by Jay Cassell
I cannot say that it happens all that often, but sometimes a turkey will fly down, go off in one direction, and then for some unknown reason turn around and come back. I really don’t know what causes him to do it, there is even a strong possibility in my mind that it may not be the same turkey, but when you have no other prospects, it is worth spending another twenty or thirty minutes on speculation. After all, he went away, you seem to have lost, you can’t lose no loster, and it is sort of like desperation passes to the back of the end zone in the last two seconds.
The second time I yelped, a turkey yelped back that sounded as if he were some two hundred yards east of where I sat. The yelping was coarse enough to have come from a young gobbler but I could not be positive, and many turkeys yelp so much alike that I cannot always tell hens from gobblers. He yelped back three or four times over the next thirty minutes, as best I could tell from exactly the same place, and I became convinced he was a young gobbler still in the tree, willing to answer but unwilling to walk over there and see what was going on, for fear that he might run into an old gobbler whose irritation threshold would be breached by his appearance.
Young gobblers in the spring have a tendency to do this. They are interested, interested enough to answer, sometimes several times. They are generally unwilling to walk over to where you are to explore who you are, and often, if they do come, they will fly over and stay up in a tree after they get there. I have seen one sit in a tree for more than an hour doing just that.
I think they are trying to cover both bases. They can satisfy their curiosity on one hand and stay out of harm’s way on the other, in case there is an old gobbler accompanying the turkey hen doing the yelping. They consider it to be a risk-free form of reconnaissance.
In this particular case, I heard the turkey leave the tree. He flew towards me from the northeast and alighted in a tree about 200 yards to my right front. The second he stopped, almost before he could get his wings folded, there was a single shot and somebody rolled him off the limb. I suspected I knew who it was, but I took the time to go back to my original position to make sure I had left no piece of equipment there, and then worked my way back to the car.
My friend was there, with a twelve-pound yearling gobbler that hadn’t been dead long enough to get stiff, and a recitation of moves, counter moves, position changes and tactics worthy of C. L. Jordan himself, on one of his better days. It was a saga that approached epic proportions, and if you had not known better, you would have been hanging on every word in breathless anticipation.
The trouble was that I knew better because I knew exactly what had happened, and had been prepared to tell him so as soon as I had finished with my congratulations. He never gave me a chance. He launched into his story before I could finish saying, “This is great, Chuck, I’m glad you got one.”
I never did bring up the question of why he was north of the creek when we had agreed he would stay south of it. Robinson Creek at that point is about ankle deep and eight feet wide, but is clearly visible.
I never questioned the breathtaking accounts of gobble and double gobble, of strut and drum, of coming in and going back, none of which I heard, just as I had heard none of his calling which had caused the turkey to turn and come in at the final call. All of which constitutes highly unusual behavior patterns and uncharacteristic actions for a twelve-pound yearling gobbler with button spurs and a three-inch beard. A bird that had the distinctive four or five feathers that stick three inches beyond the rest of the tail feathers, like every other twelve-pound jake in Monroe county. A bird that had yelped three times in the last forty minutes, and a bird that I seen him shoot out of a tree fifteen minutes ago.
What I did feel was a distinct pang of envy at the level of creative skill required to be able to come up with an Odyssey equal to the one I was hearing, in the fifteen minutes of time he had available for its composition.
American literature is poorer because of his passing.
The point of this little trip down memory lane is to leave you with a word of warning—not advice, mind you—simply a note for self-preservation. As you begin the business of hunting alone, you will find that it is pretty much like I said earlier. Nobody but you will be there at the demise of the turkey, so your report of the encounter becomes the only verifying evidence.
I am aware that a beginning hunter comes under a degree of pressure, largely pressure that he brings on himself. You have spent all this beginning apprenticeship in the company of someone else, or, if you have undertaken to teach yourself the business with no help at all, you finally get to a point where you begin to feel that a degree of success is mandatory. Unless you want people to believe you are a complete klutz, then it becomes mandatory for you to have a success every once in a while. None of this is unusual, you have assessed the situation correctly, and in the beginning you take them any way you can get them. Everybody understands how these things go and almost nobody is going to confront you with questions and accusations.
There is no intention on my part to insist that every story you tell be restricted to matters of petrified truth with no embellishment. There is an old story that it is a poor piece of cloth that cannot be improved with a touch of embroidery.
But you ought to keep things within the realm of reason.
Take every lucky turkey that circumstances offer you. This means you are going to get some turkeys you did not earn, but, on the contrary, you are going to be shut out of a great many turkeys that you did earn, but that unfortunate circumstances conspired to deny you that final opportunity to pull the trigger. Some of these denials will be your fault, some of them will not.
Just remember to keep the thing believable, be it bad luck or good.
A first turkey, like the one in the story above, does not require that you make the call-up and terminal shot rival Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg in pure melodrama. It would have been far more appropriate for the man in this instance to simply say, “The damn thing just flew up and lit in a tree and when he did I rolled him out. I had been calling for thirty minutes but I honestly don’t know whether he came to my calling or not.”
