Not all interaction between humans and turkeys has the same ending.
GLOBE AND MAIL: Friday, October 6, 2006
Every year at Thanksgiving millions of families gather over turkey dinners to give thanks for bountiful harvests and good fortune. Farmers spend the year raising and fattening up the turkeys. Then on the day of the traditional feast the turkeys are baked in ovens, carved up by the host, and eagerly eaten. Turkey scraps are sometimes fed to the family pet.
It is not a good day for turkeys.
And yet not all interaction between humans and turkeys has the same ending. Among those who can be counted as friends of turkeys are vegetarians, people who are fasting, and those who would save a turkey that has fallen over a steep precipice into a dark lagoon.
I fit into the last category. This is the story of how I saved the life of a turkey.
Some years ago I lived in a Guatemalan village close to the border with Chiapas, Mexico. Life in the village was simple: People farmed beans and corn, bathed in the river, and lived in huts guarded by skinny dogs that chased the pigs and chickens. Deep holes in the ground served as toilet facilities.
I shared the use of a relatively up-scale hole in the ground (or latrine) with a colleague from Winnipeg named Felix. Our latrine had a plastic curtain for a door while our neighbours preferred the less private but better-ventilated, open-air models.
One day I was rushing with some urgency to our latrine. When I got there, I found a turkey pacing about.
The village turkeys were ugly creatures with big flaps of skin hanging from their necks — a cross between vultures and Scrooge. Their shrill clucks reminded me of ill-tempered in-laws. They were almost as loud as the eight evangelists who possessed the village’s only microphone. Felix and I had learned to imitate the clucking — even to greet the turkeys cordially — but on this day I moved by with more pressing business.
Once behind the curtain, I thought I heard a “tweet, tweet” coming from somewhere deep below. I suspected Felix was suffering from a very melodic intestinal bug. Slowly, however, I became convinced that there was another explanation for the tweeting. I got my flashlight and shone it into the abyss. Far below, in the deepest part of the latrine, there was a frightened little chick, as cute as its mother was ugly, clinging to a narrow ledge that overlooked a turbulent black pool.
As foreign volunteers we observed a policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of the community so I went to alert the turkey’s owners of the crisis. “Tu chompipe esta en mi letrina,” I said. (“Your turkey is in my toilet.”) They seemed not to comprehend so I explained more precisely that, “Your turkey has fallen into my latrine.” Still they responded with the same blank look, either because they did not understand my Spanish or because the prospect of fishing a turkey out of my latrine did not motivate them.
I was discouraged. Fortunately my father had worked in the fire department so search-and-rescue is in my genes. My father was an officer who believed strongly in delegation so I suggested to Felix that he be lowered head-first into the hole. I would shout instructions from ground level. Felix was a judo expert so I figured he would be well suited to deal with any creature that emerged from the dark lagoon.
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“You will be going where no man has gone before,” I encouraged Felix. I told him he was free to yell dramatic things like “Fire in the hole!” if he needed to be pulled up quickly. Unfortunately, Felix had no firefighting in his blood and was not inspired by my plan.
There is a point in every man’s life when he chooses how to define himself, decides if he is a participant or someone who sits idly by. And so that moment had arrived for me — with a chick’s life hanging in the balance.
I returned to the latrine. The chick’s tweets were becoming faint, even its mother had abandoned it. Time had become our enemy. Necessity (if you know what I mean), being the mother of all invention, I hammered a small board perpendicularly to the end of a long stick with a rusty nail I had found. The board would serve as a rescue platform.
I lowered the stick down to the ledge far below and assumed the chick would understand the rescue plan.
But she turned her nose up at my invitation and moved away.
Communication had to be established with the victim. With flies buzzing around my head I leaned over the hole and clucked soothingly. You can be surprisingly persuasive when you have parasites in your belly and a turkey in your toilet. I listened and then a hopeful tweet wafted up from below. “Gubble, gubble,” I answered maternally. “Tweet, tweet.” With this she mounted the rescue platform and stood by for lift off.
I carefully raised the stranded chick, but when the rescue was just underway she hopped back to the ledge. Perhaps she noticed it really wasn’t her mother shining the flashlight in her face. I tried again, and again, with the same result. I started to wonder if she was just having a bit of fun with the clucking idiot pretending to be a fireman.
I needed to show more authority in my clucks, to persuade her I was in command of the mission.
I clucked clearly and firmly into the hole.
She stepped obediently onto the board. I raised the stick hand over hand until the chick reached ground level.
The turkey chick stepped onto the mainland and hurried past me without looking back — or even offering any gesture of thanks. Maybe that was understandable.
After all, turkeys have good reason to be somewhat ungrateful for their usual relationship with humans.
