The Turkey Hen

Nature, to a less discerning eye, at times seems partial to certain of her creatures, sparing some the pain of death and loss, a blessing we humans have somehow been denied. Driving home one afternoon, I came across a turkey chick, struck down moments before by a car ahead of me. The hen was feeding off the highway a short distance with her other six chicks minus one. The crushed chick lay in a fresh splash of blood and entrails. Death was sudden and unexpected, too fast even to alert the hen nearby who had no awareness of her loss – a tragedy if that is the proper word for it. Knowing nothing of a mother’s heart-rendering loss and pain; knowing nothing of the human heart’s easy susceptibility, she kept walking in that gait these birds have – casual, yet with a certain stately bearing, her head pointed to the ground, her eyes focused on anything that moved, utterly indifferent to her loss, untouched like a stone. In her was only that driving instinct to survive, and a compelling need to set an example for her remaining chicks, who like her, sensed no absence of their dead sibling, so that not once did she lift her head from feeding or turn to see if all her chicks were there, a simple matter, I thought, of taking a count – but then, how mercifully she could not. Leaving I took another look at the dead chick, its wing-tip feathers flapping in the wind of passing cars. I drove away unsettled, not so much by the dead chick nor by the hen’s indifference, rather by the knowledge that her loss would never change her life.