When we were young, Dad had an interest in all things having to do with hunting, fishing, and game animals. Due to this intense interest in game species Dad decided over the years to raise pheasants, geese, and a species called Merriam Turkeys.
Merriam turkeys are the archetypical huge American turkey species that everyone associates with thanksgiving. They are really interesting birds. They are crotchety, mean, stupid, and nasty...In the nicest way, of course.
When I was young, my morning chore was to go around to the chicken, pheasant, and turkey pens and nesting areas and gather eggs. By the time Mom had started breakfast I had gathered as few as two or three, or as many as twenty or twenty-five eggs. The number of eggs I found hinged upon how well the birds hid their nests.
Mom just made "mixed species scrambled eggs delight" for breakfast. No pheasant under glass or any other esoteric dishes. Just straight-ahead "cookin' with Sue" real food.
Those mornings were adventures. I had to climb into every nook and cranny of the barn, hunt in the tall grass out by the pond, and scour the pheasant coops.
We never ate goose eggs that I recall. I guess they were too valuable. Being gold and all.
I'd come back into the house with my down jacket pockets full of whatever types of eggs I found...many times they broke against each other. Sometimes I had a hard time getting a door or gate shut and had to throw my weight into it. Those mornings I had to listen to Mom cuss and I ended up wearing some other coat instead of my down jacket to school. A pocket full of pheasant ovulation is no fun for a mom to clean.
For some reason, I had a mental block about closing gates behind me. If I went through a gate, it was a even-money bet that I'd forget to close it. So we had lots of poultry rodeos rounding up birds who've been genetically selected for centuries to get away from the big animals chasing them.The bad news was we never really got them all back in the pen.T he good news is that we always had plenty of pheasants and turkeys running around the property.
The pheasants pretty much disappeared after a few weeks of freedom. I don't know if they were lost to predation or they just moved to better feeding grounds.
But the turkeys stayed around. They roosted in a huge old hangman's tree cottonwood on the island in the middle of our pond. There was a huge branch sticking straight out from the trunk of that tree, and in the evening you could see eight or ten turkeys sitting on it as the sun went down.
As part of Dad's master genetic plan for the turkeys, he mail ordered a tom-turkey to freshen the gene pool.
An actual eighteen wheel over-the-road truck delivered that tom. I don't think the truck was necessary....The tom was just shipped as freight. When we opened the back of that truck there was a crate with burlap sides sitting in the middle of the cargo trailer...wiggling.
That bird was pissed.
The crate was about a three foot cube and all of the sides were wiggling simultaneously. I was reminded of the bugs bunny cartoons where the Tasmanian Devil is delivered in a wiggling crate. This was pretty much the same.Dad and the truck driver moved the crate over to the end of the truck, which just served to further enrage the occupant.
When Dad and the driver lifted the crate out of the truck to set it on the ground the tom went nuts. Those two full grown men had a hard time getting it to the ground without dropping it. The tom was moving around so much, and was so big, that it was hard for them to balance the cratebetween them.
After the truck drove off, we let the tom out of the crate.Our lives were never the same after that moment.
We learned to live with fear.
That tom was horny. Not just a little. A lot. I mean that bird would chase the cows around the
field.
field.
Ol' Tom put the R in randy. The H in horny. I can't think of any other related terms. Horny. Randy. That's pretty much it.
Turkey's don't court. They don't date. They aren't coy or flirtatious. Nope. Turkey sex looks more like a catfight. So toms learn not to take NO for an answer. This tom had elevated the act of not being denied to an art form. He jumped everything on that property. Cows. Chickens. The hitching post. Dogs. A basketball. Everything... Including people.
We complained to Dad, who thought we were making the whole thing up and told us so. Mom refused to go from the house to her car (about 5 yards) without a broom, which she would leave on the ground next to her parking space. When she returned she'd exit the car, grab the broom, and go the 5 yards to the house.
