While the
previous two installments here were about birds that worked long, or that were repeat
offenders, this chapter is about a bird that was in my life for all of twenty
minutes, but it was still twenty very intense minutes that taught me a lesson that
I put to good use in future seasons.
Although this bird beat me, what he taught me helped me to kill other
birds after him. This particular hunt
took place on the Bruce Peninsula in 2008, and although I would tangle with a few
other hard-headed gobblers up there in years to come, this was the first time a
longbeard put a good flogging on my psychological state.
It was the
perfect time of the spring season in Ontario.
Sometimes the first week or two is still drab and cold on the Bruce,
with patches of snow in the bush, and the woods shaking off the last lingering
hangover of winter. I’ve been on damp,
chilly, windy hunts under low slate grey skies on those early days, and
although birds can be killed then, I’ve always had my success (or shall we call
it luck?) later on in the season. Late
season can be tough too, with the last week often inordinately warm and the
biting insects really start to feast by then.
But those middle two weeks of the five week spring season are just my
absolute favourite time to be out there, and they are fast approaching pole
position as my all-time favourite part of the hunting calendar, although a
Thanksgiving waterfowl hunt still holds top spot…even if just barely.
I had hunted
a field edge on the family property that Saturday morning in mid-May and had
not heard any turkey activity at all, not even a lonely hen responded to my
flock talk. After sitting from before
dawn until nearly 10am, I made a plan to roam around the hardwoods to the south
of the farm, with the hopes of at worst getting a line on a couple of likely
spots for the rest of the season, and at best of striking a tom turkey with my
calls. I was travelling without a decoy,
and unfortunately, I had left my mouth calls in the farmhouse that morning,
such was my haste to get out into the forest.
But I had a box call and I had a slate, so I made for the hills. My uncle lives in the farm house year round
and he had told us all of sporadic sightings of a nice gobbler as it crossed
from our family property onto adjacent ones and back again throughout the late
winter and into the spring. That
longbeard was just doing what turkeys do, and the hope was that he was still
wandering that local (albeit fairly large) area between the southern limits of
Lion’s Head and the northern edge of the village of Barrow Bay. I had often wandered those fields and trails
as a youth hunting rabbits, I’d chased ducks and geese in a few of them, and
sometimes as a youth I was just hiking around behind my father so I knew my way
around and I knew the properties I could frequent, and the ones I couldn’t. I had a spot or two in mind, for sure.
I made a
large loop of the big woods to the south and east of the farm, calling as I
went along, before coming out just west of a Bruce Trail parking lot. Not a single gobble had rung out, although I did
kick up a few small groups of ruffed grouse and had spent some time watching
two blue jays harass and chase each other through the budding green
treetops. It was a fairly humid,
somewhat grey morning, but sporadically the sun did shine through the
clouds. When I broke out onto a gravel
road, I unloaded my gun and slung it over my shoulder. Walking down the gravel road I resolved to
cross Bruce Road 9 and stop in to a chunk of hardwoods where I had hunted a few
weeks earlier in the season. I had
experienced no action there on that previous day, but it seemed like a good
idea; it would be a logical stop on the loop back to the farm for breakfast at
the very least. Crossing Bruce Road 9 on
the curve south of the Cemetery Road, I popped into the woods, loaded my 870, and
began a slow walk inside the tree line.
I had only walked for about ten minutes when I reached down and pulled
out my box call. I ran a string of seven
or eight yelps on it, and was just reaching down to put it back in my vest when
a gobbler hammered at me. He was close
enough that I could hear him clearly and I yelped once more, peppering a cutt
and cackle into the mix. He hollered
again, and he was closer.
For an
instant I panicked. I had not really put
any thought into what would happen if a turkey answered me and I looked
frantically for a spot to get situated.
I finally found a big stump that just a little shorter than my sitting
profile, but amply wide. I ran the box
call again and once more the gobbler answered.
I was facing a rocky saddle and he seemed to be coming down a little
bush road that came around to the left of it, so I nestled into the stump and
pointed my barrel in that direction. I
was fairly sure that this tom knew that the game was on, and I set down my box
call so that I could secure both hands on the gun. He gobbled again unprovoked, and he was
definitely close, so close that, aside from my heart beating in my ears, I could
hear him walking towards me.
I still had
not laid eyes on him, and when he gobbled again I had another moment of
panic. He seemed to have diverted from
the bush road and he was now sliding towards the other side of the small saddle
to my right. I’m a right-handed shooter,
so that bird going to my right was the worst thing that could have
happened. I secretly wished for a mouth
call, just to see if a few purrs would have straightened out his line, but in
hindsight I realized that he already knew where I was by ear, and that I was going
to have to get creative.
