April Fools

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Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths. Proverbs 3:5-6

Spring 2020

The morning sun was high enough to illuminate parts of the privately owned and maintained gravel road that we had been traveling. My dad and I stood outside of the truck at our third stop of the morning. With only a faint gobble or two to show for, which came at our first stop and was far enough away that I never was sure if it was a turkey or my hopeful imagination, our confidence was beginning to waiver. This has become pretty normal as of late as our turkey numbers locally had been in a pretty steady decline over the past ten to fifteen years. It was April Fool’s Day, and we were sure hoping to pull a trick on one before work this morning. “Let’s ride around and stop at that big intersection on the way out.” He said.

Nearly all the roads under the care of this land holding company were in an outstanding status of upkeep. Precisely ditched and crowned with drainage pipes calculated to handle highest possible runoff rates at all stream crossings, steel bridges crossing the larger watercourses, and a gravel surfacing manicured to impeccability. The landowner understood that timber pricing was most favorable during the wet season, and that the only way to realize these higher returns was to maintain a road network that allowed the movement of wood to mills during this time. An ancillary benefit to these well-manicured roadways is the access afforded to those engaged in hunting the property- regardless of recent rainfall amounts. 

We made it to the final curve in our approach from west to east which put the intersection in the gravel road just out of sight around the bend, killed the ignition, and rolled to a stop on the shoulder of the road just over a hundred yards west of the intersection. The roads were running due east/west and north/south where they crossed with a red, double cattle panel style gate situated twenty yards from the center of the intersection and spanning the entire width of the right-of-way with posts in the ditch but not tied into a fence of any kind beyond the top of the adjacent ditch bank. The gate was in place to impede travel onto the adjoining club as the road departed heading north.

The stand of timber surrounding the intersection was comprised of mature loblolly pine with mixed hardwood saplings sparsely scattered throughout the midstory. Either the recent re-introduction of prescribed fire or a wildfire that affected the stand had created varying levels of succession along the edges which was low in places where edge affect hot spots had occurred. A black stain was present on the butts of the large pines where the flames charred the outer bark. Rain during the night before made the darks even darker and intensified the contrast of the progressively greening understory vegetation. There were also stretches of small, volunteer pine seedlings growing closely together, most of which were less than six feet in height, encroaching along the roadsides. A swath ten feet or so either side of center of the right-of-way had been treated with herbicide leaving the volunteer pine stems standing with brown needles drowsing from the branches creating a screen that hid the open woods beyond the road ditch where they stood. 

I eased the truck door shut and took a few steps down the road toward the intersection to put some distance between myself and the truck which made all of the noises that vehicles make as they cool. Just as I made my last step before I intended to stop and listen, a turkey gobbled and sounded to be on past the intersection. I had not had ample time to focus my listening, so I heard him but I really needed another gobble to get a good fix on his location. 

At the next crow, he gobbled again. He was, indeed, east-northeast of where we stood somewhere just over two hundred yards. This put the turkey probably one hundred yards to the east and maybe sixty or seventy yards to the north from the center of the intersection. My dad and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. “He’s not that far.” I said as we both went into motion, hustling to get ourselves ready to throw our hats in the game. 

We used what would be the shirt collar of the road as we walked, just outside of the well-traveled tire tracks, which was covered in a carpet of pine straw that helped quiet the sound of our steps as we closed the distance toward the intersection. The turkey gobbled enough times while we got ready and during our walk for us to keep a relatively good fix on his position as we made our move. He seemed to be maintaining, more or less, the same position as we closed the distance. My eyes glanced down to the mud in the tire path on the road to the left of where I walked. Gobbler tracks so fresh that the pebbles on the pads had not even had time to melt away. The turkey that made the tracks was heading the same direction that we were, up the road to the east- very likely the same turkey that was gobbling ahead of us now, given that the rain from the night before had erased anything older than about thirty minutes at this point. This will work. I thought as I continued to walk. I knew if we could follow quietly up the road and get even close to his “bubble”, that he would come back to a hen that he heard behind him- one that he may have lost along the way. 

We reached the intersection and the turkey gobbled again just over a hundred yards east-northeast of where we stood. We crept another twenty yards or so beyond the intersection and the turkey gobbled again on his own. Eighty yards. I thought quietly as we both stopped and looked for a tree suitable for a setup. A pine tree standing at the top of the ditch bank on the south side of the road, surrounded by hanging vines and small pine saplings both living and dead, put my dad approximately twenty feet from the center of the road. Just across the road from his position was a screen of volunteer pine seedlings that would limit visual contact with the turkey in the woods beyond until he walked into one of only a couple of openings, or he stepped into the road as we planned.  

As dad settled into his hide, I called softly as I turned around and began to slowly ease my way back up the road to the west, away from the turkey, heading back towards the intersection. My response to his answer grew louder as I continued my retreat, and he immediately gobbled back. My thinking here was to pique the turkey’s interest enough to pull him back into the road- to, or past, my dad’s position, hopefully, furnishing him a shot at some point in the process. The turkey and I continued to converse, and he seemed to grow hotter with every step I made away from him. 

Nearing the intersection during our approach minutes before, I noticed a beautiful spot beneath some large pines in the southwest quarter of the intersection. The area was absent of most all shrubs, brush, and saplings containing only early successional vegetation mostly between knee to thigh high. An area that was likely created by a hot spot during the fire. I picked a tree as I passed that would put me back off the road and, sitting down, would put the understory vegetation at about shoulder height. A great vantage point to fall back to. This was my destination as I continued to sell my point and retreat away from the now very interested gobbler.

