Twain's Feast Read Online Free Page B

and bacon. But the Parklane doesn’t open until 5:00 A.M., which is still a half hour away when I drive off from the motel and out into the country darkness.
    On this April morning, it’s twenty degrees in Newton. Outside town a steady, freezing wind pulls across winter-naked soybean fields and fields stubbled with ranks of cornstalks—stalks cut down to their last spare inches, looking elastic after a winter under snow.
    Scattered among the hundreds of thousands of farmed acres are perhaps twelve hundred of broken-up prairie—a few acres here, twenty there, a hundred more here, acquired piecemeal whenever money and opportunity presented themselves. The plots of prairie are marked on my map: small, irregular blocks covered in cross-hatching like braille. But even to my untrained eye, even by the light of a two-thirds moon, the grasses are obvious as I drive toward Prairie Ridge State Natural Area. What seems a flat, featureless landscape will rise suddenly high and ragged against the pale road, swelling beside my headlights like surging water. It’s vaguely discomfiting to see wild grasses carved into such clean plots, as though a flock of flying starlings had formed into perfectly even ranks.
    Newton is a strange place to come in search of Twain’s feast; as far as I know, Twain never heard of the place, let alone set foot in it. But there are only about three hundred prairie chickens left in all of Illinois, and all of them are here. So: the cornfields outside Newton.
    Besides, I’ve already begun to understand that when it came to the foods of the feast, the simple fact is that Twain knew what he was talking about. What, for instance, is so special about canvasback ducks from Baltimore or, by extension, from Maryland? Why is it so certain that the birds living near that particular place were what Twain loved, rather than a single Baltimore restaurant’s recipe? Here’s why: the vast waters feeding into the Chesapeake Bay are replete with wild celery, an aquatic grass (unrelated to table celery) that canvasback ducks gorge on. Such is the greed of the ducks for the grass that they’re named after it (wild celery is Vallisneria americana; canvasbacks are Aythya valisineria ). When able to feed with abandon, as they are in the waters near Baltimore, the result is birds so fat that a contemporary of Twain described them as filled with their own gravy.
    I learned my lesson with the buckwheat cakes: I will not doubt Twain.
    That’s why I’m soon trudging behind a Prairie Ridge guide named Bob across an icy field, flashlight in hand, toward a distant plywood blind. The freeze is recent, so in spite of the cold only a half inch of ice covers the wide, wintry puddles. This, I realize, explains why the one thing the taciturn Bob has said to me is, “Got rubber boots?” and why, when I said I didn’t, Bob was much amused. To avoid breaking through and soaking my feet, I have to stay on top of the clumps of frozen grass, jumping clumsily as though I’m crossing mossy stepping-stones.
    The wind blows over the bare fields and straight through the five-inch-high viewing slot that runs the length of the blind’s front wall. I shiver on a long bench with a few dedicated birders, my arms tightly crossed, eyes squinted against the cold. The bench is long enough to hold six people, and it’s cold enough that I wish we did have that last body squeezed in here. The mating ground—or “booming ground,” or “lek”—is immediately in front of the blind, perhaps forty yards wide, a bit less than that deep. It was disked last fall, and the grass on it is as short as though mowed. But that’s all I can make out; except for the moon, the only light comes from a pair of radio towers blinking steadily across the fields.
    Twenty degrees is cold. When I called to reserve the blind, Bob told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to leave it until the birds were done booming, which might be several hours. He insisted, Bob did, that I not