I knew he had not been calling for thirty minutes, but I would have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he had been calling softly and I had missed it.
It doesn’t matter. The turkey lies in the back of the truck and the score is now Turkeys 234, Hunters 1. Every old turkey hunter in the world will understand. All the decent human beings among them will approve.
The first turkey you shoot alone—what the hell, the first two dozen turkeys—can come any way they want to. After that point you are supposed to be largely grown up. At that point, it is expected that you should stop cutting corners, turn in your acolyte’s badge, apply for journeyman papers, and become a decent, law-abiding member of the lodge.
I never told the story you just read before now, because I had to wait for one of the principal characters to pass on so that he would not be embarrassed. The fact that I heard the turkey as well as my friend, and saw him light in the tree before the shot, simply solidified it. All those comments about the turkey gobbling and double gobbling and going away, and coming back, would ring falsely to an old hunter.
Jakes gobble very seldom. Those that do are just learning how, are uneasy in doing it, know that an old gobbler who hears them is apt to come over there and teach them the error of their ways, and the whole set of particulars in this first kill, as reported, was out of context.
This man cheated himself, because he told a lie about his first turkey, and that first one, the first one that you do for yourself, not one that someone has presented to you, is an event to be cherished and needs no embellishment.
Understand now, I am not against lies per se. All turkey hunters lie. As one, you are just as entitled to stretch things as any other member of the lodge. If you choose, you can make yourself more of a hero in the affair than you really were, but you have to remember the hallmarks of an artistic lie.
An artistic lie is well-documented, believable, possible, and the liar should not be the hero in the affair. He can share that glory if he chooses, but he cannot be the sole owner.
Before you disregard this piece of advice as out-of-hand drivel you should remember one thing. In this particular matter you should be aware that you are listening to an expert in the field.
Excerpted with permission from the author’s newest book, A Fork In the Road. To order a copy, go to www.tomkellyinc.net.
The Turkey Cure
SYDNEY LEA
By now, nearly every time I walked down to let my pointers out, I flushed the broadwing hen who nests in the same white pine each spring. She’s always been a sort of genie of renewal, and the life force in me surges to regard her tail in flight, the severity of its black and white bands somehow metaphorizing the distinction between seasons. Dark winter, bright spring.
This year, thanks to last autumn’s bountiful mast, the chipmunk and red squirrel populations seem to have grown threefold, a great thing for a hawk, of course, and for all the other predators—fox, coyote, fisher, and so on—whose energy has thrilled me from boyhood. And yet this time around, such tokens of regeneration, and others—loosing of freshets, budding out of broadleafs, sweet ruckus of peepers, patrol of kingfishers—none of these quickened me as before. My tendency to foist poetic readings onto nature, however irresistible, struck me as more than ever inaccurate in its willfulness.
Perhaps the suicide, a year back, kept me down like this, as it had all through the winter. The beautiful boy, my oldest son’s bosom friend, had fallen into a contemporary trap, the one called crack, and ended in a California closet, a cheap belt for a noose. But if that horror proved a central motive for my long depression, I might have chosen from a myriad: the obscene death by cancer, say, of my father-in-law, too weak at the last even to cough for himself. A brilliant, handsome, volatile man, he’d stuck to being a journalism professor, loathing the job for the final decade, waiting out retirement age, at which he was diagnosed all but instantly. No time for his many writing intentions, none for the book-length thing on that Canadian copper mine, the history, sociology, mythology of its region, which he’d never visit after all.
Or I could batten on my mother’s life-threatening aortal operation, from which she recovered, but which forecast the closing of a crucial cycle: she who’d borne would leave me. Years before the surgery, I’d had an odd vision, whether in sleep or awake I still can’t say. Standing on the cobbly stoop of my Maine hunting camp, I looked upward and beheld the heavens’vault sealing itself like a womb after birth, so that it couldn’t recur, the dream of reentry that all through life any child will crave when otherwise comfortless.
Closed out. The world blank as a sheet of paper, as the sheet unmarked by my wife’s father. In which blank realm my role would be to evaluate students’ poems and fictions, not to write any more of these myself, not to write anything at all. Rather, I’d continue to fetch and carry my kids, but would be no proper father, down in the mouth all day and night; no proper husband, either, to the woman too good for me by half, who deserved worship, probably, but at the least some friendship. My agenda? Do dishes. Cook so-so meals by the hundred. Watch the years mount: the yellow leaves of spring apparently stained overnight to those other yellows of autumn; the hare gone white from brown in a blink; warbler ceding to snowbird. Watch my body slump. Fifty would be sixty would be seventy. Tomorrow.
Attending all this, a changed prospect on the hunt. I’d long considered myself, particularly, one of the better grouse men I knew, but by virtue of a chainsaw accident that radically cut my leg and my woods time in the preceding fall and by virtue of a rock-bottom bird population in the past few years, the tasty little monuments to success lay more and more seldom in the freezer. It was also hard to make a young dog under these circumstances, and a made dog has forever been an even more important sort of monument.
