We’ve all done it. We’ve made mistakes, and I’m not talking about the minor, piffling mistakes of a day-to-day life. I mean big mistakes; errors that cost you a deer, screw-ups that sent that whole flock of turkeys sprinting into the next county, or boneheaded blunders that flare ducks and geese at the last minute.
There are, in my mind, fundamentally two types of ways that hunters screw up. They either forget to do things that would lead to success, or they do things that prevent their success. In both psychology and philosophy there is a whole genre of debate about the same thing, called ‘errors of omission’ and ‘errors of commission’. I am neither psychologist nor philosopher, so I’ll leave the dialectics aside here and just fess up to things I’ve done on both sides of that particular ledger.
This always cathartic.
The constant hope is that you are alone when you commit these boners, so that you can just quietly berate and loathe yourself in solitude. Not always the case, though.
Two years ago, with my then six-year old son in the ditch next to me and four or five good friends in close proximity watching, I missed three layups on geese inside 15 yards. We had been having just a stunner of a morning. We had found a fresh-cut field and piles of willing geese; birds pitched in on almost every pass and we were beginning to make some solid stacks. A group of three spun hard at our calling and flagging, and as they bee-lined for the fakes, they slid ever so slightly to my left. It was obvious that those birds were going to all die together at the business end of my shotgun. I have always fantasized of making a true triple on a trio of decoying geese, and I like to think that my anticipation was the reason I balked hard on the birds. When I rose to shoot the birds still hadn’t made me and I whizzed my first volley over the head of the leading bird…a bird that should have been flaring and climbing. In panic I threw a wasted string of steel somewhere near the same bird, which was now obliging me by flaring hard and climbing rapidly, accompanied by the derisive laughter of my compatriots. The third blast was a true parting shot as the birds were making hasty exits and I ushered them along with a wayward hail of steel BBs. The lads down the ditch were roasting me loudly and thoroughly and I muttered a not so silent curse at myself. My son innocently asked why I missed and I tried to explain myself with a rueful grin on my face. Not my finest moment in the blind, although that evening and the next morning brought some redemption at least.
Sometimes you are alone, but people just have too many questions.
While walking into a tree stand a few years back in deer season I was obviously daydreaming or something and as I approached my ladder I was paying no real attention to my surroundings at all. I crested a small rise and heard a deer snort. Closely. Think inside thirty steps. I snapped my head up and saw a small buck standing broadside against a line of cedars. As I fumbled to throw my rifle to my shoulder he coiled and bounded for the safety of the thicket, while I blasted two cartridges at what I was certain was his front shoulder. After thirty minutes of searching, I found no blood, no hair, no dead deer. The radios we use when out party hunting were crackling with questions, and I passed it off as shots at a wayward coyote. Which way did the coyote come from, they asked. Which way did he go, they asked? Was he a big coyote? A dark one? Was he running fast or just loping along? Was it more than one coyote? How far were your shots? My tapestry of lies became untenable over time and I secretly confided in my cousin. He promptly told everyone, to my chagrin. Now it would seem that I cannot be trusted.
Sometimes you just screw up and just have to own it.
In two consecutive years I’ve missed two spring gobblers, and both times operator error lead to my hubris. I killed an absolute trophy piece of limestone ridge one year, instead of the handsome strutter giving me a full periscope of his head and neck behind it. Last year I blazed a pair of shots at a bird that I was convinced was a mere thirty steps away. On closer inspection he was much nearer to forty-five steps than thirty and I had cocked up an absolutely picture perfect opportunity for my cousin Luke and I to double up on a pair of Bruce Peninsula longbeards. I took that one out on myself particularly hard, almost renouncing my membership in the Tenth Legion on the spot…except we all know that would be an error as well.
I, of course, am not the only hunter who experiences flailing ineptitude. One of my favourite nights in deer camp, once the guns are away and the wine and whiskey flows freely, is hearing the camp elders, truly my heroes of deer hunting and men with countless deer under the belts, regale us all with the tales of their own hilarious failings, of their incomprehensible misses and gaffes, and for a while I don’t feel so crushingly inadequate…although that may have more to do with rye than with my reality.
