Although Get
Out and Go Hunting has taken a brief hiatus (forced by the fact that I have a
cripplingly busy winter schedule with my real job; this blogging doesn’t
exactly pay the bills), fear not for I have returned just in time for
Christmas.
Consider
this my gift to you. A last-minute,
thoughtless gift that you probably won’t really use and one you will have a
hard time re-gifting to others. I’m
sorry in advance.
My pining
for turkey hunting has come early this year, and I cannot precisely pinpoint
the source. Usually I don’t get all
antsy to be sitting under a tree on a verdant spring morning until sometime in
the frozen depths of February, but this year, I’ve just been sitting around in
the evenings, and the mornings, and the lunch hours just reminiscing about
gobblers. So to slake my anxiety I’m
going to recall stories about my five favourite gobblers.
Today, I
will share the tall tale of the first gobbler I ever shot solo.
I came late
to turkey hunting. Ontario had been
offering a spring gobbler season in one form or another for almost twenty years
before I started in 2007. My Dad had
been after them for many years by that time and had a nice few gobbler tailfans
already nailed to the drywall in the garage, with the year and date of their
harvest scrawled beneath each one. In
that first rookie turkey season for me I made a whack of mistakes, spooked a
bunch of birds, called too much, and nearly got skunked before Dad and I had a
frantic tandem kill on a public land turkey (the tale of which will serialized
here for posterity at a later date).
Still, even though I had come into turkey hunting later in my life, I
was hooked completely with the experience.
Early spring mornings lured me in, but thundering gobbles and intense
close-range longbeard action cemented the addiction.
In 2008 I
was focused, and I swore that I wasn’t going to find a way to cock up shooting
a longbeard that year, but by the second last weekend of the season I had so
far failed even in that respect. I had
bumped two gobblers, shot over the head of a third at 35 steps, and had one
sneak in silently behind me and gobble in my ear at just ten paces. I was beginning to think that like my deer
hunting career, my enthusiasm and early promise were going to be false indicators of
success as a turkey hunter.
The second
last weekend of the 2008 season was in reality the last weekend for me, with my
wife’s sister getting married the following Saturday, and with my work schedule
not allowing any other days off to ramble after a strutter. It was crunch time.
My Dad, my
brother, and I made our way to a local landowners bush lot early that Saturday
morning, and in the dawn I worked some light yelping on a mouth diaphragm. Not getting much response, I reached for my
box call and sawed away a slightly more aggressive string of raspy yelps, with
a bit of cutting thrown in.
Nothing.
I laid the
calls down and slumped at the base of a pile of old, balled up page wire fence
and discarded tree limbs. I was set up
inside a field edge facing north, and the sun rose slowly over my right
shoulder; a treeline separated the field I was sitting on from another
un-huntable field further north, but aside from the distant braying of Canada
geese and the morning serenades of the sparrows and finches, the woods and
fields were quiet. I was still of the
neophyte opinion that every yelp I made should get a response and to hear my
calls dissipate into the air without a lusty gargle from a fired up tom turkey
was disheartening. Some time passed,
twenty or thirty minutes perhaps, and then I heard a faint gobble from beyond
the northern tree barrier, or at least I thought I heard one. Moments later I heard two gobbles from the
same spot, only these were closing the distance to me. I don’t remember with precision what time it
was that this happened, and I can’t even really remember the exact spot these
calls originated from, but I do remember very deliberately reaching down and
picking up my box call to yelp back, and before I even finished the string of
notes, I was rebuked with what I was swore were three hefty shouts from beyond
the treeline in front of me. But that
couldn’t be, we hadn’t seen three gobblers together on this property, or any
adjacent ones, all year.
Still it sounded
like ‘they’ were coming.
I laid down
the box call and positioned myself with two hands on my Remington 870; it was
not mounted to my shoulder but I was ready in case it had to be. One turkey popped out of the trees at a fast
walk about two hundred yards away. I was elated to have had some interest in my
calling. Then another one hopped out of
the woods behind it and flapped its wings before falling in line behind the
first. I was even more excited…I mean,
TWO GOBBLERS! I had called up two
gobblers! When a third came out of the
woods in full strut, I think I whispered a silent thank you to the turkey
hunting gods. As the trio of longbeards
began making their way arduously across the field towards me, I very (very!)
slowly began inching the gun to my shoulder.
