“Not just marmot. Archery marmot.”
Jess peered over my shoulder at my handiwork. I sat at her kitchen counter in Lander, Wyoming, clutching a Sharpie and scribbling the names of wild game dishes on sheets of computer paper folded in half, hamburger style. The makeshift placards had to include the name of the dish, the name of the person providing it, and the region the ingredients came from, Jess said. This was crucial; we wanted to capture the story behind the food.
“Archery … marmot?” I glanced back at Jess, then at the couple standing behind her. The guy clutched a ceramic plate of juicy shredded meat, roughly the color of pulled pork sans barbecue sauce. He raised his eyebrows and nodded earnestly.
“Yeah. Archery marmot. Slow-cooked. From near the Greys River.”
I flipped the piece of paper and started over, silently thinking about the controversy our menu would stir in many social circles. Slow cookers of black bear bourguignon, shredded mountain lion with vegetables and moose carnitas bubbled on the countertop. Outside the front door, one hunter manned a large grill, preparing an entire Gros Ventre bighorn sheep quarter. Guests lined up before me, the keeper of the Sharpie, to rattle off the names of their dishes: backyard veggie garden salad, elk roast with chimichurri, mallard duck breast with blueberry bourbon sauce, rainbow trout dip. Jess shoved a plate of candied black bear backstrap in my face, demanding I eat.
A majority of Americans do not warm to the thought of hunters pursuing black bears and mountain lions, as shown by the debates surrounding hunts for these species from Connecticut to Colorado to California. The idea that such species could provide hunters with meat seems to befuddle many people. Most consider predators to be categorically inedible. According to a recent survey, 77% of non-hunters approve of hunting, and 61% of all respondents strongly approve of hunting for meat. But while 78% of respondents approve of hunting deer and wild turkeys, only 38% approve of hunting mountain lions, and only 44% approve of hunting black bears.
The survey didn’t specifically ask respondents how they felt about hunting and eating marmots. I wasn’t certain where I landed on the idea, either. But I forked a few heavily cooked shreds onto my plate anyway, along with 10 other species of wild game. (Whitetail, mule deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, black bear, mountain lion, mallard, flounder and rainbow trout.) The marmot tasted like dark turkey meat. The black bear bourguignon, Julia Child’s recipe, melted in my mouth. The shredded mountain lion made a perfect vehicle for the sweet sauce and broccoli. Bighorn sheep quickly rocketed into first place on my list of favorite wild game.
I chose to ignore any lingering fear of meat sweats, seeing as how I was already drenched.
Jess doesn’t have air conditioning. For nine months of the year, she doesn’t need it; at over a mile of elevation, Lander is framed by the Wind River Mountains to the southwest and the Popo Agie River to the east. But this particular 94-degree day in late June was 15 degrees hotter than the monthly average for the region. A few weeks later, Planet Earth would suffer what was likely its hottest day in over 100,000 years, according to a century of record-keeping supplemented by ample paleoclimate data from tree rings and ice cores. Sweat pooled in my armpits and under my thighs, slick against the barstool I was perched on. The conditions were less than perfect for the chaos of a wild food potluck, but 40-something people and a handful of dogs milled around in Jess’s front yard anyway.
Credit: Craig Okraska
Even if climate change wasn’t on the minds of all the guests, the dinner was a nice reprieve from other haunting topics, like election year drama or the global ire that Cody Roberts stirred up after he duct taped an injured wolf’s mouth shut and took it into a Wyoming bar before killing it — forcing members of the Wyoming conservation sphere to endure death threats from animal welfare activists over behavior they never condoned in the first place. This dinner was the picture of neighborly love and nourishment in a time of struggle. Wild food dinners, I’m learning, are like that: They radiate communal care, bringing together people who share similar passions but might otherwise not get along. The vegetarian rock climber sat next to the trapper, the wildlife biologist next to the hunter. These dinners deal in laughter, stories and warm exchanges amid days of uncertainty and division.
They also upend whatever weird detour the modern dinner party has taken in recent years.
At the turn of the decade, the “board party” trend on social media had people showing up to their friends’ houses with giant platters of Chick Fil-A, pizza, movie theater candy, once-frozen mozzarella sticks or just … butter. While the fad might be fizzling out, our obsession with gathering around piles of snackable food endures. We will never stop spending small fortunes on specialty meats, cheeses, crackers or fig spreads. Jars of tiny pickled vegetables and mustards will get used once, then exiled to the back of the fridge, most likely for eventual discarding at a later date. With the exception of family holiday meals, I struggle to recall a dinner party where I didn’t absent-mindedly fill my plate, then get lost in conversation. Pretty soon, the salami glistens and a thin congealed film tops the spinach-artichoke dip. Into the trash it goes.
