Not a Single Step

Photo Credit: Brent Ferguson

@b_ferguson66

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Every good and perfect gift is from above coming from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. James 1:17

Fossils have been uncovered dating the existence of the American alligator back millions of years. Native to the bodies of freshwater across the southern United States, the largest American alligator ever harvested in the state of Florida was seventeen feet, five inches long and weighed well over a thousand pounds. The diet of an adult alligator consists mainly of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and various mammals. Taxonomically, humans fall into the Mammalia classification, which means, quite simply, that an alligator of ample size will eat a grown man, given the opportunity. Alligator attacks on humans in the state of Florida average in the neighborhood of seven per year. Although that number seems relatively low, the thought of being one of the unlucky seven is enough to raise the hair on your arms anytime you venture near anything that appears to be decent gator habitat.

If you have never visited the southern peninsula of Florida, then you cannot truly appreciate how many alligators make their home on that part of the planet. Almost all the rural and many of the suburban bodies of freshwater larger than a cereal bowl serve as home to at least one or more of these prehistoric beasts. You see them everywhere you look. Creeks, streams, water holes, ditches along state highways, fishing ponds, those little ponds that they dig in resort communities that have the fountains in the middle designed to add aesthetic flair, if you see freshwater, there is likely a gator nearby- regardless of location. 

Another feature unique to this part of the world is the system of levees that have been installed across the portions of the landscape that have been manipulated to enhance the agricultural opportunities. Commonly referred to by the locals as dykes, levees are frequently encountered intermingling throughout the various agricultural properties that encompass large expanses of southern Florida. In a part of the world that largely exists at or in some cases below sea-level, these levee systems very commonly completely encircle large expanses of agricultural property enabling farm managers to keep water in places where it is needed, but even more commonly out of places where it is not. Working farms will commonly be equipped with a series of high-capacity pumps to both irrigate crops and move water across the levees to accommodate their needs accordingly. 

The piece of property we were hunting contained a large levee, probably six feet or more in height with a crown width of twelve to fifteen feet, and sloped shoulders on either side. The levee separated a cattle pasture that was being actively grazed from a swamp that was standing in water of varying depth and covered with aquatic vegetation where sunlight peered through the dense mid and understory brush for any length of time throughout the day. The overstory of the swamp was heavy to mature cypress, which was commonly utilized by the turkeys and various other birds in the area as preferred roosting. On the pasture side, situated at the toe of the levee and running the full length was a deep ditch that was utilized to borrow dirt from when the levee was constructed. The ditch was in the neighborhood of twelve feet wide on average, with a depth that I did not take the trouble to classify but fell into the category of: deep enough to keep an alligator happy. 

From an aerial perspective, the levee made a “backwards L” shape with the vertical axis running from the north end of the property southward to a point in the middle of the property where it cornered, and the horizontal axis left the corner and ran west. The pasture was situated to the north and west of the levee on the inside of the right angle of the “backwards L” and the cypress swamp expanded to the south and east on outside of the “L”.

We tangled with a gobbler the previous day who spent the majority of the morning courting his hens and pushing a couple of jakes along the top of the north/south portion of the large levee. We were setup on the portion of the levee that ran east and west approximately sixty or seventy yards from the corner of the “backwards L”. The gobbler had flown down on the levee just north of the corner and was quickly joined by a couple of hens which seemed to satisfy him amply enough to ignore outside propositions for additional company. The group worked their way north down the levee, angling away from our position where they met up with a couple of jakes and carried on with their business of chasing grasshoppers and scavenging for the various invertebrates along the toe of the levee bordering the swamp. Eventually the gobbler pushed the two jakes away, one of the hens went to nest, and the other started feeding her way back down the levee to the south toward the corner. 

About halfway down some of the cows made their way up onto the levee and, strangely enough, seemed to take an interest in the turkeys. As the cows and turkeys approached one another, a young heifer leading the group lunged at the hen who immediately took flight and sailed out of sight into the cypress swamp to the south of the levee corner. The gobbler who had been trailing the hen by fifteen or twenty yards was, naturally, somewhat alarmed by this. He did a quick about face and started back up the levee to the north, head up, looking over his shoulder to ensure that he was not the next victim of bovine bullying. 