Nevertheless, to err is truly human, and to miss is the mark of an experienced hunter, or so I’m told by people who really want to spare my fragile ego.
At an hour that was too early, even for a turkey hunter, I rolled over when the farm’s downstairs smoke detector chirped. In an old farm house heated with a wood stove, that sort of things gets your attention. Careful not to wake my peacefully slumbering spouse, I slipped out of bed and glanced at my cell phone, muttering in my head about the apropos fact that my alarm was due to go off in less than ten minutes.
There would be no oversleeping that Saturday morning, and the smoke alarm chirped again as if to confirm my jaded realization.
In the muted glow of my cell phone screen, I doffed my pajamas and donned my camo like a middle-aged ninja before I tip-toed down the stairs and inspected the still-beeping device. The batteries had seemingly given up the ghost and I was in no mood to attempt a pre-dawn repair. I texted my brother to wake up and heard him stirring in the room above the kitchen. I wolfed down a banana and a glass of orange juice, then gathered gun, decoys, and vest before stepping out into the still night.
Because even when using the most liberal application of the word ‘morning’, what I was experiencing at that moment was firmly entrenched in the category of ‘night’.
Eventually my cousin showed up in his truck and we weighed the options. I had been informed that the turkey haunting my preferred location had been killed earlier in the week, so I opted for a second choice where my father, uncle, and several others had been seeing a pair of longbeards. My brother hopped in with my cousin and made for their preferred location in the hopes of doubling up on turkeys. The crunch of the laneway gravel under my tires made way for the smooth hum of pavement, which shortly deferred to crunchy gravel again as I made the short drive to the field. I snuck up a thin line of trees and cedars before deploying my hen and strutter decoy setup. I nestled in between a small round rock and the sinewy mass that was the base of an uprooted tree and I looked at my watch. There were six minutes until legal shooting light. I opened the action to my 870 slowly and when the time came I dropped in a shell before firmly but inaudibly sliding it closed. Gloved fingers slid two more shells in the underside of the gun and I checked the safety as my habit dictates.
Ten minutes after settling in for a long sit, I heard a gobbler sound off from a tree two fields over to the west of my position. As if in response across the road and three fields to the east of me I heard another gobbler. I yelped softly on my box call before turning up the volume and interspersing some cutts and cackles. Nothing answered and the area fell silent. For almost two hours I called and waited for a response, and eventually a jake and two hens showed up. At about the same time I got a text message from my cousin informing me that my brother had killed a beast of a gobbler with two 10 inch beards, a wide tailfan, and daggers for spurs. Shortly after that I watched the hens and jake run off as my compatriots pulled up to the field I was in.
A single text message from my cousin Dane said “Come out”. So I did.
Dane and my brother were parked at the gate next to my vehicle and both were all smiles. My brother’s bird was a real trophy tom and in the hand it was sure to exceed 20 pounds. Officially it was 21.2lbs, with 20 inches of beards and sharp, curved spurs of 1-1/4 inches each. A true brute of a turkey.
My brother with his trophy Bruce Peninsula gobbler.
We cleaned my brother’s bird and spent the rest of the day running and gunning without much success, and just after dinner I went on a quick scouting tour. In the same field I had hunted earlier that morning I found four hens and two longbeards, and all were exceptionally skittish. When I slowed my vehicle they looked up and began fast-walking away to the west. Now, if you’ve turkey hunted for very long you know the “fast-walk”. It is not quite walking but it is not quite as quick as a trot; turkeys do it when they are uneasy and these ones did not like me peering through binoculars at them from the side of the road. I pulled in behind some greenery before I saw them cross into the next field over and continue walking away towards the sunset in the west. Having seen nothing else on my drive around, I resolved to be back in the same field the next day even earlier than before with the hopes that when they woke up they would see my decoys first.
