Texas Hunting Season Unfolds One Camp Breakfast at a Time

Through shortening days and dropping temperatures and a rotating cast of friends, from the first hot morning of September to the last cold morning of the year.I came to all of it late, through a kitchen, and the kitchen is still where I keep the thread. Whatever the month’s hunt happens to be, it starts the same way, at a table, with a breakfast on it, and people who’ll be hungry when they come in off the field. Feeding them is the part I live for.

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In early September, the heat is still heavy across Texas, and the days are still long. Dove trade low over the stock tanks at first light, and you can take them in the morning. Just slip out to sit by the water and catch them coming in to drink. But plenty of the crowd would rather sleep in and wait for the evening flight, when the birds trade back to the tank against a cooling sky. So breakfast lands late and wide on purpose, set to feed the early shooters coming in hungry and the late risers just wandering out of the bunkhouse. At our place, the table fills with friends from all over. Platters of eggs. Biscuits in and out of the oven. Pancakes stacking up, a breakfast casserole pulled bubbling from the heat, coffee that never quits. Kids underfoot, dogs hoping somebody’s careless with a biscuit.

Somewhere in that good chaos, I make the one plate that’s mine: venison backstrap from last fall, cooked to medium-rare and sliced over truffled steel-cut oats with onions caramelized down dark and sweet, a fried egg broken and laid across the top. There’s room for a plate like that, because nobody’s rushing anywhere. When the sun finally lets up, we head to the fields, morning shooters and evening shooters both, and when the last bird’s down, the day rolls on into music and barbecue back at the ranch, smoke hanging in the live oaks, the whole crowd staying late. Half the people at that table, I see only this one weekend a year.

November hits, the mornings come in cold, and the light comes later. The big crowd from dove camp has narrowed to a friend or two willing to get up in the dark. This is duck weather, and on the coast it’s a cast-and-blast. Launch the skiff before light, set the spread off a spoil bank or back in a marsh pond, take the early flight as the gray comes up over the water, then pull the decoys and pole the flats for redfish as the sun rises higher in the sky. There’s no warm kitchen to stand in and no minute to spare for cooking. If you delay, the legal light will beat you to the blind every time.

A coastal sportsman’s breakfast needs to travel. Fried wild turkey breast, basted egg and cheese on a toasted English muffin. I stack the sandwiches in a soft-sided cooler with a warm water bottle wedged in beside them, which sounds backward until you’ve tried it, the bottle holding the heat through the dark run out to the blind. They get eaten mid-morning, one-handed, between flights. Some mornings there’s a thermos of turkey broth too, heavy with herbs, and I sip that in the first cold light while the decoys settle. You don’t get a slow morning out here. By 10, the gun is cased, and we’re poling for redfish on the same water that held ducks at dawn.

December is colder still, the days drawn down to their shortest, the country emptied out. This is mule deer, West Texas, the high desert north of Big Bend, up around Marathon, and there’s no crowd left and no casserole, just you, the cold dark and a long morning of silence. You climb to a point before light and pick the basins apart with binoculars, hunting the gray of a buck working a ridge a mile off, and when you find one, you go to him on foot across more country than it looks from the truck. You eat almost nothing when going out. A heavy gut has no business on that climb.

My West Texas breakfast (recipe online at tpwmagazine.com) waits until you come back down; it has the same patience the morning demanded. Duck confit, legs cured for days and slow-cooked in their own fat back home, carried cold to camp and crisped over a sweet potato hash when you finally peel off the pack with stiff hands and the desert still on your shoulders. Three days of work for one tired hour, which is about the right exchange rate for an animal that makes you earn every yard. Maybe you closed the distance that morning. Maybe you watched him top the ridge, and that was the whole show. Either way, there’s hot confit at the camp, and you have never in your life been so glad to see a sweet potato.

Somewhere in all that moving from one camp to the next, I’ve found the shape of a life I would have chosen anyway. The light goes earlier every week. The company changes with the quarry, a September full house thinning down to one man and a thermos by the time the deer season is on. Some of these friends I see only at dove camp. Others won’t turn out until there’s ice in the decoy lines. And some mornings it is just me and the dark and a long walk uphill. What holds it together is the cooking. Every one of those days starts at a meal, because that’s where everybody gathers before the day scatters them out into the field. The tables, the smiles, the camo by the door. This is how I live, from September to the new year and back around again. Pull up a chair. You’re welcome at the table.

When not in the field or kitchen, you can find Josh @texas_josh on Instagram.