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January 18th, 2010 Wild Turkey Soup
Our friend Tod stopped over the other day with an armful of gifts. "Fish," he said, handing us a bag of crappies and a bag of northern pike. "And here's some raw honey from my brother, and here's some turkey soup." He set all this bounty down on our kitchen table, and we put some soup on the stovetop to warm. Tod is one of our woods-friends, and all of this food had come from his hunting and fishing. The soup was particularly interesting, since it was made with wild turkey -- the very animal that has played such a poignant role in our lives over the last few years. Neither Rebecca nor I had ever eaten this meat before.
Since the first time I killed an animal (a woodchuck that had been hit by a car and I subsequently killed with a knife), I've always felt that there's a certain bond between eater and eaten. It happens not just with animals, but with plants too. If you take a bite of bread and close your eyes and listen with your deepest heart, you can sense the wind blowing over you, rocking you gently as the sun warms your leaves, and the wheat berries quicken on your stem. Once, when I found an owl freshly killed on a road, I stopped and took a raw piece of its flesh from its body, and in eating it I think a little of the owl's magic blended with my own. There's a beauty in this dance of life and death, but much of that beauty is lost when we are disconnected from the lives we take every day. It seems that it might be good for each of us to take a single month -- just one -- during which we require ourselves to kill whatever we eat. Whether that's an apple we pluck from an apple tree, or a chicken that we kill, we'd get to experience that vital feeling of blood and sap and spirit moving from one living thing to another. The soup was garnished with noodles that Tod and his young daughter Sam had made. As I ate, I remembered the feeling of moving swiftly through the woods with dark-feathered beings sprinting ahead of me and showing me what it means to be human. It's good, sometimes, to remember these things.
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I
wasn't sure how I'd feel. After all, during my turkey-chases I had often
worried about the safety of the turkeys, and had developed a somewhat
obsessive fear about hurting one. Now I was eating one.