Turkey: An International Criminal At Large

This past week, a local news station from Manhole, Alabama, reported that a turkey had mysteriously disappeared from a nearby farm. Fieldhand Jim Manimann asserted that the bird had “fled in the night,” mere hours before the annual turkey slaughter would commence in time for Thanksgiving the following week. When he was asked about the turkey’s characteristics, Manimann replied, “Oh, there’s a dark cloud about that one. He’s got his own… aura of gloom and despair. None of the other animals would go near him. Does that make sense? Yeah? We were going to kill that turkey early for our own sanity but it’s like he knew what we were planning. I’m getting chills just thinking about it. We gotta find him before he commits arson or something.”

Manimann’s descriptions were met nearly ten hours after the escape, when reports of a “rampaging gobbler” across central Georgia spread to the authorities. Of the turkey, one frightened man remarked, “He tore through the streets, doing karate on everyone that came close. Like, good karate. Black belt moves.”

Police were alerted as the feathered escapee proceeded to make his way into a nearby office building after his momentary rampage. To the disbelief of the police vehicles in pursuit, he gathered a number of hostages on the building’s roof. As a crowd began to gather beneath the building, jeers and shouts were made at the creature––“Bad turkey!” or “How did he tie those people to a drainage pipe?” and “Where’s turkey John McLane when you need him?” When a police negotiator asked through her microphone, “Why are you doing this? What reason could you possibly have?” the culprit turned its head in a series of motions that could only be interpreted as “Revenge.”

An improvised ransom was quickly paid to the turkey, with nuts and grass being hurled up to the roof of the building. The bird, with what witnesses described as an “approving gobble” lept forth from the structure and miraculously caught the northern wind, graciously gliding through the air away from the gathering crowd below, landing a few blocks away to the confusion of various pedestrians.

According to local farmers, the turkey went on to drive across nearby farmland, freeing his beaked brethren as he went. The escapade has been aptly dubbed by social media as “Les Mis, but turkeys.” Once he freed all of the poultry he could, the bird regressed in a plumed procession into a nearby forest, and has not been sighted by the authorities since.

Ultimately, this series of unfortunate incidents has been cited by US News as the “second most ineffective campaign against a bird since Australia’s Emu War of 1932.” We can only guess what this avian creature will attempt next, for no one could know what bitter machinations lay brewing in that devious fowl’s pea-sized brain. May God have mercy on our souls.