Thirty minutes earlier than the day prior, my alarm gently buzzed on the nightstand and I went through the turkey hunter’s morning ritual again. Curse the early hour, silently dress, eat something marginally healthy (or at least filling), and sneak out of the house without waking anyone. I was greeted by a clear night, a blazingly full moon, and a cold, stiff wind from the northeast on my face. Throwing everything on the passenger seat, I once again rolled down to the field. Being extra-paranoid, I shut my headlights off for the last hundred yards of road and then sat in the car for ten minutes after I had powered down before slowly opening doors and unpacking. I was sure the whole flock had roosted in the hardwood stand west of the field and I crossed the ditch to the east of there and into a triangle of cedars and swampy ground under the weight of two decoys and my vest. My gun was in a sock tucked under my right arm (such is the law) and that I managed to quietly cross the foot of still water in the ditch without sustaining a soaker is more attributable to luck than to any particular skill on my part.
In the silver moonlight I put out a strutting tom decoy and a lookout hen from Avian-X before settling against a page wire fence under some low cedar boughs. I was looking towards the setting moon to the west and I was sure that I would hear turkey talk ringing from that direction at sun-up. In the pre-dawn darkness I tucked my hands into my pockets and, sheltered from the wind in my copse of cedars, I actually fell into a light sleep for a time. Rousing myself I found it to be that certain shade of purple-grey that means dawn was rapidly approaching and a glance at my wristwatch confirmed my suspicions. I once again loaded my long-serving 870, hoping I would get to unload my constant hunting companion the loud way that morning.
My gaze was transfixed on the hardwoods to the west and I eagerly waited for the gobbling to start. Except it never did. At 5:30 a.m. or so I heard a hen turkey fire up from the block I was watching, and then another joined before a third distinct voice chimed in. The hens were a cacophony of cutting, whistling, and raspy-yelping and I tried to outmatch them so that the longbeards would come check out my set up first instead of falling in line with the real thing. Before long those loudmouth hens all flew down one-by-one, making cackles so loud and clear you would have thought they were taping a ‘how-to-call-like-a-hen-turkey’ instructional video. They hit the field and milled around but never showed any real interest in my setup or my calling.
Still I had not heard a single gobble from the hardwoods to the west.
I tried a few more strings of calling, but still the gobblers remained tight-lipped, and I was beginning to get that paranoia that sets into turkey hunters when they are pretty sure there is a gobbler in the vicinity, but the cagey bastard won’t reveal his precise whereabouts. At 6:10 a.m. I picked up my phone and texted my cousin Dane to see if he was having any action, and then it all unraveled in such a casual way I could scarcely believe it.
As I set my phone down after hitting “Send” I glanced nonchalantly over my left shoulder and was temporarily stunned. Two longbeards were sprinting across the field from a position east of me and both were in half-strut while looking at my decoy setup with malicious intent. They had never made a peep. I moved both hands onto the gun and slid the safety off, just as the birds approached into range. At about forty yards both birds quit their sprinting, and as one of them dropped strut and began to slowly and deliberately take a wide circle around the decoys, the other bird held strut and made a bee-line for the fakes. It had all happened so quickly that I had not even had a moment to get excited, but now my heart was thumping as I eased the gun to my shoulder in as painfully slow a motion as I could muster.
All the while my only thought was “How in the hell did those birds backdoor this setup and just how did they get back over to where I had first seen them the night before? Crafty.”
When the closest bird hit about twenty-five steps from the decoy, he must have realized something was very wrong because he also dropped strut, turned away, and craned his head up to full periscope. He started walking straight away but was still giving the evil-eye over his right shoulder to the fake gobbler when I snapped the gunstock to my cheek, found the crease between metallic black feather and red throat with my front bead, and pulled back on the trigger.