When I reached the intersection, I made a left and started down the road to the south and continued to ease away, making soft, nearly muted conversational yelps with the occasional cluck and purr as I quietly walked. With more cover between myself and the location where I hoped for the turkey to end up, I stopped to get a better feel for progress. The next gobble revealed that the turkey was not over sixty yards from my dad, and very obviously buying what I was trying to sell. I stepped out of the road and into the open glade southwest of the intersection, crawled hands-and-knees to the tree that I had identified earlier and pulled up my facemask. 

Sitting with my back against the bole of the large pine I was covered up to shoulder height by the bright almost glowing pastel green of the young, tender rubus and other various vines and shrubs in early successional regrowth. The center of the intersection was approximately twenty-five yards and directly at my 12 o’clock. The actual point where the roads converged created a space of open air that was close fifteen yards in diameter from the center. Just a few degrees to the left at around the 10:30 mark or so, up the road to the north beyond the intersection, and approximately fifty yards from my position was the red, double gate. To the left of the gate and across the road nearest me to the north the understory was fairly open beneath the big pines allowing me to see an additional twenty or thirty yards across the road from my post. This put my dad, sitting down the road to the east of the intersection, at about my 2 o’clock and around forty yards from my hide. 

I called softly one last time after manning my position, and the turkey’s instant response revealed that he was not over fifty yards from dad’s position now and still bearing down. Judging by his progress, it sounded as though he should step into the road about the point where I turned around and started calling, assuming he maintained his current heading. Knowing that the turkey knew exactly where to find me, I went quiet.

The next time the turkey gobbled it sounded as though, any second now, dad should be looking at him. My body began to tense in preparation for the report from his shotgun of which there was no way for me to predict the timing. The turkey continued to gobble, obviously within forty yards but likely in the woods across the road from dad’s position. It was at this instant that the always uninvited Murphy showed up. We began to hear gravel popping under the tires of a vehicle in the distance, faint at first but growing louder with every passing second. No, this cannot be. Maybe he will get a shot before the truck gets here, I thought, but the seconds continued to tick past and no shot ever came. The turkey stopped gobbling. 

As the oncoming vehicle approached from the west, I elected to lay down and use the vegetation to hide myself from the passer-by. The vehicle past my position, traveled through the intersection never changing pace, and drove directly between my dad and the turkey. A turkey that was (or had been) standing within thirty-five or forty steps of the gun barrel only seconds before. As I was filing that in the drawer labeled “far from ideal”,  it hit me- turkeys hear vehicle traffic on these roads all of the time. I thought back on more than one occasion where I had driven up on gobblers in the road, continued past them at a steady pace to see them standing just across the ditch watching me drive by like you would your next door neighbor, stopped down the road around a curve or over a hill, and called them right down the road following my tire tracks to the gun barrel. If he will keep going on out of hearing without stopping or doing anything out of the ordinary, we should be fine, I thought to myself.    

When the truck passed from my hearing, I waited a long two minutes or so, with no gobbles of course, and made a series of soft yelps. No answer for the first. Again, I clucked and yelped, slightly louder this time, my call was cut off by a gobble that was even louder than before. The turkey had moved back away from the road where my dad was setup, where the truck had just passed. Previously concentrated through the vegetation and down the road toward my dad’s position, my eyes snapped around to the left in the direction of the gobble and quickly picked up movement just beyond the gate. There, in a full strut, stood the gobbler in the center of the road to the north, just a few feet beyond the gate and about sixty-five yards from my position. Oh.. Great….. was my first thought. I have seen turkeys hang up on obstacles considerably smaller in size than this huge gate, but on the contrary I had seen them navigate around, over, and through some pretty remarkable obstacles, as well, in a few instances. Turkeys tend to forget they can fly under these circumstances and, more times than not, they will treat the obstacle as impassable. From the turkey’s current position, he would have to find his way to our side of the gate, come south down the dash of road between the gate and the intersection, and likely get very near the center of the crossroad before he would break into the open enough for dad to get a clear shot. 

I turned my head slowly to the right and cupped my hand over the left side of my mouth to “throw” my call back to the right to paint the illusion that the hen was further down the road which continued past my position to the south. I clucked once and yelped softly. The turkey instantly gobbled back and walked toward the ditch on the left-hand side of the road quickly disappearing behind some vegetation. I began to scan the open woods to the left of the gate, across the road to the north, expecting the turkey to circle through the woods and pop out into the road near my position. After a few seconds passed, I caught movement back to the right near the gate and looked just in time to see the gobbler jump back across the ditch on our side of the gate from left to right and walk back up into the center of the road, immediately stretching his neck in search of the hen. 

The turkey stood for a few seconds surveying the situation, went into a half strut and continued at a fast pace toward the intersection. As his steps brought him closer, all the while in plain sight for me, I was just hoping that dad had a good shooting lane back to the intersection, something we had not taken into consideration when choosing the setup originally. Thirty steps. He continued to approach the intersection as he went into strut. Man, I hope dad can see him, I thought as he took another step into the edge of the sun brightened crossroad. The turkey raised his head seemingly to look both ways and make sure nothing was coming and was instantly flattened after the sudden blast from dad’s shotgun. 

“Never had a truck drive between me and a turkey that close!” dad said as we stood over the gobbler sharing celebratory hugs and high fives. “I just knew, the gig was up after that!” Definitely something that does not happen every day, thank goodness, but it happened, and we still somehow managed to kill the turkey. The memories between my dad and I in the turkey woods had started twenty-seven springs before. Every single memory that the Lord blesses he and I with is special, but it’s safe to say that this is one of those that neither of us will ever forget.

Matt, Waid (9 months old), and Bobby Persons (Papa)