Cape Cod is full of wild turkeys. These three paraded across our lawn one day last winter -- I sit at my computer looking over the lawn, beyond some low plantings beneath my window. As I worked I saw three ugly, wrinkled red, gray and black heads moving above the shurbs. I grabbed a camera and hurried out to photograph them. They are the only ones that I've seen on our lawn, but I have seem plenty of their uncles, siblings and cousins all sorts of places. Four or five are at home on the Cape Cod Community College campus. They stop traffic when they decide to cross the roads which they do as they wish, caring nothing for whatever might be coming.
I have yet to hear about any being hit. A fatally close encounter would be hard on a small car, probably of little importance on a big SUV or any kind of truck. I've thought about turkey fatalities (to the turkey, not the humans) and wrote a short story called "Bringing Home the Turkey" in which one is killed early on Thanksgiving morning. The young man who hits it is tender hearted and full of remorse and of an ethical and ecological frame of mind. He and his girl friend planned to ignore Thanksgiving but he takes the dead bird home, feeling the only ethical thing to do is to eat it. "It should not give up its life in vain." Unsurpringly, he finds a number of videos on You Tube that tell how to prepare and cook wild turkey.
The story is humorous -- how else to treat such an incident! -- and was read as a dramatic reading at a gathering of a group I belong to called Blithe Spirits. And it will be read this afternoon at our Thanksgiving dinner, probably between main course and dessert. Rachel has invited a house full -- it will be eleven adults (counting two high school age nephews who are in physical size and appetite adult) and five children from 2 to 8. The family has a dramatic bent so I think I will hear a good reading and we will laugh enough to prepare us for the rich desserts.
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