by Lauren Kessler
I am standing in the edge of the meadow in front of my house on a chilly late winter afternoon, learning to shoot an eighty-year-old break-barrel, breech-loading twelve-gauge shotgun. It has a name, “Long Tom,” etched along its smooth walnut stock. The gun was given to my sons by my father-in-law who got it from his uncle who got it from we don’t know where. I snug the gunstock to my shoulder, squint, and take careful aim at a pizza box propped up on a stump fifty feet away. I nick the corner. I’m going to have to do better than that if I want to play pioneer woman out here.
It all started when the first small flock of wild turkeys–a hen and her five poults–made our five-acre property one of their daily morning feeding stops. Turkeys, I later learned, eat insects, berries, seeds, and acorns, all of which can be found in abundance in and around our front meadow. They like to feed out in the open but, for safety’s sake, prefer to be near a protected, forested area, which is exactly what surrounds our place.
I watched them warily. To me they were just one more wildlife incursion. We were already enduring ravenous deer who ate our landscaping to the ground, nutria that emerged from the seasonal creek to decimate the strawberry patch, cute little gray bunnies who slipped into the garden under the twelve-foot-high deer fence and ate our lettuce every spring, and raccoons who toppled over our garbage cans at least once a week And now, turkeys.
I watched as the first six marched out of the woods and down the access road in single file, spreading out across the meadow to peck diligently at the ground. No harm done, it seemed. A week later two hens and twelve poults showed up. A week after that there were twenty poults, four hens, and a Tom. One late afternoon I watched a flock of perhaps forty birds fly in from the southwest, their big, dark wings blackening the sky. They swooped low over the garden and the house, landing in the front meadow to peck and strut and fan their feathers and make turkey noises that sounded nothing like “gobble-gobble.” I had to admit: These were impressive animals.
Wild turkeys are, in fact, America’s largest ground-nesting bird and one of the biggest things you’ll see in the sky without an engine. A wild turkey, I discovered, can weigh as much as thirty-five pounds, fly up to fifty-five miles an hour, and run across open ground twice as fast as the fastest human. For some reason we refer to the duds and losers in our midst as turkeys, but the birds themselves, the wild ones, that is, are pretty sharp. They can see five times better than we can, and their hearing is up to eight times more acute. They are resourceful animals, too, adapting to conditions from northern Guatemala to southern Canada and able to last two weeks without eating, if the occasion arises. Barring predators or hunters, they can live to be twelve years old.
They were an abundant source of food for Native Americans as far back as 4000 years ago and a plentiful game bird for European colonists—only deer were a more easily available source of meat—but the wild turkey population was all but wiped out by the early twentieth century. Hunted without restraint by a growing, westward-moving population, their forest habitat cleared for agriculture or timber, wild turkeys numbered in the low thousands by the Great Depression and could be found only in a few isolated, inaccessible locations.
But today more than 6.5 million roam this country, with significant populations in every state except Alaska. Here in Oregon where I live, you can find well over 30,000 wild turkeys of the Rio Grande and Rio/Merrriam’s hybrid subspecies. Some mornings it looks as if half of them are out there pecking in my meadow.
Ironically, we owe the amazing comeback of this species to the very folks who helped decimate it: the hunters. Beginning in 1937 with the passage of federal legislation lobbied for and supported by hunters, an excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and other hunting equipment has raised billions of dollars for wildlife restoration. It’s one of those rare man-interferes-with-nature success stories, involving artificial propagation, rapidly propelled cannon nets, immobilizing drugs (for the turkeys, not the hunters), and fifty years of diligence. These birds are no longer in trouble.
I watch our flock from my porch, opening the front door slowly and soundlessly, crouching below the railings so they can’t catch sight of me, inching down the steps to get a closer look. Often I spook them. But occasionally, if I’m careful and they are particularly self- or insect-absorbed, I can get within ten or fifteen feet. I see three-week-old poults with their impossibly long legs and their bodies no larger than sparrows. I see the mother hens, small and drab, a study in brown and black. And then there are the Toms, the big males, with their bronze heads and iridescent tail feathers, spurs that look like outsized rose thorns on their legs and beards—tufts of bristle-like specialized feathers as long as a foot—that sprout from their breasts. When a Tom is in an amorous mood, he sucks in air to inflate himself, literally doubling in size. His feathers ruffle; his tail fans out in magnificent display. He drops his wings until the feathers drag the ground, lifts his ugly head with pride, makes a noise for which there are no letters on my keyboard, and struts around hoping to attract the attention of one of the hens. It’s said that, given the choice, a hen will pick the biggest, most vocal Tom in the neighborhood. I guess women never learn.
I am not sure when the idea of shooting, field dressing, gutting, plucking, cooking, and eating one of wild turkeys occurred to me, but I think it must have been at the end of one of those days of hectic and ultimately unsatisfying activity that make up so much of twenty-first century life, a day of texting, scrolling, clicking, swiping, and driving.
