My father didn't have to travel far to shoot the pheasants that he loved so much to eat. As he often reminded me, he and my mother Jona were so broke that all winter they had to eat the pheasants she canned. His favorite pheasant-harvesting grounds were on his own farm, a quarter mile east of his house, on the "West Eighty," as he called it. The Holm farm, bought by my grandfather from the railroad in 1885, sat on a hilly section of northern tall grass prairie, dotted with swampy unfarmable wetlands and stony thin-soiled pasture. There was a little good land too, maybe half of Bill Holm's 280 acres, enough for him. On the wetlands grew heavy brush, willows, box elders, a cottonwood or two, a narrow strip of wilderness between two corn fields. Until the sixties, farmers left their corn stubble all winter and plowed in spring so the rich bottomland was always surrounded by an equally rich pheasant larder. Bill Holm Sr. shot many a bird from his tractor seat. His current Labrador—he owned a long succession of them, all named Peggy-would bring him the bird, its ring—neck clamped in her powerful jaws. She waited, tail thrashing joyfully, till my father scratched her ears and fed her a sugar lump out of his overalls pocket; only then was he free to deposit the night's dinner in the tractor's tool box.

In this lovely prolonged Minnesota autumn I think fondly of those hunting days almost a half-century ago: old men (about my current age) in tan clothes with bloody pockets walking through that brush with their heavy guns, their dogs busy scaring up birds. That strip of swampy brush ranks high among my list of magical places on this planet, but it exists now, unfortunately, only in memory.

Those pheasants, along with a Canadian honker or two, always appeard on the Holm Thanksgiving table, the geese and ducks larded with bacon, and the pheasants roasted in farm cream in a heavy black iron roaster. The bacon drippings and cream were scraped out from the bottm and disappeard into boats of rich gravy, to be poured over mashed potatoes, corn, brown bread, pheasant breasts. That gravy could have converted the bottom of your shoe into a delicacy. It was the food of the rural poor, who didn't waste their money on self-basting, butter-ball, assembly-line turkies that tasted like dry baby food. And it was, of course, the incarnation of health food itself—organic, local, nourishing, and that rarest of all American virtues: a pleasure. It deserved prayer, but since I was raised in a houseful of Icelandic Lutheran free-thinkers, the eating itself, the smacking of lips, was the only proffered praise.

© Bill Holm Reprinted by permission.