In some bizarre sense, dealing with the meat I bring home from the fields, forests and marshes is like opening a Christmas present. After I finish the nasty business of skinning or plucking or scaling, I get a chance to see the animal I’ve killed and brought home as “meat” for the first time. And, like presents, there are surprises, not all of them pleasant. You get to see how shot up the animal is, if there’s any damage that needs to be cut away or organs that are ruined. I keep most of the organs of the game I kill, so to me a shot through the heart means a loss of that tasty bit for some future meal.

One of the more pleasant surprises comes when I bring home waterfowl: Once they’re plucked I get a chance to see how fat the birds are. This can be exciting, at least to me. A fat duck or goose almost always means that bird will be surpassing table fare because the water birds in my stretch of Northern California spend lots of time in flooded rice fields. This produces a beautiful, white, clean-tasting fat that is a joy to eat and is liquid ecstasy poured warm over salad greens. Every time I open up a duck or a goose, I am hoping to see a thick layer of that fat. For those of you who primarily eat domestic meats, keep in mind that precious few wild animals put on a significant layer of fat, and even fewer of those animals put on fat you’d want to eat. Ducks and geese are one such critter.

All of this brings me to Sunday, when Holly and I went to a rice blind near Marysville to hunt. I’d seen the forecast and it called for serious wind, which waterfowlers know is a good thing: A rule of thumb is that in duck season, when normal people are tucked into comfy chairs reading or enjoying the company of their loved ones, duck hunters are crouching in a wind-whipped marsh among the tules, scanning the sky for an errant duck or goose. This is what we did Sunday, and we were rewarded with two drake pintails and a young specklebelly goose. Specks are such good eating they’re known as the “ribeye in the sky,” largely because they’re typically loaded with yummy fat.

But when I got home and plucked the goose, he was lean. Very lean. I was surprised how disappointed I felt. I don’t kill too many specks in a year, so I want each one to be perfect, even though I know this to be folly. This one had probably just come down from the Pacific Northwest, which was having an epic storm in the three days before our hunt. He was still in good shape, just not very fat.

With a sigh I turned to the sprigs, and saw a quarter-inch thick layer of that perfect, rice-induced fat. They were so fatty they looked exactly like miniature domestic ducks. I was elated. These will need nothing other than fire and salt to be perfect – a gift from the sky.

You take the fat with the lean as a hunter. Some days you come home empty-handed, some days you come home facing hours of plucking or butchering. You learn from both. In the kitchen, skinny ducks have their place poached in duck fat or olive oil, or wrapped in a blanket of bacon to protect them from the flames that would otherwise dry the birds out. Fat ducks you appreciate as the gifts they are. Take what Nature gives you. Over the years I have accepted and embraced this variability; it’s made me a better cook, and a better person.