Word: snow
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Like raccoons, wild turkeys are not really a wilderness animal. They are an edge-of-civilization critter. Deep snow and deep forest defeat them. They gobble insects in the warm months, occasionally in the median strips of rural interstate highways. But they get through winters, or don't, foraging for barberries, rose hips, wild apples, sumac, juniper, sedges and fern. What they really like is corn wastage at winter-bound dairy farms and sunflower seeds policed from beneath suburban bird feeders...
...neighbors across Old Main Street, Carlton and Maggie, regularly throw corn on a big rock in their side yard, and last week the turkey flock they consider their own made its annual reappearance. There are 16 birds this year, hens and gobblers, milling about in an inch of new snow. A parked car doesn't bother them, but if you try to approach on foot, they sound their alarm call, "putt," or "putt-putt," and wander off into the woods in a not very alarmed fashion. Real alarm would send them running at about 25 m.p.h. or flying...
...while federal employees were off duty. West Point cadets, for example, will not earn the sobriquet "The Longhaired Grey Line" after all, now that their barbers are manning the chairs again. Keeping the West Point grounds decently manicured during the shutdown was not a problem, since a blanket of snow had covered the heights above the Hudson River...
...worse weather than this," he said. "All of us experienced people have gone through snow, sleet and rain...
...STRONG SUBSURface themes of Smilla's Sense of Snow, the fine 1993 thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish novelist then new to America, was a slyly expressed contempt for what the author saw as his country's bourgeois self-satisfaction. This much relished contempt and cheerfully malign slyness are the driving forces of Hoeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 356 pages; $24), which has now been issued in the U.S. That said, there's not much similarity between the two novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles...