Franktown – He moved to the ranch when he was 1 day old, to the cream-colored barn high on a bluff with the rest of the farmer’s turkeys.
It was spring. Grasshoppers flung themselves through the fields. After a few weeks the farmer opened the sliding steel door and the turkeys, about 700 of them, scattered across the land, tearing the grass and plucking the bugs with their beaks.
This they did from dawn to dusk every day, growing taller, their heads rising to a man’s stomach; thickening, their dark chests swollen and taut, their thighs stout.
The days shortened, the nights grew colder, the green left the grass. Halloween passed. Snow fell and persevered in shady spots.
One November morning before sunrise I left Denver and headed south for an hour to the barn, where I met Dave and Priscilla Queen, the owners of Shady Springs Ranch.
The sun had just poked above the eastern prairie when I arrived. A flamboyant Pikes Peak hectored the west.
“This one,” I said, walking through a raucous rafter of turkeys flapping their broad wings and clucking in the 10-acre spread of sloping, fenced land.
I chose him because he looked healthy and wholesome.
Dave Queen shooed my bird, along with two others to keep him company, outside of the fence and into the rest of the ranch, 160 acres south of Franktown and 7,000 feet above sea level.
“He looks good,” said Queen. “Good turkey.”
It was important that I keep track of him. I wanted to understand more about the bird’s life, and death.
I called him Nathaniel.
Classic American name, I thought. Very turkey.
Like the rest of the turkeys on the farm, all a breed called Traditional Bronze, Nathaniel was the color of dark chocolate with white markings on his tail. But up close, his dun feathers revealed a peacock iridescence – a turn in the sun could flash ribbons of violet or chartreuse, tangerine or rust.
His coat stopped just shy of his knees which, given his heft, made it look like he was wearing knickers. A gray, lizard-like skin sheathed the rest of his legs and his three-toed feet, each of which held a spur projecting from the heel.
A multicolored cowl of fleshy protrusions, like curved Good & Plenty candies, encircled the top of his python neck. A loose flap of red wattle, the shape of a dorsal fin, hung beneath his beak. A crimson prong that looked like the tip of a rattlesnake’s tail nested between his eyes. Sometimes the prong stood tall; sometimes it shrank; sometimes it drooped to the side. Much of his face was the color of cinnamon gum.
Shortly after Queen left, Nathaniel strutted to a pile of feed near some machinery and commenced eating. Around noon, he fought the other male turkey outside of the pen in a succinct explosion of slapping wings and striking beaks. Later in the day, he briefly fled the 1-year-old Australian shepherd, Tiggy.
I walked beside him, talked to him, and tried to touch him as he ate and strutted, but he always ran from me. A few times I crept close enough to pat his wing before he lurched away. Sometimes Nathaniel would look at me and cock his head as though he was thinking, What’s up with this guy?
I didn’t exactly bond with skittish Nathaniel, but I liked him. His dark eyes betrayed something soulful.
Dave Queen returned at night. He grabbed Nathaniel by the feet and handed him to me. The legs, warm and dry, felt reptilian. We marked his tail with paint and returned the turkeys to the hay-carpeted barn, where some of them hopped onto wooden perches.
The barn rang with gobbles, warbles, clucks, and even sounds like puppies’ barks and seagulls’ cries. I’d lost track of Nathaniel, but I bid him goodbye anyway.
“See you soon, Nathaniel,” I shouted over the racket. Queen slid shut the heavy steel door.
“My turkeys have great lives,” he said. “And just one bad day.”
About 60 hours later, Queen placed Nathaniel and five other turkeys into a pet carrier and drove into an iron-colored prairie. Dark clouds stuffed the sky.
Queen set the carrier down behind a small white building with very little around it for miles and miles, near Nunn, about 25 miles northeast of Fort Collins. Other vehicles holding turkeys, geese, ducks and chickens, all of them voicing the sounds of their species, gathered around the building.
A man wearing a white lab coat reached into Queen’s crate and grabbed the turkeys by their legs, hanging them upside down on hooks in a small room.
“Hey, Nathaniel,” I said when the man grabbed him.
I knew what was coming, and it upset me. I’d spent the day with Nathaniel; I was witness to his pleasant life on the ranch. The past few hours had been his worst ever. The next few minutes would be horrific.
Once all of Queen’s birds were dangling quietly from chains, the man withdrew a sturdy, thin knife.
“Goodbye, Nathaniel,” I said, a slight panic rising in my throat, pinching my heart.
The man pierced his neck and then, with a flick of the wrist, cut through veins.
Nathaniel rose for a few moments and looked around with those penny-sized eyes, and then began flapping wildly, blood flinging across the room. And then he just hung there.
The spectacle of death troubled me less than I expected. But the image of the bird glancing around still haunted me a week later.
The man tossed all of the dead turkeys into a plastic trash can and dragged it into a bright, stifling room with four women wearing tall rubber boots, rubber aprons and hair nets. They sharpened knives before a long stainless steel basin and spoke in Spanish.
One of the workers whisked Nathaniel into the scalder, a metal box of 140-degree water and a rotating paddle.
After a few minutes the worker pitched him in a round metal tub crowded with black rubber spikes. The contraption spun, and as it did the pliant feelers pulled the feathers from Nathaniel’s sodden body.
Then the women clipped and cut and hollowed and washed Nathaniel before handing him to a white-helmeted USDA inspector who scrutinized the bird. The inspector kerplunked him into a metal cart full of water and big plugs of ice shaped like barrels.
Nathaniel sank to the bottom.
Even though I kept on calling the bird Nathaniel, I didn’t feel the emotional connection anymore. Now, it was just a turkey like I’d seen in many markets and kitchens, and it was destined for my table.
Fifteen minutes later, Penny Henker, the owner of Northern Colorado Poultry, wrapped it in a clear plastic bag, wrote “Denver Post” and its weight – 16 pounds, 8 ounces – on the bag with black ink, and put the bird in the minus-20-degree freezer.
The next morning I picked up the bird at Wally’s Quality Meats & Deli in Westminster, which is selling many of Shady Springs Ranch’s turkeys for Thanksgiving.
That evening, after four hours in the oven, I transformed its liquid fat to gravy. And then I brought a carving knife to the bird’s thigh and plunged the blade past the crackling mahogany skin, through the flesh and to a joint. Ten minutes later, breast meat lay in a pile like folds of canvas, and its legs and thighs and wings sat on the side of the cutting board, beside the skeleton.
“Is that Nathaniel?” asked my 8-year-old daughter Stella?
“It was,” I said.
I reached down, plucked a piece of thigh meat from the cutting board and brought it to my mouth.
“Mmm,” I said. “Good turkey.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
