Hunting
the Deceitful Turkey
At
the Thanksgiving table Thursday November 28th, 2013 some Americans will trace
their family trees back to the Mayflower. Others will discuss the
heritage of the main dish, going way back to the1890s. Roots of the Bronze Wild Turkeys trace their lineage
all the way back to the 19th century.
"It's
a great conversation piece at the table when I tell people that the turkey's
lineage goes back150 years or so," with bloodlines back to a time before
gobblers were bred for modern tastes and mass production. It costs about three times what you would pay for
an organic supermarket breed, license and all of these birds as nature intended them to be. These
birds aren't Spring Chickens, but people gobble them up.
When I was a boy my uncle and the big
boys hunted with the rifle, his youngest son Glade and I with a shotgun a small single barreled shotgun which was properly
suited to our size and strength; it was not much heavier than a broom. We carried it turn about half an
hour at a time. I was not able to hit anything with it but I liked to try. Glade and I hunted feathered small
game; the others hunted deer, squirrels, and wild turkeys and such things. My uncle Ralph and the big boys
were good shots. They killed deer, wild geese like on the wing. They didn’t wound or kill squirrels,
they stunned them. When the dogs treed a squirrel, the squirrel would scamper a lot and run out on a
limb and flattens himself along it, hoping to make him invisible in that way but not quite succeeding. You
could see his wee little ears sticking up. You couldn’t see his nose, but you knew where it was. Then the
hunter disliking a rest for his rifle stood up and took hand aim at the limb and sent a bullet immediately
under the squirrel’s nose, and down tumbled the animal, unwounded but unconscious; the dogs gave
him a shake and he was dead. Sometimes when the distance was great and the wind not
accurately allowed for, the bullet would hit the squirrel’s head; the dogs could do as they pleased with that
one. The hunter’s pride was hurt, and he wouldn’t allow the squirrel to be put in his game bag.
In
the first faint gray of the dawn the stately wild turkeys would be stalking
around in flocks, and
ready to be sociable and answer invitations to come and
converse with other excursionist of their kind.We would conceal ourselves and imitated the turkey call by sucking
the air through the leg one of a turkey which had previously answered a call like that and
lived only just long enough to regret it. There is nothing that furnishes a perfect turkey call except that
bone;
Another of
Nature’s treacheries you see. She is full of them; half the time she doesn’t
know which she likes the best to betray her child or protect it. In In
the case of the turkey she is badly mixed up: she gives it a one ruff
in getting it into trouble, and she also furnished it with a trick for getting
itself out of the trouble again. When a mama turkey answers an invitation
and finds she has made a mistake in accepting it, she does as the mamma partridge do remembering
a previous engagement and goes limping and scrambling away pretending to be very lame; and
at the same time she is saying to her not visible children, “Lie low, keep still, don’t expose yourself.
I shall be back as soon as I have hoodwinked this shabby swindler into following me out of the county.
When a person
is ignorant and confiding, this immoral device can have tiresome results. I
followed an ostensibly lame turkey over a considerable part of Idaho all
morning, because I believed in her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one who
was trusting her and considering her honest. I had the single barreled shotgun, but my idea was to catch
her alive often got within rushing distance of her and then made my rush; but always just as I made my
final plunge and land on my stomach my hand down where her feet had been, they wasn’t there: it was only two or three inches from
there and I brushed the tail-feathers off, a very close call, but
still not quite close enough; that is not close enough for success, but just close enough to convince
me that I could do it next time. She always waited for me, a little away, and let on to be resting
and greatly fatigued; which was a lie, but I believed it, for I still thought her honest long after I ought to have
begun to doubt her, suspecting that his was no way for a high-mined bird to be acting followed and
followed, and followed making my periodical rushes and getting up and brushing the dust off, and resuming the
voyage with patient confidence; indeed, with a confidence which grew, for I could see by the change of climate
and vegetation that we were getting up into the high latitudes and as she always looked
a little tireder and a little more discouraged after each rush, I judged that I was safe in following, in the
end, the completion being purely a matter of staying power and the advantage lying with me from the start
because she was lame.
Along in the afternoon I began to feel
fatigued myself. Neither of us had had any rest since we first started on
the excursion, which was upwards of nine hours before though latterly we paused awhile after rushes, I letting
on to be thinking about something else, neither of us sincere and both
of us waiting for the other to call game but in no real hurry about it for indeed those little
evanescent snatches of rest were very grateful to the feeling of us both; it would naturally be
so, skirmishing along like that ever since dawn and not a bit of food in the meantime.
To be continued…
DR. KARL WALLACE D.D.S.
