Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (16 page)

Something the size and shape of a grown nutria slipped into the water from a hillock of grass. I had the gun up to my shoulder in time but was unable to identify the species with enough certainty to take a shot.

The weeds became too thick for the propeller, so we paddled and poled our way forward. (At several key spots, the butt of my shotgun made an excellent bargepole.) Finally, we were well and truly grounded. At the mouth of the system of canals and creeks where we knew there were nutria, we could go no farther on account of how low the flat-bottomed boat sat in the water. There were simply too many people with too much weight. Thus, we turned around and went back to the cottage.

After a few hours of sleep, I sat on the porch and considered the situation. Time was slipping away. We’d seen nutria from the road and knew they were in there. We had to get serious and go in there any way we could.

We drove to the spot where Jarrett had pointed out the nutria the day before and started scouting on foot. I found a number of burrow systems of various ages in the canal along the road and realized that I’d found where they live. I hiked farther into the swamp and discovered an old beaver lodge that appeared to have been taken over by nutria. Lots of nutria tracks, a vegetative mound by the water, and years-old telltale beaver chewing signs on the trees.

I decided to set up an ambush from a dozen yards across the creek from the vegetative mound. If we sat there long enough, eventually a nutria would haul itself out of the water and make its way to the mound. This marked the beginning of a kind of hunting that I’m accustomed to for deer, but it didn’t appeal to my journalist friends.

Hunting from a boat is a great adventure. Stalking the shoreline on foot in the dark with a rifle in hand speaks to the Tom Sawyer hidden within each of us. Sitting still from a concealed position in the swamp for hours on end in silence is an exercise that most people would find excruciating.

Hunting deer, however, had prepared me well for this. I’ve spent many a day alone, waiting in ambush from dawn to dusk. If you do this enough times, eventually one of two things happens: Either you go home and turn on the TV and swear off hunting altogether or you learn to cross into the Zen of hunting. Your mind enters an altered state of hyperawareness, and boredom is simply not an issue. Time ceases to have any meaning; you really can’t tell the difference between fifteen minutes and an hour.

I can’t tell you for sure how many days we hunted that swamp. A strange odyssey began during which I rarely slept more than four hours in any day or night. I became an almost wholly nocturnal creature.

During the afternoon, we patrolled on foot from the road. The nutria usually woke up around then and would sit near their burrows feeding, grooming, or sunning themselves. For these excursions, I carried my Ruger target pistol in its holster on my belt. Several times I managed to get off a shot or two before the nutria spooked into the water. Sometimes I was convinced that I’d hit an animal, yet nothing floated to the surface, as Michael said it should. I contemplated wading into the water to search, but the alligator situation coupled with my lack of health insurance discouraged that folly.

One night, an hour after dusk, as Jeff was scanning with a green laser flashlight and I held the shotgun, I saw what was definitely a nutria swimming from the burrow toward the open lake.

“Jeff, move the light on him,” I whispered.

The nutria swam past the unmoving beam of light, apparently oblivious.

“Jeff, move the light so I can take the shot!”

The light remained fixed, and the nutria was gone. I turned to Jeff to ask what the hell he was doing and saw that he had a finger in each ear, well protected against both the expected blast of the shotgun and every word I had said.

Most of our hunts were flubbed by this sort of thing. Red would pop a flashbulb or Jeff would start talking loudly. I worked out a technique for holding and aiming the flashlight with my left hand, which also held the fore end of the shotgun.

Despite my growing frustration with them, and our joint disappointment at not getting our nutria, we agreed to have another go. We would spend another day or so hunting, then plan B would be to drive farther south, to Baton Rouge or someplace else where the populations of nutria are denser. The tough thing about plan B was that we didn’t know anyone or any place to hunt anywhere other than where we were now.

All of the pieces were there for us to bag some nutria: I had the boat and the gear, and I had those rodents patterned. What I needed were hours of ambush at night without interruption.

That night, as the sun went down, a parade of swamp wildlife began to emerge. Something small and furry sat by the water’s edge for a moment before slipping under the surface. A pair of raccoons, large and small, crept along the bank. They didn’t react in the slightest to the beam of green light aimed at them. Another lone raccoon appeared later and stopped to grab a crayfish from the edge of the water. An owl flew from tree to tree and hooted.

Some sort of animal came swimming toward me, only its head exposed, with a broad V of wake behind it. I shouldered my gun and began to swing on it before realizing that this was almost certainly a mink. I lowered the gun and watched it disappear.

I had a nutria dead to rights from ambush that night. It was swimming and was within a dozen yards of me when I squeezed the trigger. My left hand couldn’t steady the shotgun well, because it was also holding the flashlight; as a result, the shotgun leapt up vertically in my hands. A geyser of water erupted, and when I came out of the flash and recoil, there were only ripples on the surface.

We waited for the nutria to float up in the murky water, but it never did. I searched up and down the creek and found no evidence of it. As I walked back to where Jeff and Red were waiting for me, however, I saw through the woods some dark shape that was roughly man-height. It immediately ran off into the swamp. A black bear? A shy human? Bigfoot? I’ll never know. . . .

Dawn found us back at the shore behind the cottage, waiting for feeding activity at first light. Nothing appeared. I was very tired and spirits were low all around, but I was still happy about having had a night in the swamp, observing the nocturnal goings-on. It was strange: The longer we spent out there, the more frustrated I became, yet the more I appreciated sitting in that swamp and the more I looked forward to seeing what tomorrow night would bring.

The next day we were online, madly searching for trappers or nuisance-wildlife specialists who could help us find a nutria at the last minute. I left messages for several people. Meanwhile, I was able to get hold of a French chef who specialized in cooking nutria. Based in Baton Rouge, Philippe Parola could talk to us intelligently about nutria and thought he might be able to find one in the freezer for us to taste.

