In the Company of the Like-Minded

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Anyone who withholds kindness from a friend forsakes the fear of the Almighty. Job 42:10

Spring 2021

The midday sun was high in the sky as our hunting party made the walk into our proposed setup. The size of the group we were hunting with was something that was foreign to me. Back home in Mississippi, you tend to have a hard enough time hiding yourself and the level of difficulty increases exponentially with every person that you add to your group. I had hunted with three or four people in a group in the past, but today we were going to be hiding seven. As unconventional as that may sound, something I had learned from my one full day’s worth of experience hunting Florida was that in many cases the environment that much of south Florida had to offer provided enough cover to hide an entire professional football team, dressed in visitor whites, including the coaching staff and most of the cheerleaders. So, the number of people you take into the woods with you is, largely, a non-issue, as long as they can be still and quiet there will be plenty of places for everyone to hide. The only gun in the group was slung over my shoulder. The majority of the group in attendance tagged along either to film the hunt or simply just to be a part and see the show. The main focus of today had been cordially dedicated to the completion of an achievement that was long-awaited and very special.

The morning hunt had taken place in the same pasture that was currently under our feet. A hunt where a group of multiple gobblers stayed in easy shotgun range for the better part of an hour, and nearly in catching distance for part of that time. The group of gobblers spent the biggest part of that time behind us and just across a ditch that ran through our setup, which did not allow for a good shot opportunity. After the hour-long wrestling match with the group, some hens started to break towards a ditch crossing located down the ditch and probably eighty or ninety yards from our position. One of the gobblers followed. 

After crossing the ditch, the group of hens fed at a diagonal across the field in front of us. When the gobbler reached the home side of the ditch crossing, he took an immediate right which would bring him down the ditch directly toward our setup, only leaving us with one problem remaining on the list. My hunting partner and I were utilizing the same hide, and he was seated to my left- the direction from which the gobbler was now approaching. The turkey came to around the forty-yard line, but I did not have a shot that my safety conscience would allow me to take. As if the gobbler knew this, he turned around to angle back toward his hens and, using my hunting partner as cover, walked out of range before passing in front of our setup. This is the score that my hunting party and I had returned to settle. 

The field laid longways from east-to-west and ran from the ditch where the gobblers had hung up earlier that morning to a water control levee on the opposite end for a stretch of probably close to a quarter mile and spanned distances varying from eighty to a hundred yards wide for the full length. The entrance to the field was in the northeast corner and two large brush piles consisting of trees and brush that was recently cleared sat fifty or sixty yards inside the gate.  The field had been mowed and strips and patches of the mowed vegetation that laid flat on the ground had been burned in a recent attempt to burn off the whole field which created streaks of exposed topsoil that was already beginning to green up with fresh, tender vegetation. 

Our midday setup was on the south edge of the field probably three hundred fifty yards from the levee on the east side and around a hundred yards from the ditch on the west side, where we had been setup that morning. We had watched the gobbler exit the field in the southeast corner sometime mid-morning, not long after he had pulled a victory from the jaws of defeat. 

The seven of us were in an over-grown fence line that was covered in various hedges, tall grasses and shrubs, and scattered palmetto. I pulled up some of the laid over, dead grass along the field edge and propped it like a screen in front of my position to help blend our hide. Looking around at the others, some had backed into a group of hedge stems, some were behind palmetto fronds, and some were just hiding in the grass. All were hidden very well, and I was confident in our setup.

As we had during our morning hunt, the leader of our group and host for our trip, also a highly proficient caller, and I would call as a team to mimic the sounds of multiple turkeys to those within earshot of our setup. My partner and I were sitting on opposite sides of our setup, probably twelve feet from one another, enabling him to see to the north and west of our position while I kept eyes on the north and east portion of the field. 

We started calling not long after everyone was situated and comfortable. We called with some considerable volume attempting to paint the picture of a small group of hens that had gotten separated from the others and were trying to rejoin. Our calls went unrewarded for the first fifteen minutes or longer and my mind began to wander for a short time. After snapping from my daze, I looked up and immediately spotted a black object in the far east end of the field that I did not remember from previous scans. I slowly raised my field glasses to examine more closely. Gobbler, for sure. 

He stood with his neck stretched to full length, tail fanned behind him, and appeared to be looking in our direction. “There he is!” I whispered to the rest of the group. “All the way in the other end of the field. Looking this way!” The turkey was just south of center and standing on our side of one of the brush piles in the east end of the field around three hundred yards from where we sat.

For the next five minutes, he stood within ten feet of the same spot, looking our direction when we called, strutting, spinning in circles, and doing all the things that gobblers do in the spring except for gobbling and coming. I did notice several times that he would throw his fan to one side or the other while strutting which is a behavior used by a gobbler who is displaying for a hen or showing aggression to another gobbler nearby. This led me to believe that there were more turkeys with him that I could not see. Soon, I began to see the sun glaring off the backs of hens as they emerged from a depression in the field that laid to the right of where the gobbler stood and was invisible from my point of view. I reported the new arrivals back to the group and was happy to see the hens feeding steadily in our direction, ambitious that the gobbler would follow.