After putting some distance between himself and the cows, the gobbler stopped seemingly to gather his thoughts and contemplate his next move. We quickly elected to take this opportunity to call in an effort to help him make up his mind in our favor. He raised his head with our first series of calls and peered across the field in our direction. Through field glasses you could see his head color up immediately signaling that he was, at least somewhat, interested. He gobbled at our follow up call and took four or five hasty steps in our direction before raising his head again to listen. He gobbled at our next series of calls and started back down the levee to the south in the direction of the levee corner at nearly a trot.

Stopping every 20 or 30 yards to gobble, the turkey came down the levee, made his way around the group of cows, and continued toward the corner. We continued to exchange dialogue every so often to reassure the interest of both parties. From our vantage point, the corner of the levee was blocked by vegetation that was coming into play down the tree line to the right of our position. The turkey passed from view heading toward the corner at steady pace. Based on the sound of his gobble, he only hesitated momentarily before rounding the corner and heading to the west in our direction. Given that the corner of the levee was only a hundred yards or so from our position, this put the turkey within a hundred yards and closing fast. 

The turkey continued to gobble as he approached our setup down the levee. I had given him a soft yelp just as he rounded the corner, and that was the last call that I offered before going quiet and allowing him to close the final stretch suspensefully. The last time he gobbled on his own, I estimated that he was around fifty yards but still blocked from our view by the vegetation to our right down the edge of the swamp. I did my best to burn a hole with my eyes through the vegetation that was blocking our view as we waited for him to emerge from behind the brush any second. We quietly waited. We waited patiently. We waited for an eternity. Eventually, the cold grip of reality began to take hold- as they so often do, he had vanished.

Upon initial analysis during the after-action review, we observed a group of buzzards on the ground down the levee, just over forty yards from our position, that he likely would have preferred to avoid in his approach. We believe that pushed him to the toe of the levee and after not seeing the hen that had been calling, he, assumingly, presumed that she had retreated across the swamp to our rear, and he then entered the swamp in pursuit. A walk down the levee to the corner also enabled us to identify a small group of palm trees on the pasture side of the levee within easy shotgun range of the corner- the spot we identified to make our stand the following morning. 

The next morning, we arrived over an hour before daylight to ensure that complete darkness covered our entry, given that we expected our identified setup to be in close quarters with the roosted turkeys. We followed a two-track trail that skirted the north end of the cypress swamp and opened into the pasture where we navigated around some small ponds and dodged sparsely scattered cabbage palms that speckled the expanse of open landscape. Along the way, we stopped and cut some large palmetto fronds to carry in and stick around us to provide some additional cover to our setup. We parked the side-by-side near the west end of our levee and made our final preparations before starting our walk along the bank of the deep ditch that followed the levee and, ultimately, led to the group of trees that we had identified the previous morning. 

After killing the low intensity, green navigation light that we used on our drive in, it was dark. Under the moonless sky, absent from any ambient light provided by any other artificial light source nearby, it was really dark- two-foot up an owl’s rear kind of dark. Being the forward thinker that I am, I took a moment to analyze the walk that lie ahead. The ditch that we had to follow to our destination was large enough to serve as more than ample habitat for an entire community of alligators. The thought of becoming one of the unlucky seven among the state of Florida’s yearly gator attack statistics was not something that appealed to me in the least. I dug out my own green light that I kept in my pocket for just such instances to aid my navigation and hopefully help avoid stepping on the snout of a prehistoric lizard that could outweigh me five-fold. 

I gripped the light in my fist allowing only a small amount of illumination to escape and started the trek. My hunting partner followed closely behind, as we followed the ditch toward our group of trees. The almost pure sand topsoil that exists across much of Florida always provides a feel that is somewhat foreign to me. Almost sponge-like underfoot, the ground furnishes a cushioning effect for each step that many only experience during summer vacation and is typically accompanied by sun burns and umbrella drinks. We carefully stepped alongside the ditch for a quarter mile or so before arriving at our setup, thankfully absent from any encounters with hungry aquatic reptiles. My partner and I stuck our palmetto fronds, settled in, and waited for daylight. 

