Kristie Swenstad was napping in the back of plywood deer blind on a cold fall morning when her father nudged her awake and handed her a shotgun.
She was 12.
“I was excited because I was doing what my dad did,” she said. “I was going to help fill the freezer.”
Ms. Swenstad is 36 now. A former high school basketball star and homecoming queen, she owns a tailor shop in Alexandria, a little lake town 130 miles northwest of Minneapolis. And she wants more people to understand the beauty and challenge of hunting for your supper.
That’s why on a frosty- October morning, I was crouched next to her inside a canvas blind designed to look vaguely like a hay bale. She had a shotgun in her hand and turkey on her mind.
The lean birds she was hunting are about as much like big-breasted Thanksgiving turkeys as a slice of aged Cheddar is like a Kraft single. As a holiday centerpiece, their lean carcasses would disappoint most Americans.
But heading into the woods in pursuit of a bird Ben Franklin called both respectable and courageous is a singular thrill that adds variety to a hunting family’s table.
Although its farmers raise about 40 million commercial turkeys a year — more than any other state — Minnesota is not among the top places to hunt wild turkey. They had been nearly eradicated by the late 1800s. In the early 1970s, the state Department of Natural Resources moved 29 Eastern turkeys in Missouri to southeastern Minnesota. Now, the wild turkey population is more than 70,000.
The odds of bagging one aren’t great. On average, only about a quarter of the 60,000 people who hold licenses for the fall and spring hunts head home with a bird.
Still, wild turkeys are part of the fabric of life here. In urban areas, they are an object of both fasciation and annoyance, chasing children and clawing up gardens. A flock that hangs out on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis is so beloved it has its own Instagram account.
Gov. Tim Walz plays up his turkey-hunting bona fides, hosting a turkey hunting event each spring. In the days after he was picked as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in August, his recipe for turkey hot dish became a media sensation.
The number of Americans who hunt turkeys (about 3.1 million) pales in comparison to deer hunters (about 11 million), according to the National Deer Association. Deer hunting is a quieter, more solitary pursuit and perhaps more revered in rural communities. But turkey hunting has its devotees, especially in the spring when the woods are loud with the heart-pounding yelps and gobbles of male turkeys looking to mate.
The trick is to use well-placed hen decoys and calls from a practiced hunter to attract the toms.
“It’s so entertaining, like watching guys in a bar trying to impress the ladies,” said Brita Edgerton, 43, a bowhunting friend of Ms. Swenstad’s who owns an audiovisual production company in Duluth. “They start waltzing in with their big tails and plumage, showing off.”
The fall turkey hunt is different. It’s smaller and less social. Fewer hunters are looking for turkey, and since the birds aren’t mating, they tend to gather in quiet groups.
“Fall is to get the meat and just be out here,” said Ms. Swenstad, who has hunted elk during a snowstorm in the Wyoming backcountry and long-horned antelopes called gemsboks with a bow and arrow in South Africa. One gemsbok’s taxidermied head is stored in her former bedroom at her parents’ house.
It would be hard to be a member of her family if you didn’t want to pick up a gun and head to the woods. Text strings are filled with hunting jokes and wildlife photos. Getting a firearm safety certificate is as much a rite of passage as getting a driver’s license.
Ms. Swenstad’s uncle, John, belongs to the National Wild Turkey Federation, a conservation and hunting organization. And, like all the men in the family, he’s worked as a firefighter. He gives each child in the family a .22-caliber rifle to use in their gun-safety classes. He has already set aside one for his 3-year-old grandniece, whose mother, Moli Swenstad, 29, hunted deer until a month before her daughter was born.
A favorite family party trick is to ask the toddler where you shoot a turkey. “In the face!” she squeals. (The idea is to minimize the amount of birdshot in the meat.)
Ms. Swenstad’s mother, Lynnette, 58, usually stayed home and cooked while the others hunted. That changed on Mother’s Day 2010, when she decided to join in a turkey hunt. Now she is as devoted as everyone else. “I like sitting in the tranquillity of the forest,” she said.
She is also practical. When a turkey wandered to the edge of the yard a few years ago, she took aim from the patio and then walked across the lawn in slippers to retrieve it.
When someone bags a deer, everyone gets together to butcher it on plastic cutting boards set on work tables in Ms. Swenstad’s father’s cabinet shop in nearby Osakis. Backstraps and roasts are cut out whole. Some meat is reserved for jerky. Trimmed, lean chunks go into a grinder, sometimes mixed with lard from a whole pig the family buys to share.
“We just have venison in our freezer,” Moli Swenstad said. “That’s our red meat of choice.”
Few things irritate the Swenstads more than people who criticize hunting but buy meat in the supermarket. If you choose to eat meat, taking animals from the wild is the most ethical, environmentally sound option, Ms. Swenstad said. There are no torturous feedlots, she said, and most hunters are dedicated to preserving wildlife habitats.
“I like the fact that I know where my food is coming from, and I worked hard to get it on my table rather than just going to the store, where you don’t know where it came from or what’s in it,” she said. “These turkeys are the closest thing you can get to pure.”
Some hunters will roast them whole, but that’s not ideal. The birds have long, thin breasts and tough, tendon-filled leg muscles. Some cooks might throw the legs into a slow-cooker and shred the meat. But in the Swenstad household, the lean, dense breasts are the prize.
The night before she took me and a photographer out turkey hunting, Ms. Swenstad cooked two breasts for a family get-together. One was about two pounds, harvested from a tom that her best friend’s husband had shot. The other was from a juvenile male called a jack. Her fiancé, Taylor Hayes, had shot it in the spring.
Mr. Hayes (also a firefighter) didn’t grow up in a hunting family, but when he fell in love with Ms. Swenstad, it became a “when in Rome” situation.
“He’s slowly getting into it because it’s all we talk about,” said Ms. Swenstad’s brother, Kyle.
The turkey breasts had been soaking in buttermilk for days. Ms. Swenstad cut them into two-inch chunks and seasoned them well with a commercial spice blend heavy on garlic, onion, paprika and chili powder. She wrapped them in bacon. Some were secured with a toothpick. Others were threaded on skewers with onion and bell pepper.
Her father, Howard, cooked the kebabs on a Charbroil Big Easy in the garage. Mr. Hayes sizzled the turkey-bacon bites on a Blackstone grill in the driveway.
All of it was nearly gone before Ms. Swenstad set out the main event: venison stew made from her mother’s recipe, which is punched up with Worcestershire and soy sauce.
After a round of baked apples with ice cream and a few more hunting stories — including one involving her father, a crossbow and a 700-pound elk whose head ended up hanging in their foyer — we headed off to sleep.
Rising before dawn, we made our way across a field on her uncle’s 114-acre farm. The trick was to be in place before the turkeys woke up and fluttered down from the trees to have breakfast.
“I just like being out here in God’s country,” Ms. Swenstad said as we worked our way to the blind in the dark. “It brings you this inner peace you can’t find anywhere else.”
Then we had to be quiet. Turkeys can see and hear really well.
The sun came up. The turkeys started to gobble softly. Nine hens pecked their way toward us from the tree line.
One wandered close enough to the blind to get a clean shot. Ms. Swenstad pushed the barrel of her gun through a canvas flap and pulled the trigger.
She tagged her turkey, slung it over her shoulder and started the walk back to the car. She’d dress it at home. But even this close to Thanksgiving, it wouldn’t end up on the Swenstad holiday table.
They never eat turkey on Thanksgiving, she said.
“We like ham.”
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