As the group of hens began to put some distance between themselves and the gobbler, he did begin to follow- very, very slowly. The gobbler would stand in one spot for three or four minutes straight and sometimes twice that long, neck stretched to full length, feathers slicked down studying the situation ahead of him. He would then shake the mosquitoes off of his head, peck the ground a couple of times, take four or five steps in our direction looking just as comfortable and content as a turtle on a log, then for no obvious reason, he would stop to look some more. Just based on some quick math, I figured that, given the current speed of his approach and the distance that he had to cover, getting into shotgun range would take him approximately..... forever. Additionally, no amount of calling or the lack thereof seemed to affect his level of urgency, whatsoever. 

His hens walked right into our setup, and we all had a fairly lengthy conversation. My partner and I tried to keep them close by for as long as we could with soft conversation clucks and yelps, but after five minutes or so of them walking around, looking, and picking over everything, they decided to carry on westward, continuing away from both the gobbler and our position. Upon their departure, the gobbler had closed on our setup by something like sixty or seventy yards, putting him still well over two hundred thirty yards away. 

Once the hens reached the ditch, they walked back and forth for no more than a minute or two and, with a cackle from one of the group members, pitched across into the adjacent field to continue their journey. Seeing this, the gobbler, who was to no surprise already standing still, looked around as if the departing hens were no longer of any importance to him, whatsoever, turned around and started walking right back toward where he had just come from. Looking in the field ahead of him I could see at least one more hen still in the far end of the field that had not come past us with the rest of the group. I was quick to report the latest plot twist back to the rest of my hunting party. Still the only person who could see him given my position in the setup, I had been periodically relaying updates on what little progress was being made. The latest report of the hen that had held back did help make a least a little more sense of the gobbler's reluctance.

Fighting back the urge to scream, I watched through my binoculars as the gobbler strutted around one of the hens that he had gone back to rejoin. Something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye to the right. Another pair of hens was entering the field from the south just over halfway between our setup and the gobbler’s position. They began to feed in the field following the burned strips where the tender vegetation was growing from the exposed dirt. With a few calls from my partner and I, they turned and started feeding in our direction. A quick check of the gobbler revealed that he had in fact moved and was now nearly as far from our setup as I would be able to see him. He was standing basically in the gate we had entered through in the northeast corner of the field. The pair of hens continued to approach.  

I put my binoculars down as the hens neared our setup causing me to lose visual on the gobbler. My partner and I carried on conversation with them in an effort to keep them in front of us for as long as possible, just as we had done with the group before. The two stayed in front of us within twenty-five yards or so, clucking, purring, and soft yelping back and forth with one another and with us as we called back in mimicking response to them. 

When the hens moved past our setup to the west, I glanced around toward where I had last seen the gobbler and immediately spotted him with my naked eye. He was standing directly in line with where I had last seen him but was considerably closer, probably seventy-five or eighty yards closer, than he had been when my attention had turned elsewhere. I reported this back to the group, as I began to slowly ease my binoculars back up to get a better look. 

The gobbler was approaching at approximately the same pace as before, and this time was following more closely behind a single hen as she took seemingly the same path as the other hens following the burned strips that were scattered along the center of the field. I updated the group and continued to update somewhat more regularly as his approach seemed more intentional this go-round. My partner and I continued to call, his lone hen continued to feed in our direction, and the gobbler continued his unbelievably slow approach. “The way he is acting, I would bet this ain’t no two-year-old.” I whispered to the group. “No kidding.” One of them replied. 

A hundred fifty yards, one-twenty-five, step after step he was making painstakingly slow progress. “He’s a hundred yards, still coming.” I whispered to the group. Some of the other members of the group were beginning to be able to see the gobbler now as he progressed slowly in our direction, still stopping to look every five or six steps. The lone hen had obviously broken away from him by a good seventy-five yards, at this point, and was now within thirty yards and eyeballing our setup. My partner and I were now calling softly making conversation with the hen, trying to keep her close and calm as we had done with the others that had passed through. 

At some point that I cannot precisely recollect, with the gobbler still in his approach somewhere around the sixty-yard line, I stopped soft calling. I was struck by the reality that this was about to come together. That the stars had finally aligned, and God had put me in the way of the right people and enabled our friendship. Not only had He enabled that friendship, but He had grown those relationships into something special, something rare in todays society. He had provided me with friends that were real, and who allowed me to be real. Friends who genuinely wanted nothing in return for their friendship other than my friendship and for us to enjoy God’s creation together, more specifically, the enjoyment of something the entire group shared a particular passion for: the pursuit of the wild turkey. The cultivation of this friendship and our mutual love for chasing turkeys is what landed me here, in south Florida, on this day, hiding on this field edge, looking down the barrel of this shotgun at my first Osceola gobbler and the only subspecies that I needed to complete my Grand Slam. The culmination of twenty-eight years of chasing the wild turkey, to this point. 