And I thought, amidst all this: I am always doing something. But what do I actually know how to do? Machines heat my house, wash my clothes, clean the dishes, and store and cook my meals. I drive to the market to buy peaches in November, corn-on-the-cob in February, and, any time I want, shrink-wrapped domestic turkey fattened on a fancy farm in California. And mostly I am thankful for all that.
But as comfortable as I am with modern life, I am nonetheless haunted by the notion that I don’t really know how to do anything. And so, I wondered, while driving from one errand to the next, what it took to be a woman of a different age, an age when you went out with a gun and shot a turkey and ate it for dinner.
The idea of doing this seemed both adventuresome and gruesome, a challenge not only to my non-existent skills as hunter but also to my politics (guns? killing warm-blooded creatures?) But the fact is, I do eat turkey, which means I allow—and by my consumer behavior, encourage—others to kill the bird. I have no moral stance here.
This is what I told myself as I began reading John J. Mettler, Jr.’s Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game, a book best digested on an empty stomach. There I learned that the real fun begins after you shoot the bird. It is then that you stride up to your fallen prey, place your foot on both its legs, grab the head with one hand and, with your knife, open the beak and pierce up and back through the cleft in the roof of the mouth, trying to hit the brain. If the bird is not already dead, Mr. Mettler writes with confidence, it will be now.
Then you push the blade back into the throat, cutting left and right to sever the large blood vessels. Lifting the bird by his legs, head down, you let him bleed. A thorough bleeding improves meat quality. This is a fact I could have happily lived my whole life without knowing.
Now it is on to field dressing, a multi-step procedure best accomplished, as the name implies, in the field—because, believe me, you don’t want to clean up your kitchen after this. First, you pluck all the feathers from around the anus to the bottom of the tail up to the breastbone and almost out each leg. Now, with the bird on its back, you make a cut under the breastbone, slicing down from that point toward the anus. That accomplished, you reach your hand inside the bird, going as far forward as possible, and scoop out whatever you find in there. Other animals will find this stuff yummy, so Mr. Mettler suggests you leave it for them. After emptying the abdominal cavity, you are left with one internal organ, the crop, a digestive sac located in the turkey’s neck. You remove this at home in a procedure about which the less said the better.
And then there’s plucking. All of the thousands of feathers that cover a turkey’s body, from the big, impressively striped tail feathers of a mature Tom to the blanket of tiny black pinfeathers of younger Fall birds, need to be removed. You begin by hand plucking, gently pushing each feather back into the skin and then, with a quick flick of the wrist, snapping it out. If all the feathers don’t come out this way—and Mettler assures us that they don’t—or if you tire of this activity—which you will—you can scald the bird in an enormous pot of not-quite boiling water or dip the bird in a pail of water that has two or three quarter-pound pieces of paraffin melted and floating on top. When the paraffin hardens, you “simply” peel it off, taking the unwanted feathers with it.
Learning to shoot the gun is the easy part.
I decide not to focus on what I will have to do once I bag the bird, where my hands will have to go, how it will feel to tug at intestines or sever blood vessels. I figure that if I manage to shoot the bird, I will be left with no choice but to, as they say in the land of commercial poultry, “process” it. And so, reminding myself that I am in fact a meat eater and that I have this bright idea about practicing the basic survival skills my frontier foremothers took for granted, I hunker down to study another chapter in another of Mettler’s books, Wild Turkeys: Hunting and Watching, that will walk me through the process.
After reading about scouting locations, setting up a blind, outfitting myself in Mossy Oak Break-Up camouflage, learning any one of four different turkey calls, deploying decoys, and hunting with dogs, I am delighted to realize that all I really have to do is walk outside my front door and hide behind the pile of boulders by the access road. As they have done just about every morning for years, the turkeys will walk down the road just ten or fifteen feet in front of me. I should be able to get a clear shot.
It is the first day of the spring hunting season. And yes, I am legal, having purchased both a hunting license and a turkey tag. “Long Tom” is oiled and ready. I put a light-load, bird-shot cartridge in the chamber (anything more powerful might blow up the old gun), and I step out into the crisp, clear morning. I find my spot by the road behind the boulders and take time positioning myself. I prop up the gun on a slab of rock and crouch, trying not to move or make a sound. And I wait.
The turkeys come: five hens with sixteen youngsters tagging behind and two big Toms. The Toms have fanned out their gray, black, and white tail feathers. Their heads are a deep russet today, their beaks covered by the fleshy snoods that tell their age. They look like illustrations from a kids’ Thanksgiving book.
I wait until the flock separates to forage and peck, then focus on the larger of the two Toms. His head—what an impossibly small target it is, and within it, what an impossibly small brain that must be pierced by the shot—is in my sight. I cock the hammer, steady my left hand under the barrel, and take a deep breath.
I crouch there for a long moment watching the Tom through a squinted eye, my trigger finger poised.
I can’t do it. I just can’t.
I stand up. The birds catch the movement and run for the woods. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow morning. More likely I’ll drive down the hill and buy one of those nice plump California turkeys with their smooth featherless skin and their big, clean, empty body cavities.
photo credit: Mark Olsen, Unsplash