In short, I was beginning to surmise that my skills in this formerly sacramental portion of existence were dying, like men and women all around me. If there’d been a time when I was one to whom—as a student of the great Aldo Leopold marveled about him—“the game just seemed to come,” that time was fled.
The blank—and the random. Absences and murderous presences. Death as multifold, a gang of thugs who killed by hanging or by instilling mortal illness, who invited the potentially lethal scalpel. Death, whose many incursions seemed perfectly analogized by the awful crop-pings-up of so-called development in my hunting grounds. Such grounds, or so in my vanity I’d for decades imagined, belonged to me. To me and my dogs. Me and my prey. Me and my friends, so many of them either perished now or diminished or otherwise moved on, out of my ken.
The first morning of Vermont ’s turkey season, I had practically to horsewhip myself out of bed, sensing my failure before the fact, anticipating my fatigue, which would set in by noon and put me behind in my journeyman jobs. I’d have held such tiredness in contempt, of course, in naive youth, when a duck blind at dawn segued into seven hours afield behind a pair of gun dogs and then into an evening’s carousing till the small hours.
The hardwoods did look beautiful at the top of the first ridge, their leaves pastel, their every storey melodious with migrants. The abandoned twitch roads were so thickly clotted by bluets as still to seem snow-covered. Black duck and mallard croaked in the spring pools. Wake-robin already showed in wet gullies.
There was also a lovesick barred owl chanting not far off. No turkey answered that owl’s call, however, nor my own imitation of it. For a month, there’d been sign all over the four good ridges I meant to roam that opening morning: I’d seen a gobbling jake within a hundred yards of my house; I’d heard other gobblers on the west side of the pond that bisects my property. But on that day, no response. None, that is, save the owl’s. Defying its reputation for wisdom, the bird luffed in over my head, perched a spell in a sick butternut, went out disenchanted. And so, given the late drift of my spirits, it was easy, too easy, to construct crude allegory: the world had ceased answering me . . . or had come to answer in inappropriate ways.
I trudged home well before the law said I had to.
Work and parenthood conspired to keep me off those ridges for another ten days. Or so I told myself. In fact, I felt the depressive’s gratitude for such impediment, which freed me to moan with self-pity over being thus deprived but left me with no obligation to take up the thing I was deprived of. The best of two bad worlds.
And yet at length I did feel some sort of obligation once more to mount the hills. A better self (inside this worse) had retained some of an old and glorious hope, in however ghostly a guise. And the better self had its reasons: immediately on reaching the granite dune that caps the first ridge, I was greeted with a gobble. The call must instantly have obscured my melancholies, since I don’t remember their weight in the ensuing hour. I do remember surveying the terrain around me, simultaneously judging with my damnably poor, gun-shot ears the location of the tom. I would need to drop to his elevation if I hoped to call him in.
Well, I knew the country if anyone did. I turned directly away from the gobble, which now came with a heartening frequency, doglegged to a twitch road that ran under a knoll to the west, and then crept back, the knoll covering me till the road petered out by the white oak stand in which I guessed my turkey strutted. The guess was pretty close: he was on the woods’ far margin, some two hundred yards from where I quickly set up, my back to a lichened slab, my right foot pointed in his direction, the Browning on my cocked left knee, the veil slipped over my face.
I decided for a start to try no more than a soft, whimpering chirp. It was early, the sky not yet even pearlescent. The turkey yammering right back at me (or so I thought), I whiffed an ozonic scent that I needn’t describe to any hunter of wary game; my heart beat in a full, shirt-stretching cadence, and—despite the chill of a northcountry dawn—sweat drops formed on my cheekbones. I slightly lessened the crook of my left leg,
to see if it would hold more still in a different position. It did.
Everything perfect. And yet, rather than coming my way, the tom kept working south, meanwhile moving up an elevation. I was patient. I didn’t over-call or hasten to relocate. Minutes passed, the bird’s cackle fading by degrees, before I made myself take stock of the land again. At last I stood, then circled back to the east, for I knew another hill-hidden trail, the beat of deer and occasional moose, that would provide quiet and easy travel and would put me back on top, about parallel, I believed, with where the turkey now sang.
Again and again I established myself at what appeared ideal places. Again and again I heard the quarry’s noise dim, always to the south. So in fact, and in honesty: there were moments when my mopery returned; everything, I told myself, was right about this chase . . . except that I didn’t have the requisite skills to end it the way I meant to end it. But I rallied from these instants of despair: I had enough experience to realize that were the problem only in my calling, this tom would long since have spooked, long since have quit gobbling.
In time I judged the problem lay in the bird’s already having a hen, and likely more than one. If I were to get a look at him, then, it would be by way not of deception but of ambush. Unable to turn him, I’d need to head him off.
Most of the ridges on my property run more or less north and south, but one is perpendicular to these. It occurred to me that—turkeys so often describing a circle in their morning rambles—this tom and his coterie night well come to that odd ridge out, turning east along it to regain the highest ridge of all, the one where they’d probably roosted. If that bet proved right, the bird would have to travel an almost knife-thin granite strip some hundred yards above the south end of the pond. A good lie for me, then.
