Excitement and Respect

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Now we ask you, brothers, to respect those who work hard among you, who are over you in the Lord and who admonish you. 1 Thessalonians 5:12

Immaculate. Five star. Unparalleled. Impeccable. There are no words to describe the accommodations that I was greeted with upon arrival. Beyond an automatic electronic gate, a gravel driveway wound for several hundred yards to a point where the surrounding forest gave way to an opening that provided the setting for something my mind was not initially prepared to process. As the main dwelling approached on the right, the gravel driveway turned to smooth gray concrete, so free of cracks and blemishes that I was somewhat hesitant to drive my vehicle onto the surface. From the front, the large, modernized ranch-style home appeared as two separate large cottages that had been connected by a common area in the center. 

The exterior was tastefully crafted with a smattering of natural stone and mortar, solid concrete, and carefully color matched siding all accented by a slate gray colored metal roof and large natural gas fueled lanterns that hung over each of two entrances to conjoined suites and provided ambient lighting from overhead when standing outside the doors. The double doors, front and center of the structure opened into a room with several lockers on either side of a large barn-style sliding door, immediately indicating that the primary focus of this structure was that of hunting camp- first and foremost. The barn door opened into an indoor-outdoor kitchen area with the barn door on one side and large screened windows on the other providing the necessary ventilation for the various grills, fryers, and cooktops in the space. The other two sides were solid walled with doors opening into the adjoining suite on either side. 

The suite connected to the immediate right of the indoor/outdoor kitchen was laid out as the main indoor gathering area for the group on property. A large, heavy door opened into a space with high ceilings, an open floor, and a beautiful island bar which separated a large kitchen from the rest of the space that was designated more for entertainment. The walls of the living area were lined with shoulder mounts of elk from “out west” and whitetail deer that had been harvested on the property. In addition to the main living space were two bedrooms, enough to comfortably sleep four. Adjoined common corner to the main living area was another suite that was outfitted with the full complement of kitchen, living room, washroom, and dining area all on a smaller scale with bedrooms downstairs and upstairs and a dressing room with full lockers to catch all the necessary hunting equipment. There was another suite to match the latter described on the opposite side of the indoor/outdoor kitchen from the main living area. There may have even been an additional suite that I did not make it into, I cannot be certain. However, with dark stained concrete floors throughout, light colored walls, extra-large doors in every entryway, tall ceilings, white linens, beautiful countertops, stainless steel appliances, large windows absent of so much as a fingerprint, and you could not find a square centimeter of this place- ceiling, wall, floor, or otherwise from which you would hesitate to eat a meal. 

In the rear of the structure was an elevated entertainment area with a concrete pad and stone fireplace overlooking a backyard with the occasional oak, a variety of 3D archery targets at various yardages, and a five-acre lake complete with a beautiful pier and covered gazebo that had been offset so as not to upset the beautiful view one may experience from looking out of one of the large windows in the house. All of these things came together to complete what was one of the nicest, most tastefully and thoughtfully put together places that I had ever visited. A “hunting camp”- yes, absolutely, just not exactly the style of hunting camp that I was accustomed to. 

“These boys love to deer hunt,” he said, “and I really want to get them excited about turkey hunting!” The gentleman who made that statement was a man that I had guided as a client with a turkey hunting outfitter where I spent a good deal of my time in the spring some years ago. Since that time, we had developed a friendship that had allowed us to make quite a few of our own memories hunting together. The “boys” he referred to were his grandsons. High school aged young men and very athletic, they had spent much of their time in the spring to this point playing baseball or training for other sports. We had finally aligned everyone’s schedules and chiseled out some time for them to spend in the turkey woods. “That’s the goal for this weekend,” he said, “if we don’t accomplish anything else, I want to get them fired up about turkey hunting!” 

I would be lying if I said that I did not feel a certain level of pressure to put a turkey in front of at least one of these young men. I had felt this pressure lots of times over the years while guiding various people from all walks of life, only this time was different. This time I really needed to get my hunter in shotgun range of a gobbler and have it be as much fun as possible during the process. Turkey hunting is fun, yes, particularly for those who already love it, but in today’s fast paced society, if things do not develop relatively quickly then people tend to lose interest, and I did not want that to happen here. So, we need to kill a turkey, but he needs to come in gobbling, strutting, drumming, the whole nine, and we do not need to sit there all morning waiting for it to happen. Easy enough, right?