At least it was something. I reluctantly left the amazing laser flashlights with Jarrett to return to Michael and started the long drive to Baton Rouge.

Listening to Philippe was like trying to drink from a fire hose. He has enormous knowledge and experience with nutria and carp as food. Every sentence he spoke raised a dozen more questions, which would have to wait because the next sentence would be just as fascinating.

Philippe was born and raised in Paris. He began cooking professionally when he was quite young, working at an upscale hotel in London for a while and later serving a few years in the army in Africa. His time as a soldier in the bush got him into the habit of hunting and eating things that most Westerners would not consider food.

Well into middle age now, Philippe has tightly cropped hair and speaks English with an interesting blend of Parisian and Louisianan accents. He has owned a string of successful restaurants but is moving into a new arena of the food business: wholesale processing of invasive species as food. He immediately had my undivided attention.

Several years ago, Philippe decided to do something about the nutria problem in Louisiana. He quickly discovered two important truths about marketing nutria meat. First: The Chinese will consider eating anything. Second: The world at large, including China, is not going to buy or eat nutria meat so long as it sees Louisiana natives turning up their noses at it.

In order to create an export market for the meat, Philippe needed to make the stuff into bona fide local cuisine. He had a good place to start — Cajuns are almost as open-minded in their approach to meat as the Chinese are. He made the rounds of state fairs and food expos, any event where he could cook nutria using his substantial gifts as a chef and then hand out samples. He was interviewed on television and even convinced the governor to publicly try it.

Soon Philippe had grocery stores asking to stock the stuff and restaurants putting it on the menus. His next task was to ensure an adequate wholesale supply of high-quality meat. That meant going out on the bayous and meeting with nutria hunters to teach them new ways to handle the meat. Hunting for the bounty and the hide doesn’t require keeping the meat especially fresh. In fact, the way the animal is skinned depends on whether you want a first-class hide or first-class meat.

The hunters learned to process the meat and get it cooled quickly. Working all day long from airboats, they were able to harvest thousands of the invasive rodents daily.

Soon Philippe had a pretty good business going across Louisiana. The state began to embrace the meat as its own cuisine, and sales were good. Not good enough to support the back end of the business, but there was definitely a demand.

It was time to take the next step, overseas. Philippe traveled to Japan, Taiwan, several countries in Europe, and China with samples of nutria. He had sales figures and media clippings to show that this was something Americans ate. Wholesalers soon were hooked, and Philippe had his first orders for refrigerated shipping containers full of nutria meat. This would command a price per nutria much higher than that for the furs and bounty, creating an economic incentive for local hunters to clear out the species without government programs or spending.

Orders in hand, Philippe began the process of paperwork for the lawful export of his shipping containers. That’s when he hit an important roadblock: from the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA is one of the agencies that regulate not only the interstate commerce of food but also its export. The agency has a rule regarding sales of meat other than fish: It must be killed in an FDA-approved slaughterhouse. If wild nutria could be rounded up alive in significant numbers, this might be a possibility. Unfortunately, though, they can’t. They must be killed in the field and processed later.

On this point, the FDA refused to budge or even discuss the matter. With this blow, Philippe’s brilliant scheme to rid Louisiana of nutria fell apart.

The odd thing was that there were no complaints about food safety from any of the export destinations. The FDA was not protecting American consumers or enforcing any international trade agreement; indeed, the wild harvest of meat is legal and ordinary in much of the rest of the world. Culled antelope from Africa winds up on European market shelves and menus. Wild boar and red deer in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are quickly transported to butchers after being shot in the wild, and the meat is sold commercially. No disasters or health crises abroad have resulted from this system. Foreign markets are happy to accept wild-harvested invasive meat from the United States, but our own government is blocking the sale.

It was getting late, and we wanted to drive to the village of Port Vincent to meet a trapper who thought he could hook me up with some nutria. Philippe offered to come along, so I left my car in the parking lot and rode with him to the village, about half an hour outside of Baton Rouge. Red and Jeff followed.

Port Vincent, Philippe assured me in his odd Parisian twang, was as pure and true an example of southern Louisiana in spirit and appearance as one could hope for. Population seven hundred and forty one, as of the 2010 census.

We met trapper Carter Lambert in front of his house. He was in his late twenties or early thirties. After introductions, I asked him if he would show me his hands. Confused, he held them out, palms down. Sure enough, they were covered with the telltale scars of an experienced wildlife professional. I figured this guy knew what he was doing.

A few hundred yards behind Carter’s house is a creek that feeds into the nearby Amite River. We were burning daylight, so we decided to get straight to the hunting. Carter drew a battered old Marlin Model 60 .22 rifle from the back of his pickup truck. It looked older than either of us.

“Family gun?” I asked him.

“Yup.”

Yeah. Carter definitely knew what he was doing.

The terrain and flora of Port Vincent were noticeably different from what we’d left behind, near Shreveport, that morning. The northern part of the state has more conifers and less overall brush. This place was a jungle. Darwin’s “tangled bank” was never more vivid to me than in the slow-motion war going on among the denizens along that creek.

The pale torpedo outline of a moderate gar greeted me at the water’s edge. Along the banks, I saw nutria burrow systems of various ages. The older ones were abandoned and exposed along their length by the erosion they had created, and in many places the bank was collapsing. I reflexively held my scoped .22 rifle in front of my face (with the barrel pointed at the sky) to break the substantial spiderwebs in front of me. There was no trail; we simply followed the creek. Thorns scraped my arms.