Which, raised on the tales I heard growing up, is the equivalent of saying, "I see dead people." Turkeys were extinct. The Pilgrims ate them all. The only turkeys I saw at Thanksgiving were, live, the color of snow geese; just big chickens with a richer taste but a tendency to dry out in unloving hands.
Tonight's turkeys -- I didn't rush to grab my camera; the sun was already down -- crossed before me in file, about 15 in a wandering line, crunching up hill through last autumn's oak leaves to the wooded crest, the high point on our land, where there's a mighty oak and an even mightier white pine, thick as a 55 gallon drum.
And where two stone walls intersect implacably, built long ago large and firm to keep in cows, when New England was farmed bare as a knight's breast plate.
If you'd like to see a bird that still resembles a dinosaur, observe a wild turkey.
They walk, heads raised. They fly very little. They have formidable beaks, beaks you'd rather see close up turned to fossils. Another reason I'm not chasing these turkeys like a papparazzi. They have a bad reputation. A fowl reputation?
Too bad I didn't risk it. Because then they do the most surprising thing: as a flock they execute a military right turn and bounce up onto the stone wall. The big ones do. The smaller ones slip through a low spot where a few stones have tumbled. The deer kick them. There's the rough and tumble of frost that just a few years ago reached ten feet deep to glaciate the soil.
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