An orientation of the property over a wall map aerial photo showed a several thousand-acre piece of property with an incredible amount of biodiversity. The property began in a river bottom with a couple of large creeks and several intermittent streams that drained out of the uplands and into the river. The timber consisted of mature bottomland hardwood in the river and creek bottoms and within the streamside management zones that ran along watercourses of various sizes and transected mostly mature and first thinned loblolly pine plantations on the terraces outside of the floodplains. The aerial photo also revealed numerous food plots littered across the property and strategically placed in a variety of diverse topography and cover type. An incredible network of woods roads had also been installed to provide access to nearly every inch of the place. 

“I think y’all need to go right up here,” the young man’s uncle said pointing to a spot on the map, “I heard a few turkeys in there last weekend.” “Sounds good to me.” I replied. “Does he know how to get in there?” “Oh yea,” the young man’s uncle said, “he knows this whole place really well.” This was welcoming for me to hear, given that all I knew about the place was what I had just gathered from a two-minute review of an aerial photo. With a plan in place, I was now even more anxious to fast forward and see what the next morning had in store. 

The next morning, we all convened around the kitchen counter to finalize the plan for the group. “You know where we are going?” I asked the young man. “Yes sir, it’s not too far from here.” He responded with a respectful enthusiasm. Something I noticed very quickly about these young men was the very focused usage of their manners. A quality that is largely absent in today’s youth, and very refreshing when encountered. “Sounds good, let’s get moving.” I replied, and we were out the door. 

With a blanket of stars overhead, the two of us boarded an electric utility vehicle just as the eastern sky was beginning to brighten. We traveled into the pre-dawn darkness over a network of woods roads making turns at various intersections. After a five-minute ride, we slowed to a stop near the edge of a food plot. “I think we should walk from here.” The young man whispered after the noise of the vehicle dissipated. While not an experienced turkey hunter, it was obvious that he had spent a good deal of time in the woods to this point, enough to develop his instincts adequately enough to enable him to know the importance of being able to approach his quarry undetected.   

Closely behind him I walked as we followed the edge of the greenfield to the other side. We crossed through a narrow strip of pine plantation and continued to follow a gentle downhill grade. We stepped into another well maintained woods road and he stopped. The road separated a hardwood drainage from the pine plantation that we had just come through. “This is the bottom that my uncle was talking about. Where he said the turkeys were the other morning is right down there.” He said pointing to our two o’clock into the hardwood stand ahead of us. “Ok,” I said, “we will just listen from here, but we need to get out of this open spot.” We felt our way along the edge of the woods across the road ditch, found a spot that we could quietly enter through the edge effect vegetation, and settled there to wait for the first gobble. 

In the growing daylight faint gobbles began to become audible in the distance through the still morning air. There were several turkeys gobbling near the edge of hearing before the first report from the group we were listening for, approximately two hundred fifty yards or so from where we stood. Without much more than a “let’s go” we were easing in the direction of the gobble we had just heard. With the turkey gobbling every thirty seconds to a minute, we eased in their direction through the hardwood stand. We had picked our way carefully fifty yards, or so, through the open hardwoods when we ran a hen off the roost out of a big oak tree as we passed underneath. “Well, that’s not good.” I whispered as I turned to look at the young man. We continued on and after no more than thirty steps further another hen flew violently from her roost overhead. I stopped to study our position. The hens busting from their roost caused the gobbling from the group nearby to slow. With daylight growing and the woods becoming progressively more open between us and the gobbling turkey, I felt that it was best that we play it safe. Looking ahead I found a sweetgum tree about shoulder width in diameter with decent cover at the base. “Get right there by that tree.” I told the young man, and I eased out to stick up a decoy that would be tasked with keeping the attention of any approaching turkey off of us. 

As I eased ahead of the tree I had chosen, I counted my steps to twenty and started looking to find a spot to place the decoy that was clear of low vegetation. Just as I stuck the decoy the turkey gobbled, still in the tree and about two hundred yards from where I stood. I glanced briefly in the direction of the gobble as I was turning to ease back to our hide. In a tree, directly between me and the gobbling turkey, standing near the center of a long, low branch on a big oak tree was another hen. I raised my binoculars to see if I had been seen. She stood fully erect on the limb and was looking right into my childhood. Well, that’s probably the end of this, I thought as I eased back toward the young man. I sat down next to the young man and waited for the gobbler, still gobbling on the limb, to fly down. Soon he did so, and I initiated the conversation. From the very beginning, I could sense his hesitation toward answering my calls, very likely due to the suspicion that had grown in his mind pertaining to the hens busting from the roost in the direction from which he was now hearing a hen yelp. Given that we still had a hen between us that had already had an eyeful of me, I did not press the issue too much. Soon he began to work away from us assumingly following some hens and the frequency of his gobbling slowed. 

