The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  Dade and I parted for the time. I went off toward the marsh, whistling an old song. I wanted to have the gobbler put a little more distance between himself and the poacher. Besides, I felt that it was right of me to do this: for while I was on my own land, my visitor was trespassing. I hung around in the scrub—oak thickets for awhile; but no gun spoke out, I knew that the old gobbler’s intelligence plus my whistling game had “foiled the relentless” Dade. It was a week later that the three of us met again.

  Not far from the peanut field there is a plantation corner. Now, most plantation corners are graveyards; that is, cemeteries of the old days, where slaves were buried. Occasionally now Negroes are buried there, but pathways have to be cut through the jungle-like growths to enable the cortege to enter.

  Such a place is a wilderness for sure. Here grow towering pines, mournful and moss-draped. Here are hollies, canopied with jasmine-vines; here are thickets of myrtle, sweet gum, and young pines. If a covey of quail goes into such a place, you might as well whistle your dog off and go after another lot of birds.

  Here deer love to come in the summer, where they can hide from the heat and the gauze-winged flies. Here in the winter is a haunt for woodcock, a good range (for great live-oaks drop their sweet acorns) for wild turkeys, and a harbor for foxes. In those great pines and oaks turkeys love to roost. It was on the borders of just such a corner that I roosted the splendid gobbler.

  It was a glowing December sunset. I had left the house an hour before to stroll the plantation roads, counting (as I always do) the number of deer and turkey tracks that had recently been made in the soft damp sand. Coming near the dense corner, I sat against the bole of a monster pine. I love to be a mere watcher in woodlands as well as a hunter.

  About two hundred yards away there was a little sunny hill, grown to scrub-oaks. They stood sparsely; that enabled me to see well what I now saw. Into my vision, with the rays of the sinking sun gleaming softly on the bronze of his neck and shoulders, the great gobbler stepped with superb beauty. Though he deigned to scratch once or twice in the leaves, and peck indifferently at what he thus uncovered, I knew he was bent on roosting; for not only was it nearly his bedtime, but he seemed to be examining with critical judgment every tall tree in his neighborhood.

  He remained in my sight ten minutes; then he stepped into a patch of gallberries. I sat where I was. I tried my best to be as silent and as motionless as the bodies lying in the ancient graves behind me. The big fellow kept me on the anxious bench for five minutes. Then he shot his great bulk into the air, beating his ponderous way into the huge pine that seemed to sentry that whole wild tract of woodland.

  I marked him when he came to his limb. He sailed up to it and alighted with much scraping of bark with his No. 10 shoes. There was my gobbler poised against the warm red sky of that winter twilight. It was hard to take my sight from him; but I did so in order to get my bearings in relation to his position. His flight had brought him nearer to me than he had been on the ground. But he was still far out of gun-range.

  There was no use for me to look into the graveyard, for a man cannot see a foot into such a place. I glanced down the dim pinewood road. A moving object along its edge attracted my attention. It skulked. It seemed to flit like a ghostly thing from pine to pine. But, though I was near a cemetery, I knew I was looking at no “haunt.” It was Dade Saunders.

  He had roosted the gobbler, and he was trying to get up to him. Moreover, he was at least fifty yards closer to him than I was. I felt like shouting to him to get off my land; but then a better thought came. I pulled out my turkey call.

  The first note was good, as was intended. But after that there came some heartstilling squeaks and shrills. In the dusk I noted two things; I saw Dade make a furious gesture, and at almost the same instant the old gobbler launched out from the pine, winging a lordly way far across the graveyard thicket. I walked down slowly and peeringly to meet Dade.

  “Your call’s broke,” he announced.

  “What makes you think so?” I asked.

  “Sounds awful funny to me,” he said; “more than likely it might scare a turkey. Seen him lately?” he asked.

  “You are better at seeing that old bird than I am, Dade.”

  Thus I put him off; and shortly thereafter we parted. He was sure that I had not seen the gobbler; and that suited me all right.

