Balancing precariously on a rickety ladder, gripping a concrete support beneath a bridge, a hunter named Steven Rinella is trying to scavenge pigeon eggs from a nest. Sounds like the opposite of high-class dining, right? Wrong.

Mr. Rinella was actually just gathering one more ingredient for a three-day, 45-course feast from Escoffier’s late 19thcentury cookbook, “Le Guide Culinaire.”

Most of us wouldn’t imagine a hunter messing about with high-end French food, but there’s a hidden connection between these two worlds. In “The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine” (Miramax Books, $23.95), Mr. Rinella proves that, oddly enough, he’s the perfect man to revive Escoffier’s cooking for the 21st century.

Nowadays, only an avid hunter could have access to many of the ingredients Escoffier calls for in his recipes. From sparrows to carp milt, antelope to turtle, you won’t find these items next to the chicken breasts at Dean & DeLuca. But for Mr. Rinella, “Le Guide Culinaire” was no obscure culinary artifact. “I saw it immediately as a scavenger’s guide, an inventory of all that is bizarre and glorious and tantalizing about procuring your own food and living off the wild,” he writes.

And so, “The Scavenger’s Guide” chronicles the year Mr. Rinella devoted to hunting and fishing wild game and seafood from Missoula, Mont., to the Alaskan Panhandle. His approach? A blend of exactitude and improvisation. Sometimes he goes by the book, raising very young pigeons to make pigeonneux. Other times, inspired by Escoffier’s own ingenuity, he substitutes wild American ingredients for European ones. Skate becomes stingray, and elk stands in for venison.

And as Mr. Rinella goes to Odyssean lengths to acquire ingredients, an intriguing question takes shape: Have humans become more food-savvy over the years, or less? Sure, we bounce between Thai Tom Yom and Mexican chilaquiles, but most of us have never glimpsed a chicken with its head still attached – we’ve become more distant than ever from the process of turning animals into food.

Escoffier, on the other hand, certainly dispatched plenty of exotic animals in his kitchen, and “Le Guide Culinaire” includes explicit instructions on slaughtering everything from turtles to trout. That honesty is pretty refreshing for Mr. Rinella, and he manages to match it in his own writing. “I guess I just like the whole package of wild food: eating, almost being killed, and, yes, killing,” he concedes.

Nevertheless, Mr. Rinella is more humane than the esteemed French chef. While Escoffier savored foie gras despite the plight of the fattened goose, Mr. Rinella chooses to use wild goose livers instead.

The book is full of hunting adventures that get a bit overwhelming by the book’s end. But the final feast makes up for everything. Somehow Mr. Rinella ends up making three days of cooking 15 courses seem like the easiest thing in the world. Wild boar headcheese, rolled gallatine of turkey, venison, and pistachios, saddle of antelope larded with bear fat – any of these dishes would be an allday project for mere mortals, and yet Mr. Rinella (with two helpers) manages to pull it off.

Sure, there are gritty blue mussels, stinky elk and antelope kidney pudding, and rubbery boar’s ear sausage, but most of the dishes triumph. “A Scavenger’s Guide” celebrates self-reliance through hilarity, pain, and sheer determination. In the process, Mr. Rinella demonstrates the truth of Escoffier’s words: “One can but deplore the arbitrary proscription which so materially reduces the resources at the disposal of a cook.”