One of my other jobs was to take out the trash. It was a pretty simple routine. I took the bag of trash to a rusty barrel, threw it in, and lit it on fire. The barrel was about thirty yards from the back door. The longest thirty yards in the world. After that tom showed up, the trash run took on a whole new "Mission Impossible" dimension. Now the routine went something like this:
-Grab the bag of trash.
-Grab a baseball bat.
-Oops, forgot the matches.
-Drop the bat.
-Get the matches.
-Get the bat again.
-Cautiously open the backdoor.
-Look around for the tom.
-Notice the tom acting innocent about eighty yards from the door and one hundred yards from the burn barrel.
-Silently slip through the door and down the steps, creeping toward barrel.
-Look over shoulder for the turkey.
-Oh No! The turkey sees me.
-Sprint for the barrel.
-Look over shoulder.
-The turkey is fifty yards away and closing fast.
-Sprint harder for barrel.
- Turn head to look for turkey.
-The turkey is twenty yards back.
-Trip over my own feet because I'm not looking where I'm running.
-Spill the trash.
-Get tackled by the turkey.
-Can't use bat because I'm sitting on it.
-Forty pound horny turkey desperately seeking Susan on my lap while swatting me in the head with his wings.
-Punch the turkey with a roundhouse to the snot locker.
-Turkey not amused.
-Turkey backs up hoping for seconds.
-Stand up, pick up baseball bat.
-Chase that lousy bird all over the everlovin' farm trying to hit it with a Louisville Slugger.
-Turkey laughing at me, staying just out of reach.
-Go back to pile of trash.
-Pick up eggshells, nasty paper towels and other assorted kitchen trash.
-Dump the whole mess in the barrel and set the thing on fire.
-Imagine putting turkey in the barrel and setting his randy ass on fire.
-Keep a sharp lookout onthe way back to the house.
Nope, things just wouldn't ever be the same around the old Scholz rancho.
Today, now that I'm grown up, people ask me why I carry a gun. I tell them its because I'm a rape victim.
One day Dad invited one of his friends and his two boys over to our house to go fishing in the pond. When they showed up the whole family piled out of their old Ford van with their fishing poles, nonchalantly getting their gear out of the back of the van.
All of the sudden, out of nowhere, a black streak of feathers and libido races across the yard heading right at the group, all of whose backs are turned.
A night I wake up sweating, flashing back to that moment frozen in time. Its like slow motion. "LOOK OUT!" I yelled. Dawning realization on their faces as they turned toward me with relaxed secure expressions which quickly progressed from confusion to fear as they saw the turkey bearing down on them.
"Don't run!"
That was good advice. Marlin Perkins once said that horny turkeys and grizzly bears can outrun a horse over short distances. Well, if he didn't say that, he should of. It's true.
The father turned to face the oncoming hornyturkey express, shielding his two young sons from the tom. But one of the boys panicked and headed for the hills. He was sprinting down the gravel road as fast as his two-sizes-too-big-he'll-grow-into-them yard-sale cowboy boots would carry him.
I had my money on the turkey. It wasn't even close.
The turkey ran that boy down, tackled him, pinned him face-first in the gravel and started biting the hair on the back of his head, slapping him with his wings, and riding him like a porn star in the middle of the road.
The boy's dad showed up a few seconds later and started whipping that bird with his fishing pole. I remember thinking "he's gonna break that fly rod." The turkey was oblivious. He was going to town on that kid.
Finally, the tom lost interest and wandered off to make a sandwich and have a cigarette, leaving Dad to apologize to the family of a skinned up little boy in the early stages of post-traumatic-stress-disorder, a father who was mad that his kid had been jumped by thanksgiving dinner, and a bewildered younger brother wondering if he was next.
Dad went out with a broom later that afternoon and beat the everlovin' crap out of that bird.
Oh sure! As soon as someone else's kid gets boofed by the turkey, he's all over the situation.
We never saw that turkey alive again. We did find what was left of him though-- a pile of bones in the middle of a circle of feathers. I like to think that he tried his "ride-em cowboy" act on a coyote. That would be poetry.
No comments:
Post a Comment