But in this crowd, the food was the center of attention. Not in a pretentious “what kind of specialty flaky salt do you use” way, but in a “tell me about this backstrap” way. When people had their fill, we ushered the leftovers inside for storage and safekeeping. The food, like the animals it came from and the landscape that once sustained those animals, was a precious resource.
“Our pharmacy and our grocery stores used to be all around us.”
There was nothing new or novel about what we were doing, especially not on land traditionally occupied by the Shoshone people. Two days prior to the wild game dinner, I sat under a tent at Miller Land and Livestock in Big Piney and observed a private-land sagebrush conservation celebration hosted by the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, the National Wildlife Federation, and Audubon of the Rockies. One of the speakers at the event was Jason Baldes, a wildlife biologist and the Tribal Buffalo Program manager for the NWF Tribal Partnerships Program.
“Our pharmacy and our grocery stores used to be all around us,” he said to a crowd of ranchers, Fish and Game commissioners, and conservation advocates. “That’s how we would move through the seasons. As summer, fall, winter and spring came, we would move to different regions, low elevation during the winter months, high elevation during the hot summer months, and everywhere in between, to find different food.”
The Eastern Shoshone people trace their existence in the Wind River Range back over 12,000 years. The Northern Arapaho joined them on the reservation in 1878, after the federal government broke a series of treaties over its thirst for gold. Both tribes relied on wild, free-roaming High Plains bison for much of their diet, but the towering creatures were mostly wiped from the landscape by the 1880s. Government-funded assimilation programs and containment on reservation land forced the tribes to turn to agriculture instead, abruptly transforming a seasonal diet that had evolved over thousands of years.
“I’m involved in bison conservation because the Shoshone people call ourselves the ‘Guchundeka,’ the ‘buffalo eaters,’” Baldes said. “But buffalo was missing from our diet for over 130 years since they were exterminated from the landscape. We have a chance now to restore this historic relationship … to restore this nutritious meat back to our community, while also ensuring that our young people can be proud of the identity that they hold, as Shoshone, or Arapaho, or Blackfeet, or Cheyenne or many other tribes that had a historic relationship with buffalo.”
Baldes went on to explain how bison were inextricably linked to the sagebrush ecosystem of the area before they were exterminated, how their wallows created depressions that retained essential water, while the hair they shed from their winter coats ended up in the nests of native birds, incubating the eggs to the proper temperature for hatching. The examples he shared are some of humanity’s oldest proof of how our food is connected to our environment — for better or worse.
In 2022, the agriculture sector accounted for 9.4% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. While total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. have actually decreased since 1990, those stemming from agriculture have managed to increase by 8%. Lots of concerned consumers with the privilege of access and financial stability have turned away from grocery store meat to buy food directly from their local producers instead. Farmers markets are booming. The “locavore” movement has transitioned from a fad to a dietary baseline for folks across the political spectrum: Just how much can you close the distance between your home and the source of your food?
For hunters, the answer is measured not in miles, but in yards. In this sense, the party attendees could reasonably call themselves environmentalists, even though rural Wyoming’s brand of environmentalism tends to look a little different than it might elsewhere. The state’s top three industries for revenue generation are oil drilling and gas extraction, coal mining and petroleum refining — the combination of which will generate an estimated $25 billion for the state this year. Only 17 of the state’s 203 towns and census-designated places have electric vehicle charging stations. (Yellowstone National Park is listed as the 18th place.) Outside of Teton County, most of Wyoming is not a great place to buy a Tesla and eat organic groceries and thereby feel better about your carbon footprint.
If you want to be an environmentalist in Wyoming, you have to work a little harder. Hunting for a wild protein source is a great way to start. Sharing that food with other people is even better.
Of course, it goes without saying that not everyone can eat like this; a mass shift to a wild-food-first diet would undeniably result in total ecological collapse. But in the aftermath of the hottest day in 100,000 years, maybe we can open up the way we think about things like environmentalism, hunting and dinner parties. Maybe the next time we throw a bring-your-own-board shindig, we can ask everyone to bring a board with a story to share — along with refrigerator dishes for their leftovers. Maybe the next time something questionable shows up on our plates, we can close our eyes and take a bite.
And maybe we can start to see a yard full of people eating venison, or elk, or black bear, or mountain lion, or restored bison or archery marmot, for what it is; a climate-savvy coping mechanism that’s been around for millennia, cooked low and slow and served with a side of healing. Maybe we even sidle up and see if they have an extra plate.