With the other turkeys that we had heard in the distance in mind, we elected to leave well enough alone with this group and move on to find a different game elsewhere. We eased back toward the road and were able to make exit without further disturbing anyone to our knowledge. We retraced our steps back to the electric buggy, climbed aboard and struck out further into the property. Being a forester by trade who has spent my entire life in the outdoors, I am compelled to make my own assessment of any piece of property that I visit with regards to things like timber quality, biodiversity, accessibility, level of upkeep, and so forth. I was not adequately prepared to psychologically digest the field tour that I was about to experience, but let’s just say the immaculate state of the living quarters should have been a solid leading indicator for how the rest of the property would present itself.

Every single road that we traveled was beautifully crowned and ditched with culverts strategically installed to facilitate sufficient drainage, to the extent that if I encountered so much as a hole of water in the road at any point during my time on property, I cannot recall it. All the pine plantations appeared to have been managed with a fire return interval that was regular enough to allow for the infiltration of non-woody vegetation in the understory but kept hardwood competition to a minimum in most areas yielding a thinned plantation overstory with an open midstory and levels of succession in the understory that varied from short grass to shrubs and vines no more than knee high. The creek and river bottom flats and other significant low-lying areas largely consisted of bottomland hardwood stands, mostly mature, and heavy to oak. The strategically placed food plots scattered around the place were all well-manicured and gorgeously maintained with a variety of forage types beneficial for many forms of wildlife. The place was one of the most well put-together, thoughtfully managed, and well-maintained pieces of property that I had ever stepped foot on, and it brought me a great deal of pleasure just to see it for myself.  

I snapped out of the spirit world as we crested a hill just before a “T” in the road. “Let’s stop and listen here,” I said to the young man. We slowed to a stop, stepped out of the electric vehicle, and almost immediately heard a gobble. It sounded to be a quarter mile or so away and appeared that a left at the “T” would lead us in the right direction. The turkey gobbled several more times during the minute or less that it took us gather our essentials before starting our walk, and he continued to gobble frequently as we made our way toward his position. The clean road made for easy, fast, and quiet walking which allowed us to make really good time on our approach. We reached about what I figured to be the halfway point and stopped to listen. After no more than a few seconds the turkey gobbled again and sounded as if he was in the hardwood flat that we were approaching and still over two hundred yards from where we stood. We continued in his direction and the vegetation between us and the gobbler began to thicken. 

I turned to the young man and said, “I don’t know if we need to try to pick our way through this thicket or just go past him and see if we can find a better spot to kill him on the other side.” It was at that moment that the young man delivered the piece of information that absolutely changed the entire scenario altogether. “There’s a ditch out there between us and the turkey.” He said. “Well, we absolutely have to get across that ditch,” I replied. Without hesitation the young man said, “There is an old logging crossing that we can get across on right around there,” he said as he pointed in a direction parallel to the turkey from our position. “Perfect! Let’s go.” I replied. We made our way toward the ditch crossing with the turkey still gobbling. 

Now less than a hundred fifty yards from the turkey, he gobbled once more just as we reached the old crossing. We dropped into the creek channel, navigated what remained of the crossing, and climbed up the other side. Just as we reached the top of the bank, we stopped to listen. Nothing. For longer than what felt like normal, he did not say a word. Fear started creeping in- Man, I hope he didn’t see us, I thought. We stood still and waited quietly as probably close to three minutes passed before he finally gobbled again. His latest gobble revealed that he had made a move, which explained the period of silence. He was now a hundred seventy-five yards or more from our position and gave us just the cushion we needed to get out of the ditch and get setup. 

Right at the top of the ditch bank was a small hardwood stem probably around eight inches in diameter with a deadfall laying lengthways away from the base with the top largely still intact but absent of leaves. “Get right around in front of this tree,” I said pointing at the base of the small hardwood, and I tucked in right behind. The turkey was down the ditch from our setup and there was a sweetgum flat ahead of us with trees tightly spaced, mostly sapling to small pulpwood sized, and the ground was clean underneath. This was obviously where the turkey had just been gobbling from. I thought we stood a chance to make him believe he had left a hen behind when he made his move, and, with a little luck, we could talk him into coming back for a look. “You ready? I asked. “Yes sir.” The young man replied confidently.

I made the first series of calls and the turkey gobbled right back, followed up by some clucks, purrs, and contented yelps which the turkey answered also. “Alright, just point your gun toward the sound of his gobble and follow his gobble with your gun barrel.” I told him. “Yes sir.” He replied. I called again and could immediately tell that the turkey was facing our direction and had made some progress toward our position. “He’s coming,” I said, “you’re going to have to be still when he gets up here now, it’s pretty open in here.” “Yes sir.” He replied as both of our nervousness began to grow. The turkey gobbled several more times and the growing volume verified his progressing approach. 

Less than five minutes after the first call, I picked up movement through the gum flat at about our ten o’clock. “I see him,” I told the young man, “he’s right down your gun barrel, coming left.” “I can’t see him.” He replied. This was somewhat understandable given the density of the sweetgums between us and the turkey. “Just keep watching, you will see him soon.” I said. After some additional back and forth between the two of us with the gobbler slowly continuing to angle toward our position, I finally realized that I had given some bad directions. The young man was looking right down the barrel of his gun for the turkey as I had instructed, but his gun barrel was actually a few degrees off to the right of the turkey’s location. I eased my hand down beside his leg and pointed- “He’s right here.” I said. “Ok, I see him!” The young man replied. “Ok, ease your gun around on him when he goes behind a tree, but otherwise just be still.” I said. “Yes sir.” The young man replied, his well-engrained respectfulness never wavering even with the heightened intensity of the moment. 

The turkey was making his approach from the east. He would take a step or two, stop, stretch his neck to full length to look, gobble in pleading search of the hen, strut, spit-n-drum loudly, and repeat. The turkeys head was colored up vibrantly, and the rays from the rising sun still low in the eastern sky penetrated through the narrowly spaced sweetgum stems and ignited his tail fan into a beautiful glow each time he would go into a full strut, just an absolutely magnificent sight. “Can you hear him drumming?” I asked the young man. “Yes sir,” he replied “I’m getting nervous!” The young man whispered. “You’re doing great,” I said, “just be real still. He's almost in range.” I could tell that the turkey was starting to grow somewhat suspicious knowing he should be able to see the hen he had heard by now, and I called softly in an effort to calm him down some which seemed to work. He continued his hesitant approach for another ten yards or so. “Ok he is in range now, so if you get a good gap through there, put that bead on his neck and shoot him.” I said. “Ok, I can’t see him right now.” The young man replied. “Well just be still and wait for him to walk in a hole.” I said. “Yes sir.” 

The turkey was obviously not seeing the hen, and we were nearing ten minutes since I had first laid eyes on him. While this had afforded us an outstanding show, I could tell that his suspicion was starting to get the best of him. I had already soft called a couple of times to reassure him to this point, but those pleas had started to lose their luster, as well. The turkey began to work parallel to our position from left to right. “Let me know before you shoot him.” I told the young man. “He’s about to walk in a gap, and I’m gonna to shoot.” He replied. I plugged my right ear to guard it from the blast. The turkey took three or four steps to the right at a steady pace- “Stop him!” The young man said. With my finger in my ear, I did not hear him that well, and it took a minute for what he said to register. By then it was too late. “Do you have another hole past there?” I asked anxiously. “Yes sir.” “When he walks in it, kill him.” I said. “He needs to take a few more steps.” He replied. The turkey was taking more steps between pauses now and progressing from left to right. “I am about to shoot him!” The young man said nervously. About the time I plugged my ear, he pulled the trigger. 

Excited was the initiative, excited was the focus, and excited now he was. With regards to a relatively new hunter, there is a fine line between so tough it will make them never want to go again and so easy that they get a false perspective on what the chase was truly meant to be in it's perfect form. This hunt straddled the line perfectly. The young man was beaming with excitement as we stood over the gobbler and relived what we had just witnessed. The look in his eyes seemed different than it had been earlier that morning, the mood had a different aura about it, it felt like it had stuck. It really felt like the goal that this young man’s grandfather had set for the weekend had been achieved. “You think you might want to do that again?” I asked. “Yes sir,” he said with his ever-steadfast respect, “thank you for coming." “No sir,” I replied, “thank YOU for allowing me to be here with you.” I am not worthy of many of the gifts that have been afforded to me in my life, and I truly consider seeing someone enjoy something that I love so dearly to be one of these gifts.