Fur trappin' with my cowboy hibachi-cookin' dad

One spring day when I was a teenager, I crouched beside my dad behind a scrub palo verde, downwind from a mountain lion den, waiting patiently to see if the two cubs that dwelled therein would come out so we could watch them play.

The cubs never surfaced, but we watched spellbound as the mama lion sauntered through the brush from the opposite direction, flopped onto her side at the den's entrance and sunned herself.

We were only several yards away, and if she had not just eaten a big meal — evidenced by her protruding belly and blood-smeared face, chest and paws — we might have found ourselves in a serious predicament.

But the lion fell fast asleep, and we backed quietly away from the place, a mountainous area called Marlboro in the South Vekol Valley between Gila Bend and Casa Grande.

As a teenager growing up in Gila Bend in the late 1970s, I loved to tag along with my dad as he cowboyed or fur trapped on the Big Horn and Vekol ranches along Interstate 8, east of our little home town.

We observed coyotes, bobcats, badgers, foxes and javelinas in their natural habitats out there in that paradise called the Sonora Desert.

We breathed fresh air and hiked the mountains, canyons and draws, looking for signs such as scats, tracks, broken twigs and scratch marks in the ground as we set or checked our trap lines.

At lunchtime, we usually gathered mesquite wood and built a small fire. Sometimes we grilled steaks and heated a small pot of pinto beans on an oven rack laid across a ring of rocks around the fire.

Other times, my dad cooked our meal in his “cowboy hibachi,” a wok-like cooker made by welding angle iron or rebar legs and handles onto a plow disc.

Some people call it a plow disc cooker, or wok, and Spanish speakers call it a disco. Some use fire or charcoal to heat it, and others use a propane burner.

My dad would place it over an open fire and hold his palm over the cooking surface to see when it was hot enough to begin cooking.

He often fried bacon, onions, potatoes and eggs in the center of the hibachi, and heated tortillas on the outer edges. Other times, he fried chopped meat with onions, chilies and potatoes.

Simple, one-pot meals like those are easy to cook in the hibachi, and they are easy to clean up. We just wiped the cooking surface clean with a cloth and disinfected it by burning it over the fire a while longer.

Then we'd season it the way cast iron cookware is seasoned, by lightly oiling the cooking surface of the hot hibachi. Seasoning the cookware with cooking oil helps protect it from rust and creates a nonstick finish.

My dad always chopped the food at home the night before and packed it in containers in an ice chest that he kept in the pickup bed. He also packed boiled eggs, olives and dill pickles for snacks between meals. He kept crackers, sardines, other canned goods and cooking utensils in a chuck box in the pickup bed, in a corner opposite his bear-claw traps and jars of scent bait.

One of the jars contained oil of anise (used to flavor licorice), which he would sprinkle on twigs and leaves around the traps to attract bobcats and mountain lions.

Once back home, he never had to unload any of his supplies or gear because in Gila Bend we didn't worry about anyone stealing anything from the truck or anywhere else. However, he always took his rifles, bullets and skinning knives into the house to keep them out of the hands of some curious kid.

But I digress. Out on the desert at lunchtime, we played eight-track tapes on the truck stereo. Waylon & Willie wailed “Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys” across the desert while we sang along and drank hot coffee from a thermos or cold Michelob from a bottle while my dad cooked.

We worked from the first pink glow in the east until a red-orange blaze backlit the mountains and saguaros in the west, so our lunch breaks generally lasted about two hours.

Sometimes we'd recline against a soft sandy bank to eat, rest, tell stories and laugh. Other times we just sat quietly, enjoying the sunshine, the scent of creosote and the stillness shattered only by an occasional sonic boom from the nearby Goldwater Bombing Range.

When it was time to hit the trap line again, my dad would shovel sand over the hot coals and double check to make sure not an ember was left burning. Then he'd don an oven mitt, hoist the hibachi by one handle into the pickup bed, slam the tailgate shut and off we'd go.

One-skillet meals such as those I've already mentioned are easy to prepare in a hibachi while cowboying, trapping, hunting — or just camping in the desert. But in the backyard, where one has the time and means to dispose of a large quantity of cooking oil, other types of recipes can be used.

For instance, deep-fried tilapia just seems to taste better when cooked outdoors in a hibachi over a mesquite fire. Maybe it's the fresh air and sunshine, or maybe it's my imagination, but readers can certainly try it and judge for themselves.

Many people add Tabasco and other hot sauces to the cooking oil to flavor fish, chicken wings or meats.

A hibachi is also great for cooking fajitas or stir-fry.

However, I would not recommend cooking soups, stews or beans in one because the liquid can ruin the effect of well-seasoned cookware. Plus, it would have to be washed with water, heated over a fire and seasoned again. But to each his own.

Farmers, welders, swap meets and the Internet are good sources for anyone interested in purchasing a cowboy hibachi, disc, disco or whatever one might want to call it.

Even when my dad wasn't working, he enjoyed taking our family out to some pretty spot in the desert, where we'd hunt for sun-colored purple bottles or target shoot while he cooked in his hibachi or on a makeshift grill.

People often say to me: “You grew up in Gila Bend? What's there to do in Gila Bend?”

And I typically respond by recalling that spring day when, amidst a blanket of orange poppies, white desert lilies, purple owl's clover and yellow daisies, a well-fed mountain lion sunned herself just yards from where we crouched, breathless and wide-eyed at the wonder of it all.

Later that day we found buzzards finishing off the carcass of a javelina the lioness had killed and eaten. The meal made her so content and sleepy that she never even detected us so close to her den and cubs.

We did not set trap lines in or near her territory. I hope her descendants still hunt prey on that beautiful desert that was so much a part of our lives and hers.