Pobre Houdini

I think Houdini is on to the fact that his days are numbered. He has escaped four times in the past two days. Usually I find him milling about in the unkempt yard behind my house. I pass through the various gates to track him down, take him underarm, scold him for leaving, and then bring him back to my yard. But his last escape was a much more determined and detrimental attempt.

Yesterday I was at home over lunch and noticed he was gone. I immediately went to his usual hiding place, but he was nowhere to be found. In a steady rainfall, I trudged through the mud and thick undergrowth until I reached the street a block behind my house. Still no Houdini.

I was really worried I had lost our dinner two days before Thanksgiving. There was a handful of passersby in the street, and I began desperately asking them, “Have you seen a turkey? Did a turkey go by here?” They all looked at me like I was a crazy gringa. Standing in a jungly lot covered in mud in the rain, I did probably look like a crazy gringa.

Eventually a resident of a house across the street came out, and I posed her the same question.

“¿Ha visto un chunto?”

“Se fue por allá.” (ambiguously pointing to her left with her lips)

“¿Por allá?” (ambiguously pointing to my right with my finger)

“Sí. Por allá.” (another ambiguous lip point)

“Gracias.”

The lot I was in is surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and instead of backtracking through my own yard and walking around the whole block, I decided to wiggle through a small gap in it. This move, I believe, only solidified my crazy gringa status. My hair and shirt got caught in the barbed wire, and I as I was hunched over working to get them free a man walked by.

“Buenas tardes.” (forcing a really-I’m-not-caught-in-barded-wire-smile)

“Buenas tardes.” (not even attempting to mask his bewilderment)

After I finally got to the other side of the fence, the woman who gave me the lead on Houdini’s whereabouts and who had been watching my struggle with the barbed wire told me, “There’s a gate down there.” (Lips to the right). Information that would have been useful before I was tangled in barbed wire.

Houdini had made his way behind the woman’s garage to where there was a pen full of turkeys, ducks, and chickens (a chupallofest). I found him wedged in a tiny space between the back wall of the garage and the pen with five turkeys inside the cage pecking at him from all angles. ¡Pobre chunto! I squeezed into the space and pulled him out to freedom.

Once again, I tucked Houdini underarm to carry him home, but as I was adjusting his position, I noticed blood on my hand. I set him down to examine him, and after pulling back his feathers, I found some lacerations on his right flank. Houdini was just searching for some turkey friends, but they ganged up on him and beat him up.

I walked back to my house in the rain; him whimpering in my arms and me soaked to the bone. It wasn’t until we were at home when I discovered the full extent of Houdini’s injuries. He was moping around, so I got him a tortilla snack to cheer him up. After a while, he seemed to have regained his spirit and puffed out into full plume. It was then that I noticed the damn turkeys had ripped out nearly half of his tail feathers.

Pobre Houdini. He surely could have matched up with any those turkeys in a one-on-one fair fight, but the five of them at once was just too much for him to handle. And now his final memory before his imminent death will be of this public humiliation.

Before.

After.