Meat Eater: Adventures From the Life of an American Hunter by Steven Rinella

Author:Steven Rinella [Rinella, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Hunting, Outdoor Skills, Cooking, Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9780679645283
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2012-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Tasting Notes: Black Bear

You eat one black bear and it tastes as bad as half-rotten fish, and then the next one tastes as good as blueberries. How this happens is hardly a mystery. The flavor of a particular bear has a lot to do with what the animal’s been eating, and what the animal’s been eating has a lot to do with opportunism and random chance. A friend of mine who lives near the hunting and fishing shack that my brothers and I own on Prince of Wales Island, in southeast Alaska, told me a story about a black bear that raided a workshop and consumed three gallons of bar-and-chain oil. Others have told me stories about black bears eating everything from Crayola crayons to rubber rafts to vinyl gas cans.* While I doubt that those substances improve the palatability of a bear’s flesh, none of them is as deleterious to its taste as the more normal things that a hungry black bear is likely to come across in his wanderings. My brother Matt’s buddy in Montana killed a black bear that was feeding on the bloated carcass of a cow. After skinning the bear, he found that he couldn’t go near the meat without gagging. I’ve had similar though less dramatic experiences with coastal bears that have been feeding on spawned-out salmon. One time I prepared a coastal black bear’s ham in a smoker that I’d borrowed from a buddy. The ham came out tasting just like fish, so I went over and accused my buddy of not properly cleaning his smoker after using it to make his last batch of smoked salmon. He informed me that he’d never put a fish in that smoker. I then looked at the forty pounds of meat that I’d pulled from that bear and knew I was in for a long haul of bad meals.

While I do wish that all bears tasted great, the variability of their flesh makes hunting them all the more enjoyable. It’s kind of like gambling, but instead of either winning or losing you’ve got the dichotomy of enjoying your meals or just enduring them. My first taste of bear meat was the former variety. It came from a bear that Danny killed in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He and I took a chunk of meat from the bear’s back leg and sprinkled it with salt and pepper and cooked it with carrots and potatoes in the oven. We liked it a lot better than any chunk of meat that we’d ever pulled from a whitetail deer.

The second black bear I ever ate was the first one I ever killed. It was a three-hundred-plus-pound bruiser that I shot in mid-April in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains. Back then, the state offered a free service of testing hunter-killed bear meat for the cysts of the roundworm Trichinella spiralis, which can cause the parasitic disease trichinosis. So, before eating any of the bear, I mailed in a golf-ball-sized chunk of the animal’s tongue for analysis at a laboratory at Montana State University.

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