Halvard
We followed the trail down Halvard’s field approach and along the edge of the stubble. The sun was still low. Every broken stalk threw a long shadow, and the whole field looked like it had been combed.
About half a mile in, where the ground drops a little toward the slough, there they were.
Three hundred white turkeys spread out across maybe two acres of stubble, heads down, pecking. Some were scratching. A couple of the big toms had fanned out at each other, puffed up and drumming. They looked as happy as I have ever seen them.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
“There,” I said. “There they are. Now nobody run. Nobody yell. We are going to be the slowest people in Otter Tail County.”
Across the field, past the windbreak, I could see Halvard’s yard. Halvard is seventy three. He has farmed that ground since before I was born, and he farmed next to my grandpa for thirty years. He was standing by his machine shed with a coffee cup, watching.
He lifted his cup at me. I lifted my stick back.
He did not come over right then. Halvard is not a man who runs out into a situation. He watches it first. But I saw him set his cup on the hood of his pickup, and I knew he was thinking.
How You Walk a Turkey Home
People who have never moved turkeys think you chase them. You do not. If you chase a broad-breasted white, it will panic, run ten steps, sit down, and refuse to move. They are too heavy to fly more than a few feet. What they want most is to stay together.
So you use that. You get behind them, spread your people out, hold your sticks straight out to the side, and walk slow. The sticks are a fence that moves. The birds drift away from you, and they drift together.
“Ellery,” I said, “take the far side. Out wide, maybe forty feet from the flock. If they start to spill your way, just step toward them and hold the stick out. Don’t wave it.”
She went out across the stubble in her green hoodie, holding her pole out like a tightrope walker. She had done this before, when she was nine, the day a shelter door blew open. She remembered.
“Pax, take this side. Same thing. Junie, you walk with me in the back and help me count.”
“Count to what?” Junie asked.
“Three hundred,” I said. “We are counting to three hundred today.”
We started in. I walked right up the middle behind the flock in my rust canvas barn coat, my braid down my back, with my stick held out sideways in one hand and the feed bucket in the other. Every so often I would take a handful of pellets and throw them out ahead of the leaders, so they would have a reason to keep going forward.
The flock lifted its heads all at once, the way they do, and looked at us. Then it began to walk. Slowly. Grumbling. A wave of white bodies moving across the yellow stubble, with the low gold sun on their backs.