  Then came the day of days. I was up at dawn, and when certain red lights between the stems of the pines announced daybreak, I was at the far southern end of the plantation, on a road on either side of which were good turkey woods. I just had a notion that my gobbler might be found there, as he had of late taken to roosting in a tupelo swamp near the river, and adjacent to these woodlands.

  Where some lumbermen had cut away the big timber, sawing the huge short-leaf pines close to the ground, I took my stand (or my seat) on one of these big stumps. Before me was a tangle of undergrowth; but it was not very thick or high. It gave me the screen I wanted; but if my turkey came out through it, I could see to shoot.

  It was just before sunrise that I began to call. It was a little early in the year (then the end of February) to lure a solitary gobbler by a call; but otherwise the chance looked good. And I am vain enough to say that my willow box was not broken that morning. Yet it was not I but two Cooper’s hawks that got the old wily rascal excited.

  They were circling high and crying shrilly over a certain stretch of deep woodland; and the gobbler, undoubtedly irritated by the sounds, or at least not to be outdone by two mere marauders on a domain which he felt to be his own, would gobble fiercely every time one of the hawks would cry. The hawks had their eye on a building site; wherefore their excited maneuvering and shrilling continued; and as long as they kept up their screaming, so long did the wild gobbler answer in rivalry or provoked superiority, until his wattles must have been fiery red and near to bursting.

  I had an idea that the hawks were directing some of their crying at the turkey, in which case the performance was a genuine scolding match of the wilderness. And before it was over, several gray squirrels had added to the already raucous debate their impatient coughing barks. This business lasted nearly an hour, until the sun had begun to make the thickets “smoke off ” their shining burden of morning dew.

  I had let up on my calling for awhile; but when the hawks had at last been silenced by the distance, I began once more to plead. Had I had a gobbler-call, the now enraged turkey would have come to me as straight as a surveyor runs a line. But I did my best with the one I had. I had answered by one short gobble, then by silence.

  I laid down my call on the stump and took up my gun. It was in such a position that I could shoot quickly without much further motion. It is a genuine feat to shoot a turkey on the ground after he has made you out. I felt that a great moment was coming.

  But you know how hunter’s luck sometimes turns. Just as I thought it was about time for him to be in the pine thicket ahead of me, when, indeed, I thought I had heard his heavy but cautious step, from across the road, where lay the companion tract of turkey-woods to the one I was in, came a delicately pleading call from a hen turkey. The thing was irresistible to the gobbler; but I knew it to be Dade Saunders. What should I do?

  At such a time a man has to use all the headwork he has. And in hunting I had long since learned that that often means not to do a darn thing but to sit tight. All I did was to put my gun to my face. If the gobbler was going to Dade, he might pass me. I had started him coming; if Dade kept him going, he might run within hailing distance. Dade was farther back in the woods than I was. I waited.

  No step was heard. No twig was snapped. But suddenly, fifty yards ahead of me, the great bird emerged from the thicket of pines. For an instant the sun gleamed on his royal plumage. My gun was on him, but the glint of the sun along the barrel dazzled me. I stayed my finger on the trigger. At that instant he made me out. What he did was smart. He made himself so small that I believed it to be a second turkey. Then he ran crouching thro
ugh the vines and huckleberry bushes.

  Four times I thought I had my gun on him, but his dodging was that of an expert. He was getting away; moreover, he was making straight for Dade. There was a small gap in the bushes sixty yards from me, off to my left. He had not yet crossed that. I threw my gun in the opening. In a moment he flashed into it, running like a racehorse. I let him have it. And I saw him go down.

  Five minutes later, when I had hung him on a scrub-oak, and was admiring the entire beauty of him, a knowing, cat-like step sounded behind me.

  “Well, sir,” said Dade, a generous admiration for the beauty of the great bird overcoming other less kindly emotions, “so you beat me to him.”

