In Bars, Women Are as Scary as the Men

Women are weird. Oh, yes they are. I don’t care what you say, and it’s a personality trait that seems to cross species lines, turkeys to humans, for example, and vice versa.

For years, fifty, now, I have had as much fun with hen turkeys during the spring gobbler season as I have had with the gobblers, even. We look at one another and hear music that nobody else does. We dance, maybe, where nobody else can see us. It’s personal.

For years I met gobblers like I did belligerent men in the bars of my youth, where I acted an idiot, and somehow kept my name out of the paper. You never heard about it, and family honor shamed me back into “line” before you could have; no credit to myself.

In the spring, you better mess with the mail “bar” turkeys only (you will get into some fights) unless you want to go to jail, but the women turkeys are going to mess with you anyway, whether you want them to or not. Think of the Kardashians, and those “Party Girls Down South”.

Well, maybe you do want them to mess with you. That’s your business, not mine.

Hen turkeys are gorgeous birds to look at, all slim, trim, and with every hair in perfect place as if just having come out of Laura’s Beauty Shop downtown. You won’t ever catch her looking bad, and there are those among them that are stunningly beautiful, Cindy Crawford turkeys, maybe. 

One time years ago, Bryan Test and I watched a flock of half-a-hundred turkeys way out west on the wild Palo Duro River come to the ground out of a single, giant cottonwood at daylight. Ten-inch boss gobblers all over the place; gnarly, ugly old bar fighters (I knew them well); every one with a big ol’ beer belly flopped out in front of them.

Right in the middle of that sloppy looking bunch of Harley riders was the most beautiful hen turkey I have ever seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. In fact, I’m seeing her right now. She was snow white without a single dark feather on her slim, trim body anywhere. It was like looking at Snow White waltzing with a band of Barbary pirates.

I knew she wasn’t some farmer’s domestic bird gone wild because of her overall slim body profile, and (a dead giveaway) her long, slim, legs. Other than the fact her legs were a beautiful coral pink, her legs were the same Cindy has. Oh, yes, they were, and I mentioned it to Bryan.

Domestic hens seem to totter around on old, weathered gray, sawed off, stumps. Wild hens throw the same kinds of steps on the same kinds of legs as Ginger Rogers.

Bryan and I followed that huge bunch of turkeys for the better part of the morning all over the Palo Duro valley before we were able to get in front of them (no, you are not going to call up fifty turkeys at a time) and bushwhack a belly dragger apiece, scattering the bunch in the process.

My last memory of that snow white hen was of her pausing at the top of a distant sage brush hill, looking at me, and turning on her heel and walking out of sight over the crest of the hill, just the same as Scarlett used to leave rooms. Cindy Crawford pausing at the top of a distant hill and smiling slyly at me before walking away would not have affected me more.

But, in case you think I forgot, I said that “women are weird.”

There was that hen that came to my calling, by herself, unaccompanied, in the middle of a small, cross timber opening out in old, wild Blaine County. She not only came to the sound of what she had to recognize as another hen, but she began to demonstrate as if she were a gobbler come to court a hen. Honestly.

Like a male, she puffed up. Like a male, she dragged her wing tips in the sand. She fanned her tail. She strutted and pivoted in place. All of this not fifteen yards away from where I was backed into a cedar, terrified at what I was seeing. And then, with good grief, she gobbled, or tried to, six or seven times.

Her “gobble” sounded as if someone had their hands around her neck and was trying to strangle her in mid-gobble, is the best that I can describe it. Eventually she gave up and swaggered back into the blackjack jungle hence she had come, the hairs at the nape of my neck resuming their natural order as she did so. Goodbye, and good riddance.

Snow White I would like to see again before I die. The other? There’s a reason I no longer drink my beer inside a bar: The women in there are as scary as the men.

Copyright © 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen