Resists.

Fly-fishing for trout offers an ideal match of the exacting and the aesthetically pleasant: to sit by a stream during the evening hatch and watch what trout are feeding on, then to draw from the hundreds of variations in your fly boxes a close approximation and catch a few trout. It's easily the most hypnotic of the outdoor sports. Once we began fishing in the Middle Branch of the Ontanagon at dawn. I was numbly depressed from having finished my second book of poems and had been sleepwalking and drinking for weeks. My friend, who is equally maniacal and has no pain threshold that is noticeable, insisted we eat a pound of bacon, refried beans and a dozen eggs for strength. We fished nonstop then from dawn to dark at ten in the evening. It was a fine day, cool with intermittent light rains and enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away. I remember catching and releasing a half-dozen good brook trout from a pool where a small creek entered the river. We saw deer and many conical piles of bear shit that gave us pause, but then our local bears are harmless. We watched the rare and overwhelming sight of two adult bald eagles flying down the river course just above our heads, shrieking that we didn't belong there.

There is something about eating game that resists the homogeneity of taste found in even the best of our restaurants. A few years back when we were quite poor, lower-class by all the charts, we had a game dinner at our house. There were about twelve people contributing food, and with a check for a long poem I bought two cases of a white bordeaux. We ate, fixed in a number of ways, venison, duck, trout, woodcock, snipe, grouse, rabbit, and drank both cases of wine. I doubt you could buy the meal on earth.

The French, however, are marvelous at game cookery. Two years ago I spent a week up in Normandy covering a stag hunt at the invitation of a friend, Guy de la Valdène. His family has a chateau near St. George and a breeding farm for racehorses. You do not go to Russia to eat, and I had just returned from a hungry trip to Moscow and Leningrad. Other than the notion that stag hunting seemed to me the pinnacle of stylishness in mammal hunting, the memorable part of the week was the eating, a vulgar word for what took place nightly in a local auberge. Despite my humble background I found I enjoyed saddle of wild boar, or a 1928 Anjou with fresh pâté de foie gras in slabs, trout laced with truffles, côtelettes of loin from a small forest deer called a chevreuil, pheasant baked under clay with wild mushrooms. It all reminded me of the bust of Balzac by Rodin at the Metropolitan in New York, the evidence in his immense, bulbous face of his legendary interest in food and wine. But moderation only makes sense to those whom such food is continually available. The stag hunt itself began after dawn, and the animal was brought to bay by the hounds at twilight, when the master of the hunt dispatched the stag with a silver dagger after the manner of some six centuries. All day we had been sipping Château Margaux straight from the bottle and not feeling even vaguely boorish.

Jim Harrison, from "A Sporting Life"

Some of the best meals I've ever eaten outside the home haven't been in restaurants, but seated on a log in the woods, afloat on a lake, or standing at a tailgate buffet-table.  Fresh air makes anything taste better.

Jim's right, glasses are for the fully-evolved. --Ed.