Hunting for the main dish
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 Fred 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. Fred 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 beguiled this shabby swindler out of the country.
To be continued…
DR. KARL WALLACE D.D.S.
To read more go
to: www.karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com