At forty-five yards the turkey stopped for a longer period than he had been on his recent stops, even though his last hen had looked the setup over for more than five minutes and gave no indication of anything out of the ordinary. “Hen’s coming back from the left.” One of the group members whispered. Likely attracted by my hunting partner’s continued soft calling, the two hens that had passed through prior to the arrival of the single were coming back to re-investigate. Once they were back in front of us making contented clucks and purrs and soft conversational yelps, the gobbler closed five more yards. Forty. I thought quietly. I can kill him right there, but I am going to let him come as far as he will. 

The gobbler raised his head, this time with a noticeably different attitude, seemingly unsure about something, all of the sudden. It was at least thirty seconds or more before I began to hear it. A single engine airplane in the distance approaching our location traveling from east to west. The gobbler did not seem spooked, but it did seem to at least be somewhat concerning to him. The plane continued to approach. Louder, louder, and louder the engine noise grew, but it did not seem to pass. What in the world is going on. I thought to myself, as I tilted my head back slightly to look out from under the bill of my cap. Without much movement at all I was able to see the yellow single engine plane basically directly to the north of our setup, barely moving through the air. That’s weird. There must be a serious headwind up there for him to be moving that slowly. I thought to myself, refocusing my attention on the turkey. 

Probably twelve or fifteen seconds passed with no appreciable change in the engine noise from the plane above, or really in the direction the noise was coming from for that matter. I tilted my head back slightly to look out from under the bill of my cap again, and I quickly found out what was holding up progress. The plane had a giant banner in tow covered by an advertisement for renter’s insurance. Well… That’s a first. I thought to myself. 

Hopeful that God was not using this moment for some type of subliminal messaging, I looked back toward the gobbler. He was still in his same tracks, but you could nearly feel his nervousness growing. He turned his body to the face the woods to the right of our setup and just as he began to step, I said aloud: “Y’all ready?” It could have been someone in the group but could have just as easily been my sub conscience that answered simply “Yes.” 

There seems to be a mechanism inside the human brain that takes a snapshot during times of particular relevance in life. For turkey hunters, or for me anyway, my brain seems to take a snapshot in that final second just before trigger releases the firing pin, and that half-second is etched into my memory for a very long time. This one was different. This time during that brief second of pause, a flood of memories raced through my mind. Looking back it was no more than a second or two, at most, but it felt like two hours. My thoughts, my emotions, and my spirit were overwhelmed. Immediately incapacitated by a moment in time that I had dreamed of for as long as I could remember. A moment that for so long seemed so far out of reach. 

The Lord knew what it meant to me. He knew that there sat a man looking down the barrel of a shotgun at the culmination of something that had consumed his thoughts and dreams for much of his life. A man who viewed the dawn of each day of the spring season with the same joy and excitement as children feel just as they open their eyes on Christmas morning. A joy and excitement that stemmed from a passion that He had embedded inside of him as a boy and used to reward him in many ways in the years that have passed since. He did not make me do it alone. He never had. He is always with me, thankfully in turkey hunting and in life, and I am eternally confident that He almost always allows my grandfathers to tag along with me in the woods, as well. In that moment, He allowed twenty-eight years of learned instinct to take over. I do not even remember aiming. Maybe He called on one of them to do the aiming for me this time. 

On Sunday, March seventh, two thousand twenty-one, the beginning of my twenty-eighth spring turkey season, something I am most passionate about. A constant in my life that God has used to bless me richly in numerous ways, even and especially outside of hunting. A constant that has, over time, changed who I am for the better and put me on the path that has delivered me to where I am today. A passion with an associated level of romance that is difficult for me to put into words. At two fifty-one in the afternoon, in a place more wild and full of critters than anywhere I have ever been in this country, surrounded by a group of friends who had become more like family, I pulled the trigger on my first Osceola gobbler, completing my Grand Slam. 

To cap it off, the turkey was a respectable representative of the subspecies by any standards. His spurs shed light on exactly why his approach was so careful. He was an old, weathered veteran of this life. Tried and tested by the hands of time in a world where every step is a risk, there is a threat behind every bush, and giving up on the fight is choosing to die. 

There were hugs and high fives, smiles and tears, and before it was over a reverent quiet that came over the group during the celebration that ensued. I said a prayer of thanks and was overcome by emotion. I am forever grateful and indebted to those who afforded me this experience. Though I tried, I could not tell all of them how special this was to me. I did not have to. In the company of like-minded people, one does not have to explain their feelings and emotions. Often the words that go unspoken are the words that are best understood.