I barely felt the gun kick such was my adrenalin response in that moment, but the Remington roared and I saw his head snap forward, hit the ground and flop limply over his wing. His legs had quit on him by that point and he was burying his head in the dirt as I put the gun to safe and jogged out to him. Amazingly the other turkey had stayed stock still at the shot and simply watched me walk over and put my bootheel on the Ontario longbeard’s neck before he started putting and sprinting off to where I had mistakenly thought they had been roosted the night before. It was 6:15 a.m. and not four minutes had passed between seeing the birds and pulling the trigger.
Another gobbler falls to the Remington 870.
I snapped some photos and tagged the bird before rounding up all the gear and heading back to the vehicle. In the early morning sunlight the wind no longer felt as cold, the gear, gun, (and now) gobbler were somehow lighter than before, and I could sense that I was grinning uncontrollably. After stowing all my gear at the van, I sat on the open hatch and petted the bird’s feathers flat where they had ruffled.
My hands were still shaking.
A good end to a good morning.
He was a trophy tom as well, and although his inch long spurs lacked the scimitar-curve that my brother’s sported, he had a head the size of a softball, his body was long and heavy coming in at 22.1 pounds and his bushy 10 inch beard confirmed that he was a very mature bird. Statistics aside, though, he was the culmination of what had been a long, frustrating season of lousy weather, bad shooting on my part, cagey birds, bad luck, more lousy weather, and one badly placed coyote. There was redemption in that hunt, and all the crippling self-doubt that sometimes creeps in during turkey hunting’s lowest moments was washed away. No one had guided me to him, no one had done the calling or the scouting for me, and when things got unpredictable, I was still able to seal the deal on my best bird to date. There’s probably a deeper meaning about personal independence or a spiritual metaphor in what I’ve put myself through in the last five weeks, but there’s not much room for that here right now. A turkey in the freezer notwithstanding, right now all I have is the memory, and I’m going to spend some “me time” with it thank you very much.
That is, until the next early morning hunt when I try to forge some new ones.
It is here, or very nearly so. A time of warbling songbirds, buzzing bees, and the seductively sweet pollen of reborn vegetation. That time of the season when no hour is too early and no setup too far-fetched in its possibility of success. A season housing a tradition embodied by two of the most melodious words in the hunting vernacular, two words that set my heart thumping and my eyes gleaming.
Spring. Turkeys.
Esteemed writer Tom Kelly said in his seminal tome Tenth Legion that “A man really ought to start to learn turkey hunting in the fall” and who am I to argue with a turkey hunter and writer of such a pedigree? However, and to my detriment, since the earliest seeds of my turkey hunting affliction began with no legal options to chase wild turkeys in the autumn months, I am forever and indelibly tainted by the compulsion to chase longbeards in April and May.
What this means is that once I wrap my deer hunting exploits in mid-November, there really is not too much for me to do but sit and stew on the fact that I have to endure five long months before I can feel a warm spring breeze on my cheek and feel warm sun on my legs and all that while I pine for the chance to feel the heft of a tom turkey over my right shoulder. That those five months are the most barren, dank, gloomy, and miserable months of the year (both psychologically and climatologically) is just a cruel twist of fate that I must learn to endure.
Christmas festivities do little to rouse me from the funk, and the teasing January thaws we regularly experience remind me that while the sun may shine, true spring is still months away. There are many hard days in that cold winter of discontent and on those darker days I try to make spring turkey hunting seem less attractive than it is. I remember the unpredictable downpours that early May can bring. I think of the thin, maddening hum of countless mosquitoes in my ears. I think of the emotional knots that a hard-headed gobbler can twist me into just by doing what he is naturally inclined to do. And overall I tell myself that the deed is never going to be as ecstatic as my rosy, optimistic anticipation wishes it to be.
But even I’m not so delusional as to fall for myself being so goddamned delusional. Rain and bugs are just as frequent in my early season waterfowl hunts, and truth be told, the masochistic urges run strong in me when it comes to chasing longbeards a deep recess in me secretly likes being whipped by the birds.
There is probably a German word for that feeling of proud humiliation, but I don’t have a clue what it is.
