The Way the Game is Played
Not prone to introspection, a bit concerned as to what I might discover in there, I learned a great deal about myself as I hiked through the turkey woods. I had forgotten what it was like to hunt alone and during the general season. A decade of early youth hunts, when the turkeys are so gullible that you can call them in by rubbing your boots together, had spoiled me!
This year's bad weather seemed to set-back the mating-clock a bit. Here it was, mid-May, and several toms called anxiously from woods and field edges. Problem is, they were all talk! I had conversed with several toms in previous hunts that were willing to gobble every time the striker scratched the call, yet, I could not move to them for various reasons.
Late season may require non-conventional tactics and not everyone is willing to divert from traditional means of collecting a tom turkey. Calling from stationary hides, with a variety of decoys – even expensive taxidermied turkeys - tradition dictates that spot and stalk is not how the game is played!
While talking with a particularly long-winded Thomas, that stubbornly held to property I had no permission to hunt, I detected a few distant replies. They continued to gobble a distant challenge to the off-limits bird and my hen-chatter.
“Ah-Ha”! I knew these birds! In their click-ish rafter they travel back and forth along a field edging a forested glen. The pair of hen-pecked toms refused to commit to our set-up on earlier hunts with kids. The jealous hens would stroll away from calls, pulling the pair of love-sick toms with them, gobbling over a feathery shoulder as they leave. Knowing this, I devised a plan!
It would have worked better to have two hunters, but what the heck?! If I messed up this plan, I could always go back to the previous long-winded tom – still gobbling, by the way. I hiked through the forest to the west of the group and called for several minutes; toms offering scattered replies and hens chattering their displeasure. I then slipped quickly - quietly – back east, through the forest, to head off the "herd of birds".
I realized that I was well ahead of them when the toms let out a sporadic gobbling fit. Sneaking through the trees and brush, I was set for an ambush. I peered from behind a particularly large ponderosa pine and could barely make out that the toms and the group had begun to move! Playing a game of "Red Light - Green Light", only moving as they passed behind cover, worked for a while.
I was running out of cover and the group was spread in a long procession. Soon the lead tom would reach a large opening and, at over 40 yards, would safely pass! In the last bit of cover between us, I knelt toward the opening, gun raised, as the first tom passed through with the rafter of hens.
Still unaware of my presence the lagging tom began to sprint in a desperate attempt to catch up with the rest of the group! Head leaning forward, the runner let-out at a fast turkey trot, bolting 35 – 40 yards, from my right to left! It was the last chance, the only opportunity to make my plan work. I set the bead on its beak, thumbed the safety forward, and the Mossberg pump's 3" magnum round kicked my shoulder! As if dashed against the ground, the turkey pitched, beak-first, into the dirt without a twitch!
In protest some may say, “That’s not how the game is played”! Perhaps I hadn’t fooled them into coming to me in the traditional sense. Rightly fooled, is it less a challenge to out maneuver and, in the end, take a bird on the run? I will let nose-raised purists struggle with that.
And, yet, something was definitely missing. With the back-drop of a tom still gobbling in the distance, I lit a pipe, cut a tag and took pictures to share, later. Hauntingly absent were the high-fives and cheerful banter of companions. The comradery that was part of the turkey hunt. It was then that I realized, that truly, with friends and family, is how the game should be played.
