The other half, also sautéed in butter, was served with a garlic/plum wine/Dijon mustard/wild blueberry compote sauce. The sauces were nothing short of sensational. A gourmet chef I know said that, prepared like this, he could eat his sneakers. One thing is for certain. We’d have been better off trying to eat his sneakers than trying to eat the crane.

Bobby doesn't "do" cranes. In fact, he won't even look at them.

How to describe that first bite? It’s a bit like trying to describe passing a kidney stone to someone who has never had the experience. To put things in the proper perspective, when I was in college I worked for a man who had received a contract from the U.S. military to reformulate field rations. He used his staff as guinea pigs for this project on the assumption that college students will eat damned near anything as long as it is free. Those field rations were five-star fare compared to the crane.

Tough? Shoe-leather by comparison is fork-tender. Stringy? I once had the “honor” of being served monkey meat and there was no way to gracefully decline. It was the smoothest, finest filet mignon compared to crane. Offered leftovers--and there were plenty--the dogs, who have been known to relish road kill that has been basting for three days in a July sun, turned up their noses.

The next morning, a member of the hunting party contended that he had been awakened during the night by loud, strangling noises outside his window. When he looked for the source of the racket, he said he saw a coyote retching and gagging a few feet away from the crane leftovers. While that may have been an exaggeration, his tale did not garner any of the usual hoots of disbelief and derision that usually accompany such stories.

Denny eventually did devise a means by which his crane could be eaten but only by unsuspecting victims. It should also be noted that he selected the smaller of the two, which happened to be from that year’s hatch, and rumor has it that the young of the year are considerably better eating than the mature birds. However, Denny’s method involved grinding the marinated cooked crane into a pâté so loaded with onions, pickles, garlic, mayonaise and who knows what else that the crane was overpowered by and indistinguishable from the rest of the ingredients.

This year, the farmer who loans us his farmhouse during hunting season requested that we shoot a crane. He said he liked crane. So on the first morning of the hunt when the first flock of cranes came in range, we complied with our host’s request. Then we watched Bobby, the fifth generation of my line of thoroughly force-broken, field titled dogs, trot over to the bird, sniff at it and return in a huff, outraged at what he’d been sent to do. The end of this most recent crane-shooting episode provides a perfect commentary on why you should do yourself a favor and resist shooting cranes, no matter how tempting it may be when they fly over 20 yards up and taunt you.

After removing the breast meat for the farmer, we left the remainder of the crane in his machine shed for the lean, hungry-looking cat that lived there. A week later, the crane remained as we had left it--untouched. Even a half-starved cat was unwilling to chance dining on crane.