So here I sit, less than a week away from lounging under a tree in the pre-dawn hours, cradling a shotgun and making plaintive hen turkey sounds. When that time comes, if I’ve properly done my homework, I’ll be in the vicinity of a slumbering longbeard. If I say the right things, perhaps he will wake up and answer my call. If I’m fortunate and play my cards right there is a chance that he will head my way, and while I sit there doing my best impression of a stump and bundle of roots, with my heart pounding in my ears and my breathing toned down to a tremulous whisper, that bird might inadvertently blunder into my little trap. Perhaps I’ll have wild turkey for dinner that night or perhaps he will outfox me once again and I’ll shake my head in frustration and respect. No matter what happens I will fell rejuvenated.
Right now the off-season tarnish and grime that has accumulated on my cynical soul is in need of some spring cleaning. In five days I just know that I’m going to get right again.
A thunderstorm almost made me miss out on the bird that day, but before we get there, so much more can be said in the lead up to my encounter with a gobbler I nicknamed “One and Done”.
Years ago, a fifteen-year old version of me began my deer hunting career on the property. It had a modest farmhouse on it and was a working cattle operation for most of the year. By the time I started chasing gobblers we no longer hunted deer out of the farmhouse, but I made a point of asking the landowner if I could poke around the property one or two times in the upcoming spring turkey season. There were small copses of cedar trees interspersed here and there through the pasture, a marsh bookended one piece of the property while a bush road marked the other end. Hardwoods stands circled the perimeter and the large fields were cordoned off by a modern electric fence overlaid in front of an older fence of split cedar rails. A Google Earth view of the property showed more than one spot that just felt like they had to have a turkey in it; narrow fingers of pasture surrounded by hardwoods tucked back far from the prying eyes and binoculars of ‘road hunters’. In one spot the distance across the field was less than fifty paces.
I was early in my turkey hunting life and as I recall it was just my second full spring season. Success had eluded me in my rookie year but close encounters with gobblers had whet my appetite so much that in my mind I was picturing myself triumphantly killing a wary old gobbler in that exact, narrow, secluded spot. I told no one about the spot, so sure was I of my success there.
The fact that I had not actually scouted the location did not enter my young, excitable mind as an impediment at all. Such is the joyfully ignorant exuberance of youth and inexperience.
That morning my alarm buzzed in the predawn of an early May morning. I heard rain on the rooftop. Hard rain. No matter, I told myself as I pulled on a camo rain suit. I was outfitted with the newest, most modern line of waterproof box call and could run a mouth call more than competently. All my readings had indicated that turkeys stampeded to open fields during rainstorms, and with the zeal of a converted fanatic, I went out the door.
Driving in the dark down an empty two lane highway at 4:30 in the morning gives a man pause for thought. I shifted a mouth call from cheek to cheek and thought about how that morning was going to play out, while the rain picked up and my wipers slapped against the windshield. I ran a few practice yelps from behind the steering wheel and turned off onto the county road; as I did so lightning sparked in the east. A drizzle I can handle. Thunderstorms, not so much.
At that point my 870 would have been less of a weapon and more of a lightning rod.
I pulled off the county road at the eastern edge of the property and then drove down a narrow dirt road to a point that gave enough berth for me turn around and pull over so as not to block the track. Thunder rumbled again and wind-driven rain sheeted down, so I decided to give the storm a half hour to pass me by. It was 4:55am. I set a cellphone alarm and reclined the car seat, dozing and listening to the spring showers falling outside of my glass and steel cocoon.
My phone alarm buzzed and I jolted awake. The earliest hints of powdery grey dawn was breaking and while the thunderstorm seemed to have passed, a fine mist with aspirations of becoming drizzle persisted. I unloaded my decoy, my gun, and then slipped my vest over my raincoat. With the cedars and hardwoods forming a protective bower over the road I stalked quietly down the trail to that secluded finger of pasture where I was sure that I had a date with a tom turkey. I stopped and owl called half way to the field but received no response. Further on a crow called and again met only the stony silence of rain-soaked branches and budding spring leaves.
