Originally published in Oregon Quarterly
Winter 2003

Hunting wild turkeys in a skinny mocha world.The gun was the easy part.There. I have wanted to begin a story with a gun since I first read Raymond Chandler, author of the justly famous Philip Marlowe detective novels, whose one brilliant suggestion to writers was: “When the plot lags, bring in a man with a gun.”And so, this story begins with a gun.It is a break-barrel, breech-loading twelve-gauge shotgun, and it has a name, “Long Tom,” etched along its 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. We thought it might be a classy antique, but the guys at Baron’s Den, a local gun shop, say it’s just a cheap model from the 1920s. Cheap it may be, but it is also big and heavy and carries quite a kick.I am neither target-shooter nor hunter. I am not now nor have I ever been a card-carrying member of the NRA. But I did learn to shoot at summer camp many years ago, and guns don’t scare me. My oldest son is my teacher this morning. He learned to shoot at Boy Scout camp and takes me out to the meadow in front of the house to show me the ways of Long Tom. He shows me the parts of the gun, shows me the stance, tells me to press the stock hard into my shoulder or the kick of the gun will give me a bruise. I am aiming for a Pizza Hut box nailed to a tree stump thirty feet in front of me. Long Tom is a simple gun. No scope, no safety. No frills. Crack the barrel and insert a cartridge, pull it up to lock, cock the hammer, aim, and shoot.On my first shot, the gun jumps more than I expect, and I almost fall over backwards from the recoil. I’ve pressed the stock into my shoulder, but not hard enough. The shot is a good one, though. I hit the pizza box just a bit off center to the right. It falls off the nail, dead. I rehang it and take another shot, this time placing a hand towel over my shoulder to protect myself from the recoil. The towel doesn’t serve as much of a buffer, but I manage to keep the gun steady this time and keep myself upright. It’s another decent shot. If a big, square, white cardboard box was my quarry, I’d be in business.So what exactly is my quarry? Why am I standing in the middle of a field on a warm summer afternoon learning to shoot this eighty-year-old gun?It all started almost two years ago when the first small flock of wild turkeys – a hen and her five poults, which is what the chicks are called – made our property south of Eugene 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. Turkeys are not particularly attractive animals — notwithstanding Ben Franklin anointing them the “noble bird” and suggesting they, not the bald eagle, be the symbol of our country — and to me they were just one more wildlife incursion. We were already enduring ravenous deer who ate our landscaping to the ground, a marauding band of feral goats who took care of what little the deer left behind, raccoons who toppled over our garbage cans at least once a week, and cute little gray bunnies who slipped into the garden under the twelve-foot-high deer fence and ate our lettuce every the spring. And now, turkeys.I watched as the first six marched out of the woods and down the driveway 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 5.6 million roam this continent, with significant populations in every state except Alaska. Here in Oregon, mostly across the southern tip of the Willamette Valley down to the Umpqua (but with a scattering across the north central part of the state), you can find about 37,000 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 bird 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 spent emailing and driving, a day of pushing buttons and swiping cards.And I thought, amidst all this: I am always busy, 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 farm. And mostly I am thankful for all that. Who would want to go back to the days before skinny mocha lattes and 350-count bed linens toasty from the dryer? Not me.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, 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 actually 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?) and, not insignificantly, to my personal squeamishness index. 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 right to be squeamish.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 as wide as your knife under the breastbone, cutting 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 out the abdominal cavity, you are still 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. This is one of those chores, like setting the timer on the VCR, that sounds simple but ends up taking the entire afternoon.As I said, the gun is the easy part.I decide not to focus on what I will have to do once I shoot the turkey, 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 call GI Joe’s to see about purchasing my fall season turkey tag, my license to kill.Oregon will issue only 3000 tags this season, each of which entitles the bearer to bag only one wild turkey, of either sex, between October 15 and November 30. The tags ($11.50 for state residents, $41.50 for outsiders) are sold on a first-come, first-served basis. The only way to be sure of securing one is to get to GI Joe’s before the store opens on the first day the tags are offered.At home, I sit down to study “Fall Hunt,” the 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 relieved to realize that all I really have to do is walk outside my front door and hide behind the pile of boulders by the driveway. As they have done just about every morning for the past two 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 fall hunting season. 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 driveway behind the boulders and take time positioning myself. I prop up the gun on a slab of rock and hunker down, 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, take a deep breath, and curl my finger around the trigger.Then I freeze. I can’t seem to will my finger to action. I crouch there for a long moment watching the Tom through my squinted eye. Then, abruptly, I stand up. The birds catch the movement and run for the woods. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow morning. Or maybe 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. I remove the cartridge from the chamber, walk into the house and carefully place the gun back on the highest shelf in the cupboard.