Our setup put the top of the north/south levee out front at a range of about twenty-five yards. The corner of the levee was situated at my one o’clock at a range of about fifty yards and the westward portion of the levee passed by to our immediate right at around forty yards at its closest point. The approximate point where the gobbler had flown down the previous morning was on top of the levee at about my ten o’clock which put me in the driver’s seat if he followed suit again today. As I gathered my bearings in the dark, I elected to build a scenario in my mind for what we proposed to take place, best case scenario. I chose a spot on the top of the levee where I expected the gobbler to land and made adjustments to ready myself for a shot in that direction. This allowed me to shoulder my shotgun with the forend in my left hand, rested on my knee, so that, hopefully, no major adjustments would be required once the cloak of darkness was lifted.

We sat in silence as daylight grew and the environment around us became increasingly more visible. My partner broke the silence: “Turkey in a tree straight across from us.” I trained my eyes in that direction as he described the location of the turkey based on defining features of the treetops in the skyline. I found the turkey in the tree after little description, and we both watched as the turkey began to wake up. After watching for a few minutes, we both agreed that it was a hen and continued to search the adjacent trees for the roosted gobbler. Daylight continued to grow and several minutes later I heard what I thought was faint drumming. Unsure at first, I tuned in to listen closer. By the third time or so I was sure of it- it was drumming beyond all doubt. Although the sound is hard for me to course, the drumming sounded like it was to our right, and I scanned further in that direction continuing to search the naked canopy of the still dormant cypress trees for the roosted gobbler. 

Soon I spotted a distinct dark blob in a tree, and after hearing the drumming, the blob slowly shrank in size. “There he is,” I told my partner, “right over the corner!” The turkey was roosted right off corner of the levee in one of the trees out on the very edge not over seventy yards from our position. No more than a minute later he gobbled for the first time of the morning. 

My partner and I sat melted into our hide, doing our best to breathe through our eyes as the turkey continued to strut on the limb and gobble periodically. The hen that was roosted across from us gave a soft tree yelp, and he gobbled right back. I was hopeful that this made up his mind on a landing zone if he had any fleeting thoughts of doing something different from the day before. The turkey gobbled a few more times each separated by a couple of minutes while he continued to strut on the limb and scan his surroundings. We knew it had to be getting close to go-time. With ample daylight to verify that no danger was present around his landing spot, the gobbler stood up on the limb and adjusted his body position to face in the direction of the north/south levee. “Here he comes.” My partner whispered. With one flap of his wings the turkey jumped from the limb was airborne sailing toward the levee right in front of our position. 

There are always specific things about a hunt that stand out. Some of these things are very memorable, a few of these things you will never forget. Watching this turkey glide from his roost is one of the latter. The white light of the eastern sky just before sunrise almost shined across his back as he sailed. The turkey angled toward our position in flight, turning his tail fan to steer his trajectory directly toward “position A” in front of our setup. Swooping lower to the ground, from our point of view it looked as though he was about to crash into the top of the levee before he was ready to land. About two-thirds of the way through his glide, he dipped down behind the crown of the levee, with all but his back disappearing from our view. The turkey landed just on the shoulder of the levee opposite our position and immediately stretched his neck exposing from the head down to just below his beard. He had landed within six inches of the spot that I had picked in my pre-meditated scenario which put him right down the barrel of my shotgun. “Kill him!” my partner whispered. I raised the gun off my knee, trained the bead firmly on his neck, and squeezed the trigger. He took not a single step from where he landed off the roost. You can be the best turkey caller in the world, but there is no substitute for a good setup. This day our setup was spot on, our plan was executed perfectly, and thankfully the turkeys had received and reviewed their copy of the script the night before making this hunt one that I will not soon forget. There are those you will chase for miles over days, and there are those that, quite literally, fall in your lap- each one is earned, each one is special. To our Creator we are grateful for these and all other blessings.