land on a vast and complex scale, I developed a strong desire to go there, stay there, and write about the state in its transition. When I asked William Shawn, The New Yorker's editor, if he would approve and underwrite the project, his...
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