It’s that sweet spot in autumn, when, on the east side of Montana, you can, beneath brilliant blue skies and in shirtsleeve weather, with cottonwood leaves cascading around you like so many gold coins, hunt pheasants, sharptail grouse, ducks, geese, Hungarian partridge, and antelope, all in the same day, and all within sight of the same mountain, or the same lone puffy cloud.

We head east, out into the plains once inhabited by the First People—the Blackfeet—and into the geography subsequently claimed by Jefferson and the new republic, and explored then by his emissaries, Lewis and Clark. Our plan is as loose as it is ambitious. Elizabeth and I will check in at our favorite cheap little hotel and be out in the stubble at dawn; should we be fortunate enough to find an antelope, we’ll take it from there. I have it in mind to borrow an old canoe from the hotel and drift one of the slower, quieter tributaries to the Missouri, stopping on every gravel bar I come to, and getting out and searching those protected thickets for pheasants.

I have in mind paddling silently, sticking close to shore, and jumping ducks and geese, too. I have in mind doing it all within 24 hours—to freeze time in its tracks, and ignore its passage. To hunt not as if I have to return home the next evening, but instead as if I have all the time in the world: to go out onto that plain and see it certainly not as Lewis and Clark saw it, nor as the Blackfeet and, if any such existed, their progenitors saw it—but to see it as it is now, pretty much unpeopled and, though latticed with wheatfields in the high country above the great gouged gorge of the Missouri, still productive.

Should I get an antelope, there’s a recipe I have that involves grilling an entire quarter after marinating it all day in a dry rub composed of kosher salt, freshly ground coarse black pepper, toasted cumin seed, cinnamon, brown sugar, thyme, marjoram, and oregano, with shards of cinnamon stick embedded in the meat. You grill it over glowing mesquite coals for about an hour. I don’t mean to presume luck or success, it’s just that I can’t help but think about that recipe.