  There was nothing for me to do but to agree. I then asked Dade to walk home with me so that we might weigh him. He carried the scales well down at the 25-pound mark. An extraordinary feature of his manly equipment was the presence of three separate beards, one beneath the other, no two connected. And his spurs were respectable rapiers.

  “Dade,” I said, “what am I gong to do with this gobbler? I am alone here on the plantation.”

  The pineland poacher did not solve my problem for me.

  “I tell you,” said I, trying to forget the matter of the five velveted bucks, “some of the boys from down the river are going to come up on Sunday to see how he tastes. Will you join us?”

  You know Dade Saunders’ answer; for when a hunter refuses an invitation to help eat a wild turkey, he can be sold to a circus.

  The Central Character

  TOM KELLY

  We now have come to the central character of the work, the reason we are all here, the turkey himself. I will spend only a modest amount of time in discussions of food and habitat, the specifics of his life cycle, population dynamics, etc, etc. Every bit of this either has been done or is being done by competent biologists, and there are literally thousands of words in print about almost every aspect of a turkey’s life and habits. Since this essay is designed to be a manual for the beginning hunter, I will spend very little time in statistics but will concentrate on the probable reaction of turkeys to various stimuli or, to put it more simply, why does he act like he does, and what can you do to get him to do what you want, rather than simply accepting what he does as gospel and trying to fit your actions around his.

  A lot of turkey hunting follows just this line of endeavor and has been following it for some time. The hunter makes no real effort to adjust the movement of turkeys. He tries to find out what the turkey wants to do, goes to one of the places the turkey usually visits in doing this, and waits for the quarry to arrive. The only method he uses to get the turkey to react to a situation is to use bait.

  Back in my vanished youth, before the advent of television, nearly every kid of my acquaintance went to the cowboy movies on Saturday afternoon. A kid got in for a dime, most of the Saturday afternoon shows were double features, and many of them had one of the episodes of a 15 chapter serial that was shown between the movies. Usually the serial was not a western, although when it was, you got a solid three hours of the old west. None of the westerns, known to us locals as cowboy shows, bothered their heads with any smidgen of deep sociological drama, or boy-girl relationships. The love interest was usually between the hero and his horse. There was always lots of gunfire, fist fights in saloons, stagecoach robberies, cattle stampedes, and Indian uprisings. Plots were pretty straightforward and familiar. In fact, Republic Pictures, a Hollywood studio that made a great many of these horse operas, had a particular outcropping of rock in one of its locations that was shown so often it became familiar, and every kid in the theater recognized it.

  Posses galloped past these rocks. Indians attacked wagon trains in the flat just below them. The hero and his second lead often hid behind this same old set of rocks to fight off the assault of the bad guys while they waited for the arrival of the U.S. Cavalry.

  In addition to a similarity of scenery there were a good many instances where situations seen in one epic repeated themselves in another, repeated themselves to the extent of using the same familiar names.

  In story after story, after the bad guys had robbed the bank, or rustled the cattle, or burned down the ranch house leaving the rancher wounded in the shoulder and his daughter crying and wringing her hands, there would be a scene in front of the Sheriffs office, which was always a door or two down the street from the saloon.

  The scene always featured the formation of the posse. The posse may have been officially led by the Sheriff but it always placed itself under the tactical command of the hero, and the final line in nearly every formation process, the last thing said before the posse galloped off in pursuit in of the outlaws was,

  “We’ll cut ‘em off at Eagle Pass.”

  Until very early in the 1950s, most of the turkeys killed in the States of Alabama and Mississippi, were killed the same way. The hunters cut the turkeys off at Eagle Pass and ambushed their ass after they got there.

  The rocks were not like the Republic Pictures rocks as seen on consecutive Saturday afternoons, and the ambush weapons were not single-action Colt 45s, that shot three-inch, six-shot groups at 200 yards, like the Colts used in Republic Pictures did, but the tactical principles were identical.

