Cold Turkey

 

We’re snowbound out here on Baker’s Branch. It’s alright. We have stocked, both in the freezer and the pantry, more food than we could eat up in twenty-five blizzards; a good deal of it wild game and fish.

I found a turkey breast snuggled in under some crappie fillets while looking for a deer backstrap yesterday. I pulled out the turkey breast and four plucked gadwalls, and weighed the options in my hand. It was an easy choice. I took both in the house to thaw, one to be eaten tomorrow, the other the day after. I know, I know. What about the crappie fillets, the backstrap, right? It was an embarrassment of riches.

There’s this big difference between thawing out meat produced by your own efforts, and that by the local supermarket: You never think about the weather you found along Aisle “J” the day you pushed the cart there, or whether or not you smelled the oak woods there after a rain passing through, or the color of the sky just above the checkout counter around sundown.

It’s impossible for me to look at a piece of meat coming out of my freezer and not see the very day attached to its production. I don’t make any excuses for it, either. We’re all cut different ways when it comes to such things. I know this: I’m not the only one that ruminates about such. Since a boy, I have done it, and now in old age I hear others do it when sitting down to a “wild” meal they have helped produce.

Story telling as we know it today, in all of its manufactured complexity and shades of gray, undoubtedly began very simply around a campfire with meat shared when someone asked while eating, “How, exactly, Esau, did you bring down the beast?” The resultant story became the dessert of the meal, coconut cream pies having not yet been invented.

In the kitchen sink, thawing, the turkey breast had a clearly marked date on the surface of the freezer bag. I killed the turkey in the first week of the season 2013. Pam noticed the date and asked, “That gonna’ be alright to eat?”

“I froze it in water. It’ll be alright. Any freezer burn will be along the edges. I’ll trim it off.”

And that’s the way it turned out. The turkey, fried, was great. I hadn’t intended to leave it in the freezer two years, but “stuff” happens. That old trick of freezing fish and game in water has saved me many times. Someday I’ll buy a vacuum sealer. Maybe. The water seal still works, and costs nothing.

It snowed on me the day I shot that turkey out in the southwestern corner of the state. Snow the first week of the Oklahoma turkey season is not all that unusual. Historically, the Panhandle has had cattle killing blizzards (more than one) clear up into the middle of April. You don’t count on the weather to be your friend in this state, and every hunter and fisherman knows it. Some days are diamonds, some days are stones as the old saying goes.

I bush whacked the turkey on the fly. The turkeys were still bunched up, hens and gobblers together, as they often are at that time of the year, and I had had to put the sneak on the bunch, rolling the gobbler like a big, black quail when the whole drove flushed just the other side of the little hill I had put between us on the stalk. I could have killed another just as easily, I remember that, but the law didn’t allow it that year which forced me to try for another the next day. That didn’t hurt my feelings.

Late the same day, the truck pulled under an old leaning barn way up yonder on the wild headwaters of Grape Creek, it rained on me. Thunder rolled in the distance, how far off I sat and wondered. Lightning flashed while I finished off a pan fried ribeye and a can of boiled potatoes swabbed in butter, then salt and peppered. Simple, simple, simple.

Now, the turkey hung, gutted, dangling by its heels from a salvaged hank of baling wire from one of the barn’s rafters, hopefully where the rats couldn’t get at it during the night. I fell asleep in the camper shell to the sound of thunder and hammered rain falling on the old barn’s tin roof. The last thing I remembered seeing, eyes closed, but not asleep, was the rise of a drove of black turkeys from atop two inches snow.

The last thing I remember thinking, eyes closed, but not asleep, was how strange it was to be on the spot of winter’s last snow, and spring’s first thunder storm, all the snow gone, and dry creeks rising.

If I tell you it makes dinner taste a little different, two years later, you’ll understand, right?

© 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen