Shooting a Thanksgiving dinner

“What people like about turkey hunting is the communication,” Clare said, a tall man with a grey Buffalo Bill-style mullet and goatee. “The vocalization and intensity of the one-on-one, the mental game that's involved of trying to beat them in their own backyard, that's the challenge.” This autumn is Clare's 49th turkey season (autumn and spring are each their own season) and he prefers to keep things basic by avoiding high-tech hunting gadgets and dressing in beige and tan instead of camouflage.  Turkeys can see in colour, but wearing shades of brown allows you to blend sufficiently into the surroundings. Wearing colour while sitting on the ground making turkey calls can also be very dangerous, as an imprudent hunter may mistake you for a turkey -- male birds' plumage contains splashes of colour. For safety, turkey hunters generally wear blaze orange while walking to a new location, but all colour must be removed while calling the birds. A few times a year, Clare offers “retro hunts”, in which visiting hunters eschew camouflage, decoys or blinds and rely solely upon old fashioned patience and skill. Patience seems to be the key to any successful turkey hunt. Hours may pass with no sign of a bird, and then suddenly you hear warbling in all directions as the turkeys try to rejoin their flock. “That's all this game is,” Clare said, “You go from chicken [excrement] to chicken salad in a heartbeat.”

Back at the lodge, Clare butchers your kill for you on a wooden table outside the main house. He does not recommend roasting the bird whole in the classic Thanksgiving fashion, as wild turkeys tend to be tougher than their farm-bred counterparts and they dry out much faster. Instead, he removes the breast meat for cooking, along with the legs and thighs which are great for making stock. Sherry’s recipe for a stuffed, rolled turkey breast is a deliciously juicy and slightly gamier version of your typical turkey dinner. If you want to keep a trophy of your kill, Peter will cut off the prehistoric-looking feet and beautiful tail feathers. He recommends covering the gory bits where they were severed with salt or borax for a few days to dry them out. Then you can mount them on the backing of your choice.

Autumn turkey hunting is thrilling. After hours of sitting in the cold woods, when a turkey enters your line of sight and you click off the safety of your gun, the adrenaline rush is primeval, exhilarating and somewhat frightening.

But it also provides a chance to better understand where our food actually comes from. Although they might not have eaten turkey, the Pilgrims and Native Americans who shared that first Thanksgiving meal nearly four hundred years ago surely appreciated just how difficult their food was to obtain. A wild turkey hunt gives us the rare chance to fully comprehend that the pre-packaged meat on our plates was once a living, breathing creature, and it offers a visceral connection to the Thanksgiving tradition that brings US families together every year. If the turkey on your carving board just happens to be one that you bagged yourself, even better.