Read Online Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species by Jackson Landers - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jackson Landers
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two e-mails. One was from Kiera Butler, articles editor of Mother Jones magazine. She was interested in following along with me on a hunt to find out what this business of hunting and eating invasive species was all about.
The other was a Facebook message from Baker Leavitt, a friend of a former student of mine who had heard about what I was up to. Baker was at that time a resident of New York City but was part-owner of some family property near his childhood home in Georgia. Would I like to “come bust some hawgs!” around Savannah at the earliest possible convenience? Yes, please!
I checked to make sure that it would be okay for Kiera to tag along. She’d never hunted anything, and, in fact, was a longtime vegetarian. (In this, her background reminded me of my own.) As a hunting instructor and guide, though, I was used to working with adults who have no hunting or shooting experience, so this sounded like a situation I could handle.
Bob was game for another trip, so we made the day’s drive together from Charlottesville to Savannah in the dead of February. We checked into our hotel, just outside the city limits, and met up with Kiera. She was a tall, whip-thin young woman who, for a vegetarian from San Francisco, seemed quite eager to kill a pig.
Baker’s family’s place turned out to be a thousand acres of old rural Georgia standing firm in the face of suburban encroachment all around. We drove into what seemed to be a long-established suburban neighborhood and took a turn into a dirt alley between a few houses, and pretty soon we were back in the country. Stands of live oak were mixed with scrub pines, swampy bottoms, and long meadows that had been carved out of the woods.
Baker is a strong, sturdily built man devoted to the CrossFit movement. (Many of my hunting students have also been part of CrossFit, which is a strength and conditioning program for professional athletes, police, military, and ordinary people.) He spoke rapidly of more businesses he had invested in or started than I could keep track of. Somehow, he was working on an energy-drink company and a sporting-equipment business and a few other projects, all while enrolled in an Arabic-language program at a university in New York City. I imagine he’s bound to strike it big in something sooner or later, on odds alone.
Before we hunted, I gave Kiera a crash course in shooting a hunting rifle. We set up an ad hoc range, and I found out what she could do with the 7mm-08 deer rifle that I brought for her. She did well enough for a first-timer, and I figured she’d be all right to seventy-five yards or so. I’d been drilling her on the vulnerable areas of a pig’s anatomy for the last few weeks and was confident that she knew which part of the animal to shoot.
Kiera and I walked under a white, threatening sky to our two-person blind. Bob was less than a mile away in a blind of his own. It began to drizzle, but Kiera bore the bad weather with good cheer. We saw many fresh tracks in the area, but no pigs trotted out.
Around midday, we heard several shots from less than half a mile away. I was pretty sure they’d come from Bob’s lever-action 30-30 rifle, so we headed back to the dirt road and toward the barn to find out if he’d gotten something.He had! It was a young boar of around sixty pounds — old enough to have put on some size but still young enough to be free of the “boar taint” (an unpleasant smell to the meat) that is reported in older, uncastrated pigs. We carried it to a wooden platform that was built for the purpose of butchering, and I set to work.
I had never butchered a pig before, so I approached this one in the same way I would butcher a deer. First, I gutted it, noting the various similarities to and differences from deer viscera. Kiera watched with interest and never shied away from what was happening. After it was gutted, Bob hung the pig from a hook and skinned it. (Skinning a pig is, by the way, fairly hard work; the
The other was a Facebook message from Baker Leavitt, a friend of a former student of mine who had heard about what I was up to. Baker was at that time a resident of New York City but was part-owner of some family property near his childhood home in Georgia. Would I like to “come bust some hawgs!” around Savannah at the earliest possible convenience? Yes, please!
I checked to make sure that it would be okay for Kiera to tag along. She’d never hunted anything, and, in fact, was a longtime vegetarian. (In this, her background reminded me of my own.) As a hunting instructor and guide, though, I was used to working with adults who have no hunting or shooting experience, so this sounded like a situation I could handle.
Bob was game for another trip, so we made the day’s drive together from Charlottesville to Savannah in the dead of February. We checked into our hotel, just outside the city limits, and met up with Kiera. She was a tall, whip-thin young woman who, for a vegetarian from San Francisco, seemed quite eager to kill a pig.
Baker’s family’s place turned out to be a thousand acres of old rural Georgia standing firm in the face of suburban encroachment all around. We drove into what seemed to be a long-established suburban neighborhood and took a turn into a dirt alley between a few houses, and pretty soon we were back in the country. Stands of live oak were mixed with scrub pines, swampy bottoms, and long meadows that had been carved out of the woods.
Baker is a strong, sturdily built man devoted to the CrossFit movement. (Many of my hunting students have also been part of CrossFit, which is a strength and conditioning program for professional athletes, police, military, and ordinary people.) He spoke rapidly of more businesses he had invested in or started than I could keep track of. Somehow, he was working on an energy-drink company and a sporting-equipment business and a few other projects, all while enrolled in an Arabic-language program at a university in New York City. I imagine he’s bound to strike it big in something sooner or later, on odds alone.
Before we hunted, I gave Kiera a crash course in shooting a hunting rifle. We set up an ad hoc range, and I found out what she could do with the 7mm-08 deer rifle that I brought for her. She did well enough for a first-timer, and I figured she’d be all right to seventy-five yards or so. I’d been drilling her on the vulnerable areas of a pig’s anatomy for the last few weeks and was confident that she knew which part of the animal to shoot.
Kiera and I walked under a white, threatening sky to our two-person blind. Bob was less than a mile away in a blind of his own. It began to drizzle, but Kiera bore the bad weather with good cheer. We saw many fresh tracks in the area, but no pigs trotted out.
Around midday, we heard several shots from less than half a mile away. I was pretty sure they’d come from Bob’s lever-action 30-30 rifle, so we headed back to the dirt road and toward the barn to find out if he’d gotten something.He had! It was a young boar of around sixty pounds — old enough to have put on some size but still young enough to be free of the “boar taint” (an unpleasant smell to the meat) that is reported in older, uncastrated pigs. We carried it to a wooden platform that was built for the purpose of butchering, and I set to work.
I had never butchered a pig before, so I approached this one in the same way I would butcher a deer. First, I gutted it, noting the various similarities to and differences from deer viscera. Kiera watched with interest and never shied away from what was happening. After it was gutted, Bob hung the pig from a hook and skinned it. (Skinning a pig is, by the way, fairly hard work; the
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