I parked out of the way in the place where a county road and a logging trail met. It seemed like the spot I’d picked out on the map, but it was hard to say. It was still very dark, as four in the morning generally tends to be.
GPS devices existed but it would be a long time before I had one. I had first come to turkey hunting in adulthood, after I was out of school, gainfully employed and happily married, and I was still in the earliest stages of learning what to do about the former and how to balance it with the latter. I had shot turkeys on earlier occasions when others were doing the calling and making all the decisions, but this was going to be one of my first turkey hunts completely alone.
I had a Cody slate I’d practiced on enough to sound mostly like a turkey, a crow call for locating, a repurposed duck gun, a handful of shells, a suit of camo, a map and a compass. The map’s scale was about an inch per two miles, meaning a portion of the map an inch wide by an inch high showed four square miles of territory. As you would imagine, it did not include an excess of detail. Making sure I knew where the boundary lines were was its only use, and that was good enough for me, because I was hunting on the Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge south of Starkville.
After my eyes adjusted to the dark, I set off down the logging trail as quietly as possible. Somewhere to the east, the black of the heavens was turning royal blue, but the sight was lost to me where I was, shaded among tall timber. After a long time walking I stopped to listen. Owls cranked up on their own and, on cue, a turkey gobbled in a tree well ahead and to the right. I followed the road on as it curved in the direction of the bird, trying to gauge at each stop how much closer to get. He and I were both on public ground, so I decided to, quietly and carefully, go for broke. The last time I stopped to listen, I could hear the drum under each note of his gobble. I couldn’t see him in the tree, but he had to be in a big oak, roosted on the side of its trunk away from the trail I was walking, and he had to be roosted alone, otherwise he or another turkey would have seen me for sure. I stepped out of the path on the side away from him and sat down.
As the world continued to wake up, a symphony of other gobblers, jakes, hens, owls and crows carried their tune. I scratched out yelps on my slate from time to time, and he answered some of them. Eventually, the hens that hadn’t roosted in the tree with him walked in on the ground, he flew down to them, gobbled twice more and shut up. I’d heard hens coming in from everywhere. I figured I was beaten.
He was on the other side of a briar thicket and, while I was too far back to see, I was too close to stand up and leave, so I just sat there. After a long time, I heard hens purring, turkeys walking in the leaves and him drumming. I put the gun on my knee, watched his hens walk out onto the trail I’d followed walking in, spotted him through a tangle of saw briars and shot him at about 15 yards. I hadn’t done anything particularly notable, other than go in the first place and not quit at the first opportunity, but I counted him as my first one called in just the same. The hens he was following led him in the direction of the calling they had heard.
If we have to suffer the bad breaks when we do everything right and still lose, we ought to get to smile and congratulate ourselves when we catch one going the other way.
Kevin Tate is the outdoors writer for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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