I was assigned the honor of roasting the holiday turkey for our multifamily Thanksgiving dinner this year, so I’ve been surfing the net and watching the cooking channels for a clever new recipe to try out on the relatives. Talk about information overload. On my first search, I counted 20-some ways to cook a turkey: grilled, smoked, barbecued, deep-fried maple glazed …. I even saw a recipe for “black lacquered” turkey, if you can imagine such a thing. I actually thought about that one for a minute but then figured that’s probably not the sort of thing you’d want the in-laws to remember you for.
I’m a traditionalist anyway, so I decided to just roast the bird the way I always have, except that I’ll brine it first and drape it with cheesecloth drenched in white wine and melted butter a la Martha Stewart. That’s about as exotic as I care to get with a turkey.
Besides, I have other things on my mind. Shortly after Thanksgiving, my sons are taking me on a weeklong hunting trip out east where we plan to hunt deer, pheasants, and quail. We’ll concentrate on deer first and, if we’re lucky enough to fill our tags early, spend the rest of our time chasing pheasants and quail.
This will be the first time we’ve attempted a mixed bag hunt, though we’ve toyed with the idea before. First of all, there aren’t many places in Colorado where upland birds keep company with big game. With the exception of dusky (blue) grouse and the occasional Merriam’s turkey, you won’t find game birds in typical elk and mule deer country. You will, however, find both whitetail and mule deer in the bottomlands in eastern Colorado where the bulk of the state’s pheasants and quail are concentrated.
We never seriously considered hunting deer in the river bottoms instead of the mountains until we found ourselves jumping them out of the cattail sloughs and cornfields while hunting pheasants along the Platte. We applied for plains deer tags the following year and started flushing roosters and quail coveys while trying to sneak up on the deer.
At some point, the light finally came on.
It seemed obvious, but there were still a few details to work out. Small-game hunting is prohibited during the deer season on certain state wildlife areas and, since you can’t realistically carry a rifle for deer and a shotgun for birds at the same time anyway, you’d have to choose to hunt one or the other on any given day. We decided we’d concentrate on the deer first and, if successful, switch to small game in those areas where the restrictions didn’t apply. It might seem a little confusing, but it’s a lot less overwhelming than that recipe for black lacquered turkey.
Dennis Smith is a freelance outdoors writer and photographer whose work appears nationally. He lives in Loveland.