He gobbled
again and it was now obvious that he was going to pop around the bottom of the saddle
in area that I couldn’t swing my gun into.
I’d been in that crossed up position before while deer hunting, and now
I found myself in it again with a fired up longbeard within twenty steps of me.
I resolved
to scooch my behind around the stump so that my gun would point to where he
seemed to be heading. I made a bit of
headway, and I took my hand off the stock and placed it down to stabilize
myself while I shifted. When my hand brushed
and scratched a few leaves the bird went berserk; he bellowed a double-gobble
and literally ran up over the top of the saddle, again in a place where my gun
was not pointing. At least I had a visual
on him now.
For a brief
moment his eyes and mine met; I could see his fiery red head, the top of his
breast feathers, and the upper part of his beard. His head craned back and forth and his body moved
in a jerky, startled fashion for a few steps, and he began to putt loudly. I knew from that sound and body language that
I had just a few short seconds to make my move, so I slid the safety off and
tried to pull the “spin move” on him, hoping to put the bead on his neck and
fire in one seamless motion.
I failed.
While I had
visualized a smooth transition and a peach of a shot, he had dropped off the saddle
and was sprinting back from whence he came before I had even swung halfway to
him; I never even yanked the trigger. He
gobbled as he ran, and I clicked the safety back on and sprinted the small saddle
myself, just in time to see his sleek black back and red legs becoming one with
the underbrush at a distance of nearly 100 yards. I swore, I shook my head, and I sat down on a
rock near to where I had first seen him.
I waited five minutes and ran a long string of yelps on my box
call. Nothing. I looked at my watch: the whole thing had
happened in under half an hour.
I hiked the twenty
minutes back to the farm in that fog of self-loathing and hard, psychological self-analysis
that any failed turkey hunter knows all too well. How had that all gone wrong? I went from having a lusty, willing gobbler
essentially running to my calls to a fleeing bird that had me clumsily sprinting
up a hill in desperation. Even for me
that was “bugger up” of legendary scale.
Then it
dawned on me that I had ‘overthought’ myself into failure. Now this is not something that I am the sole
exclusive owner of; plenty of other hunters overthink. They believe they know better than the
animal, and they try to outsmart a bird that while supremely adapted,
unbelievably wary, and maddeningly unpredictable isn’t really that smart to
begin with. Which actually makes it all
the more frustrating when that gobbler kicks your ass. I’ve always held that the worst thing that
can actually happen when you overthink a gobbler is that you still actually
kill him in spite of your error. This
just goes to cement a practice that is patently absurd.
Turkeys aren’t
smart in the way we think of it. They
are creatures of adaptation and habit, they have wickedly impressive eyesight
and supernatural levels of hearing, and they have a memory and attention to
detail that to my mind is unmatched in the inventory of game animals in
Ontario, and maybe the nation at large.
But they don’t do trigonometry, they don’t use deductive logic, and they
don’t function on an intellectual plane of cause and effect so far as I can
tell. All they have is one reaction to
anything that seems even slightly abnormal: be paranoid and run from it like
hell.
In the days,
weeks, months, and let’s be honest, years since I’ve realized over and over
again the things I did wrong that day, and forgetting my mouth calls on the
table was probably the least of my errors.
First, I was
prospecting for a gobbler with no actual plan of attack should one answer. Now, before calling I map out a few likely scenarios
and setups should one sound off in response.
On that Saturday in mid-May 2008, I may have been better off backing
away slightly to a spot that wasn’t squarely facing a saddle; as I look at it
now, I only had a 33% chance of having my gun in the right place when the bird
popped up; if he came to the wrong side of the saddle I would have been crossed
up, and if he popped over the top (as he did) I would have had to make a move,
which I did and failed at in epic fashion.
Second, I
was trying to be predictive in how the bird would react, and in so doing, I had
actually forced myself into a reactionary situation. By trying to extrapolate (from no facts at
all I might add) how this bird was going to behave on approach, I essentially
put myself in a position that enabled my failure. The goal now is that when a gobbler answers,
I try to put myself in a spot that has several easy outs. This includes concealing myself better,
positioning the gun in a spot that doesn’t have me locked into one area only,
and generally letting the hunt develop a little further before committing to a
shooting lane or a physical position.
But even
then, turkeys will be turkeys, and I’m going to have to suffer them being
frustrating and unpredictable. Because
that’s why I love hunting them.