I had never cooked, or even seen, a wild goose before Fred and his friend, Jack Newell, made a trip to Conrad to go goose hunting. I had promised that if they got anything, I would cook it. I spent the weekend looking for recipes for wild goose. They did come home with two nice birds.

According to the recipe I had found, I soaked pieces of orange, apple, and prunes in brandy and then stuffed the fruit inside the goose and basted it while it was cooking with the fruit juice and brandy left over from soaking the fruit. It was delicious! It was years later that I found out that what I had cooked were two tame geese they had picked up at the Hutterite colony on their way home. Talk about a wild goose chase!

David, who lives close to the Clark Fork River near Frenchtown, Montana, tells me that he often shoots wild geese. His method of cooking them is a little unique. He skins the geese, cuts them up in small pieces and puts them in his crock pot. He pours a bottle of ranch dressing over the meat and cooks it slowly for several hours. He says the gravy it makes is really good—and the goose is “not bad at all.”