Tales from Pleasant Grove by Steven Peck

Author:Steven Peck [Peck, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fiction-Literary-Short Stories
Publisher: Steven L. Peck
Published: 2018-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Escape of the Turkey-Shoot Flock

Thanksgiving in Pleasant Grove has always been a time of family gatherings, joyous feastings lubricated with good gravy, and parades and football games on TV. Except the year that Maple Shepherd stopped the annual turkey shoot with her crazy notion that turkeys deserved to die with dignity—by which she meant a hatchet. That year, all 4’10” of her skinny meanness stood on the old stump out under the trees in the little park on the corner of Main and 200 South and shouted to all who would listen that shooting turkeys wasn’t right. No sir. Her grandmother taught her that a turkey had to die on a cottonwood chopping block on the very week of Thanksgiving, because that’s the way the Pilgrims did it. To do otherwise was an offense to their memory and to yea, even God Himself. Hearken even unto Him who hath ordained it such, she would cry. We paid no heed. We all knew Maple. She was always as angry as a badger with the clothespin on its tail, and we took a don’t-get-too-close-or-you’ll-get-bitten approach.

Well of course we were used to her rantings—she did it every Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, the turkey shoot went on year after year and neither God nor the ghosts of the Pilgrims appeared to have a mind to put a stop to it. Until that one fateful day that permanently ended that which had gone on since pioneer days. And those of us that were there, who saw what happened ... well we won’t forget.

It was one of those warm years. Here it was, near December, and Mount Timpanogos, our back yard 12,000 foot peak, had not a lick of snow on her sides. The news was reporting every night about the ski resorts being downcast and troubled about the weather, but we who had neither the money nor means to hit the slopes were enjoying every minute of the extended fall.

The shoot was a tradition I enjoyed. I kept my 12-gauge shotgun all oiled up just for this event because I was getting too old to go out after ducks any more and pheasants required a good dog to flush them out and mine was a lazy dachshund that would have died of a heart attack if it ever met a pheasant, so my gun was kept around just for the turkey shoot. And not to brag, but over the course of my life I’d won the event a time or two.

That year, on the day before the shoot, however, crazy Maple went out to the fairgrounds where we held the event and let all the turkeys go. Every one. All two hundred plus of them. They put out a call for the volunteer fire department, of which I was a proud member, to come and round them up.

We all had walky-talkies that we set on the same channel and started trying to round them up, but it was strange: the turkeys didn’t scatter like turkeys should. No. They all made a run for it up Battle Creek Drive.

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