I had a monopod attached to the barrel, and it was already in the down
position so I had a limit to how far I could swing from left to right, but the
birds were making good headway in my direction so I was not worried.
They closed
to within 100 yards or so, all the while alternating between gobbling and
strutting and spinning, before hanging out at that distance for about ten
minutes. They then began marching a line
parallel to my position until they were right in front of me, but still at least
fifty yards from being in range. By then
I was getting worried. If they slid any more to my right, I’d have
to move to put a bead on them, and with my monopod rooted to the spot that was
a task that would be difficult to execute without spooking them into the next
township. I was distinctly aware of a
few trickles of sweat inspired more by the circumstances than the pleasingly
warm May morning as they rolled down my cheek, and my one foot was beginning to
go tingly from being tucked under my other leg for some time. My arms and shoulders were just glorious
though, I had that damned monopod to thank for their freshness.
I made a
light yelp and cluck on my mouth call and all three birds hammered back
simultaneously, making any adrenaline response I had been having kick into
overdrive. I was filled with a sickly
sweet anticipation that I have come to know very well since; it is the
excitement of anticipation mixed with the absolute dread of buggering
everything up. It was intoxicating, and
for a moment I was afraid to blink or exhale, lest those wary birds make me for
the predator I was and have them make tracks elsewhere.
Then, glory
of glories, one of the birds started to break the line and walk my way, this
made another bird start over as well.
The third compatriot, not wanting to be left out, tried to run ahead of
the other two and in short order I had three longbeards bouncing their way
towards me at a dead run, gobbling the whole time.
I slid the
safety off silently.
All three
broke into a strut in a phalanx at roughly thirty yards and the monopod held my
bead in a space between two of them. I was
beginning to rue attaching that contraption to my gun. The gobbler that to my
eye was the largest jumped and swung a wing at one of the others and both the
subordinate birds broke strut. It was
fascinating to see the pecking order so instantly displayed, and while the one
bird stayed in strut safely to my right in a spot where my monopod wouldn’t
allow me to get to him, the other two birds began clucking and purring
inquisitively. I had only called two or
three times since they had broken into the field, but they had marched and
trotted right to the exact spot where their ears told them a hen should be waiting.
Since I had
no decoy, the birds saw no hen, and I could tell that the two subordinate
gobblers were becoming a little agitated by this, since the tone of their
purring and clucking was becoming more, shall I say, urgent. The big fella just strutted and spun in one
spot the whole time. As the two other
birds putted around I noticed that one of them was on a path to walk directly
in front of my gun barrel, while the other began picking at some new grass on
the field edge. I figured quickly that the spot the one bird would pass would be well in range and just as he approached
that spot were the vectors were to converge I bore down on the bead. That slightest movement made him lift his head to full
periscope and he looked back over his shoulder towards the strutter.
It was the
last thing he ever saw.
At the bark
of the gun, the strutter leapt into flight and flew over my head into the bush
at a height of no more than ten yards. Had
he been a Canada goose, I could have dumped him easily. But he wasn’t a goose and the law says we can
only shoot one turkey per day in Ontario so I listened to his wingtips tickle the
trees as he powered out of earshot. The
other gobbler alarm putted and gobbled off through the low brush to my right,
and I watched his shiny black back merge into the woods and fade off into the
sun-dappled understory behind me.
A still,
black form was laying in the grass at the field edge, with the white bars of
one wing held up stiffly like a signal flag.
I slid the safety back on, stood and slowly paced off the distance to
the lifeless bird. At twenty five steps
I put my bootheel on his neck and grabbed his legs below the spur. He lamely flogged my shin with his wing for a
moment, but he was soon still again. It
was all just too much for me, and standing there with shotgun in one hand and
gobbler in the other I let out a war whoop that came from some previously
untapped part of my brain.
I was a
turkey hunter right then. Before I had
been in practice, an apprentice at the feet of mentors and magazines and often
contradictory advice and opinion, but at that moment I’d tasted solo success and no
matter what the future held I knew I had that one moment forever. I’ve been hunting after and writing about gobblers for six
seasons since then and I’ve shot other birds since, but I still haven’t found
the words that adequately define that moment of ‘the first time’.
I probably
won’t ever have another hunt like that, and in some ways I hope that’s the
case. That ‘first time’ was just too
picture perfect to sully it with duplication.
As a footnote, that blasted monopod has not been re-attached to my gun since.
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