  Almost all deer hunts in those days were driven hunts, with a collection of eight to ten drivers, a couple of dozen hounds, and up to forty or fifty standers spaced along the boundary of the property being hunted. All the standers were armed with shotguns, rifles of any caliber were expressly forbidden, and the hunt master’s instructions before the drive specifically instructed the standers to shoot buck deer, turkey gobblers, and wildcats. Most standers kept one barrel loaded with buckshot and one with 5s or 6s, and it is very likely that seventy-five percent of the legal turkeys killed in the two states between 1925 and 1955 were killed on deer drives.

  A lot of turkeys were killed at baited trenches, because the chufa patch, the present day legal equivalent of baiting, had not yet been invented, so many blinds were built in pea fields, and near feed lots or catch pens. But what it all really amounted to was that part of the party lay in ambush at Eagle Pass while the other part drove the turkeys to it, or by a judicious use of bait, artificial Eagle Passes were created and the guns simply lay in ambush there and waited for the turkeys to arrive.

  The principles of scattering fall turkeys and calling the drove back together, or the art of calling gobbling turkeys from the roost in the Spring were known, but they were considered prohibitedly difficult. There were not many turkeys to begin with, it was felt that every succeeding year there would be less, and the general consensus was one of, “I better get mine while the getting’s good.”

  Even now, years after re-establishment has occurred, a lot of the same kind of thing still goes on.

  There are still turkeys being killed from car windows. There are still blinds built at the edge of chufa patches, blinds being occupied from 1:00 P. M. until sundown by people who yelp once every thirty minutes. There are still boats running the river, trying to find turkeys on sand bars, and then beaching the boat on the bar, leaving the motor running, and the occupants going over the bar and through the willows, in line abreast with guns at high port. Turkeys are going to be ambushed and turkeys are going to be surrounded, and rushed. There will always be corners cut, and people willing to cut them.

  The reason for most of this is that turkey hunting is such a solitary and private sport—a turkey killed on the fair and square is such a difficult trophy—that many people are willing to make unfortunate arrangements. And because of this signal lack of witnesses, when you are standing at the tailgate of the truck, or the boat landing, or on the steps of the clubhouse in front of the photographer, the bystanders are going to have to take your unsupported word as to what the dead turkey was doing when you shot him.

  There is a set of thought processes that are all too prevalent, and a segment of society in existence, that simply have to make a four-star production out of a piece of luck.
Every turkey some people bring in has to have been a classic. A duel between Holmes and Moriarty, or a combination of Horatius at the Bridge and the Charge of the Light Brigade.

  Most of the time a person who specializes in these epics is going to get away with it, but there will be instances where they won’t. Let me lay on you a true story, now forty-some years old, and all the participants but me have gone to that great roost tree in the sky. It is the story of a man’s first turkey and I would not be telling it now except for the fact that it may help drive home a point, both the man and the turkey protagonists are dead and can remain nameless, and I am the only surviving witness.

  It was in the first week of the spring gobbler season and I was hunting in the company of a man I had known for some years. The individual was a good hunter of other game but was very new to turkeys. He was, as well, one of those people who have trouble moving about and finding his way in the woods and no matter what questions you asked later, you could never find out from his answers exactly where he had been and what he had seen.

  When you had agreed to meet back at the truck at such and such a time he was generally a little late, but he was forever coming from a strange direction and you could never get out of him where he had been and why he was approaching from north of the road when you both had agreed where he and you would hunt and he had chosen to go south of the road.

  On this particular morning I had heard a turkey gobble north of the creek on my side, after we had separated. I had gone to the turkey and set up and at the first yelp he gobbled back, and then never made another sound. I gave him the obligatory twenty minutes and then added another ten minutes for lagniappe, and then I decided he had seen something else and flown down to it, although I had not heard him leave the limb. I got up, moved a hundred yards or so in the direction of where he had been when I first heard him gobble, picked a place and sat down, and decided to spend a little time there.