Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
S needn't end when the hunting does. What made the hunting tough was a combination of factors, all ultimately traceable to the fact that it was now late-September, and central Montana hadn't felt a drop of rain since the first of July. Scenting conditions were abysmal, in other words, and even when the dogs did make game the cover was so scratchy that the birds – Huns and sharptails – were disinclined to hold. Some flushed crazy wild as we approached a point, and some didn't wait that long, blowing out before the Lewistown, Montana – perhaps when we broke for lunch in the dusty shadow of a ruined wooden grain elevator – it occurred to me that once the guns had been cased, the dogs had been cared for, and I'd had a chance to clean up and change clothes, a martini would be the perfect celebratory capper. And I had a hunch that Maria, bartender extraordinaire at The Mint, Lewistown's legendary watering hole, had the skills to transform this lingering vision into icy-cold reality. The pleasures of the hunt, after all, headily fragrant, bracingly potent marriage of gin and vermouth, shaken with ice, strained into a stemmed glass (there is no such thing as a martini "on the rocks"), and garnished with a twist of lemon. Or, as some prefer, an olive. Either way, it is the cocktail nonpareil, the one all others aspire to, magical in its ability to suffuse every cell and fiber with an almost incandescent sense of well-being. At some point on the second day of a tough but eminently rewarding upland bird hunt on the high plains near P O R T I N G C 81 L A S S I C S