• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

For more information visit www.foodsecurity.org and www.farmtoschool.org.

* * *

STEVEN L. HOPP

My pupils in the turkey coop were not such quick studies. The first hen who’d come into season was getting no action from either of the two males, whom we had lately been calling Big Tom and Bad Tom. These guys had been fanning their tails in urgent mating display since last summer, more or less constantly, but they directed the brunt of their show-off efforts toward me, each other, or any sexy thing I might leave sitting around, such as a watering can. They really tried hard with the watering can. Lolita kept plopping herself down where they’d have to trip over her, but they only had eyes for some shiny little item. She sulked, and I didn’t blame her. Who hasn’t been there?

I determined to set a more romantic scene, which meant escorting Lolita and one of the toms into their own honeymoon suite, a small private room inside the main barn, and removing any watering cans from his line of sight. She practically had to connect the dots for him—no bras to unhook, heaven be praised—but finally he started to get the picture. She crouched, he approached, and finally stopped quivering his tailfeathers to impress her. After all these many months, it took him a couple of beats to shift gears from “Get the babe! Get the babe!” to “O-oh yess!” Inch by inch he walked up onto her back. Then he turned around in circles several times, s-l-o-w-l-y, like the minute hand of a clock, before appearing to decide on the correct orientation. I was ready to hear the case for artificial insemination. But it looked now like he was giving it a go.

The final important event after all this awkward foreplay is what bird scientists call the “cloacal kiss.” A male bird doesn’t have anything you would call “a member,” or whatever you call it at your house. He just has an orifice, or cloaca, more or less the same equipment as the female except that semen is ejected from his, and eggs come out of hers later on. Those eggs will be fertile only if the two orifices have previously made the prescribed kind of well-timed contact.

I watched, I don’t mind saying. Come on, wouldn’t you? Possibly you would not have stooped quite as low as I did for the better view, but geez, we don’t get cable out here. And this truly was an extraordinary event, something that’s nearly gone from our living world. For 99.9 percent of domestic turkeys, life begins in the syringe and remains sexless to the end. Few people alive have witnessed what I was about to see.

Cloacal kiss is exactly the right name for it. The male really has to extend that orifice, like puckering up for a big smooch. Try to picture this, though: he’s standing on her back, tromping steadily and clutching his lady so as not to fall off. The full complement of her long tail-feather fan lies between his equipment and hers. The pucker has to be heroic to get around all that. Robert Browning said it perfectly: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?

Paradise arrives when a fellow has kneaded his lady’s erogenous wing zones for a long, long time with his feet, until she finally decides her suitor has worked himself up to the necessary fervor. Without warning, quick as an eyeblink, she flips up her tail feathers and reaches upward to meet him. Oh, my gosh! I gasped to see it.

It was an air kiss.

They really did miss. Mwah!—like a pair of divas onstage who don’t want to muss their lipstick. (Not Britney and Madonna.) But rare is the perfect first attempt, I know as well as the next person who has ever been young.

She wandered off, slightly dazed, to a corner of the dark little room. He stared after her, his feathers all slack for once in his life, divining that this was not the time to put on a tail-shaking show. He knit his caruncled brow and surely would have quoted Shakespeare if he’d had it in him: Trip no further, pretty sweeting; journeys end in lovers meeting