I entered the field and dropped a hen decoy twenty steps away before stepping over the electric wire fence and nestling comfortably into a corner of the moss-covered cedar rail fence. The cedar rails propped up my shoulders and supported my back so perfectly it was as though that spot was designed just for me to hunt out of it. I slipped shells into my gun and waited a few minutes in the dawn light, absorbing the sounds of an awakening woods.
Eventually I started calling softly, mimicking the soft yelps and clucks of a hen turkey on a limb. I escalated the volume into a fly-down cackle and ran a string of assembly yelps together with my mouth call. The natural amphitheater of the narrow field surrounded on three sides by forest provided an acoustically perfect atmosphere.
To my “second-spring-of-turkey-hunting-ear” I sounded damn near perfect.
As is usually the case nothing answered me immediately, and given my total lack of scouting in this area in the pre-season, that result was less than surprising. In time, I ratcheted up the volume and urgency, before throwing in some hard cutts and cackles. The second time I ran some aggressive calling, he answered.
It was a gobble that was quite close, and it was a long, raspy, mean-spirited old gargle that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And he did it only once. Although the gobble had come from a spot directly across from me, I was not 100% certain of where I should be pointing my left shoulder.
I cutt hard again on the call, hoping he would betray his spot and give me a glimpse. He remained silent. My eyes scanned the undergrowth across the field, trying to key in on the blue and red of his head, or the white bars of his wings, or for him to move slightly and let me track him with my eye, since he seemed reluctant to give me anymore help with his voice. At one point I was peering so hard through the trees that my eyes started to blur. I blinked hard and still could not make out his form, but I was certain he was there. My heart was hammering and I was barely managing to keep my breathing steady.
For fifteen minutes this went on. Me sitting there silent and still with my gun at the ready, and him standing somewhere across from me in the gloomy forest under grey skies, curiously wondering where the hen sounds had been coming from or perhaps even cautiously eyeing my decoy. I was afraid to move or even call. For a while I was afraid to even blink. The brain of a turkey hunter can play some awfully mean tricks in that still, quiet fifteen minutes, and I was mentally scrolling through my (at that time very limited) turkey hunting playbook trying to come up with a strategy. Finally unable to take it any longer I clucked, once, on my mouth call. Nothing.
Emboldened, I purred and yelped softly. All remained quiet across the pasture.
Taking this personally, and still absolutely sure that the bird was standing inside the far tree line, I yelped and cutt on my call, pleading for him to gobble again. The silence, or was it indifference, that I was receiving was borderline insulting.
Slowly I reached into my vest and retrieved my box call. It was damp, but waterproof and I sawed some sweet yelps on it. Once again, nothing happened.
I exhaled slowly and my heart rate returned to normal. I was fairly certain that the bird had seen or heard something he didn’t like and had just moved off, although I had never heard a putt or seen any movement at all. I was crestfallen, and in an instant all my hard-won confidence and self-aggrandizing delusions of expertise went out the window.
And that’s the point of the story I guess. A bird like One and Done didn’t care what the magazines said or how much proprietary modern technology I had in my hands, how promising a hunt looks, or how good I thought I was. If a bird like him wants to go silent and wander off, that’s just what he is going to do. Short of the very unlikely prospect of running him down and tackling him, he was not going to be killed that wispy grey morning, at least not by a hunter of my then-novice pedigree.
I never did kill him, or any other turkey that day, and when I went back the next day the woods were vacant of turkeys. I wandered and prospected but it was as though he was never there at all. I shot over the head of a bird later that season, bumped a couple of others, and it was not until the last weekend of that season that my comedy of errors ceased and I was finally able to put my boot heel on my first longbeard’s neck. The lesson in humility that the One and Done turkey taught me was not forgotten though, and to this day one or two birds teach me something new every season. Once in a while I get a predictable bird that does what I planned he would, but more often than not some ornery gobbler or his harem of girlfriends flips the script and I have to improvise.
I don’t mind though, because that’s the fun of it.
