Rocky Roads

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Hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and forsake not your mother’s teaching. Proverbs 1:8 

The communication piece is one of the aspects that sets turkey hunting apart from some other forms of hunting. Whether it be an instrument of some sort or vocalizations made with your natural voice, producing a call and eliciting a response from an animal that is perfectly wild, whose primary focus in life is to survive, and who, otherwise, would be positively terrified simply by the sound of your voice provides a level of intimacy that is absent in many other forms of hunting and serves as one of the most soul satisfying experiences that a hunter can have. 

From a very young age, I always found a great deal of pleasure in this part of the game and worked very hard to perfect my craft as a caller. As a young boy, I first learned to call with my natural voice. By the age of six, I had developed this skill enough that my dad would often allow me engage with a gobbler we were working, mostly on his command, of course. I think largely attributed to my love for calling turkeys, I began to realize that, while I definitely liked to pull the trigger myself, that was not the sole driver behind me getting out of the bed to go turkey hunting. As long as there was someone present who was identified to do the job when the time came, I have always been furnished with a comparable level of satisfaction from simply being the person responsible for calling the gobbler to the gun, as opposed to actually performing the trigger work myself. This is also where I began to develop the skillset that would enabled me to become a proficient guide in future years. 

In the spring of 1996, I was eight years old, and my love for communicating with wild turkeys and the equal enjoyment that I realized in contributing to someone else's success was already growing inside of me. This is even further amplified when the person behind the gun is someone as special as my dad. Given all of the sacrifices he has made for me throughout my life, there are very few things that are more gratifying to me than calling a turkey to the gun for my dad. He and I have been blessed to make a ton of memories over the years. Many of my fondest among those memories have taken place in the outdoors, and this story stems back to one of the earliest of those. 

My dad has always been a gifted writer, and I am very thankful that he took the time to sit down and record some the details from a few of his hunts soon after they took place, including some of my earliest hunting experiences. Many of the details from the hunts from that early on in my life are blurry in my memory, so having a copy of these memoirs to keep and reflect back on is very special to me. He was gracious enough to allow me to revive some of these to be shared abroad. This is one of those recounts.

Bob Persons – April 1996 

 

Every turkey hunter goes through periods in their career where they doubt their ability to call a turkey, kill a turkey, or even be in the vicinity of a wild gobbler. The closest thing to a turkey hunt they can arrange is a trip to the frozen foods section of the grocery store. I have read one writer who described this phenomenon as having an early warning system which alerted all turkeys to his presence as soon as he turned the key in his truck. So effective was this system that he actually went a full season without hearing a single turkey gobble, while his partners were killing turkeys all around him. I have never been afflicted that badly, as I have been able to get into hearing range of a turkey each season, at minimum. I have, however, been afflicted badly enough to have to solicit the services of my eight-year-old son to call a turkey up for me. This happened not one, but two years in. a. row. 

The first year, I had gone all season without ever seeing a turkey. They would gobble at my calls, then having pinpointed my location, they would move swiftly into the next county. I tried moving after I had called which only sped their departure. I tried using different calls, including a fighting purr push-button box that a friend of mine had used to call in three huge gobblers on three consecutive hunts. The turkey that I called to with said box listened intently to the sounds of turkey combat and then, apparently being non-confrontational, calmly went to visit some relocated kinfolks in the neighboring state. 

I finally decided to take my son, Matt, under the pretense of calling him a turkey up to shoot. We were hunting on a piece of property that contained on old oxbow river slough served as home to some of the finest hunting and fishing in the southeast United States at the time. A fisherman friend of mine who was not a turkey hunter had gifted me some information about a turkey that had been roosting over the lake and regularly flying down in a nearby field I decided this was a good opportunity to take Matt because, if worse came to worse, we could still go fishing. 

The late April morning dawned hot and muggy. Giant groups of mosquitoes buzzed around and the bullfrogs were singing their low octaves in the shallows of the lake. Matt and I arrived long before daylight and made our way quietly around the lower end of the lake to a point of timber that jutted out into the field that the gobbler had been frequenting. I was trying to move quietly through the mud and brush on the forest floor and was even more diligently watching for snakes. I carefully found a place for the two of us to sit while waiting on gobbling light. In the gathering daylight, the redbirds, thrushes, and barred owls all did their part to ensure that none of the day critters were late to work that morning. Then the crows started. The call from the first crow echoed through the woods unchallenged, but the second three-note-caw was answered by a gobble from a turkey that was roosted out over the lake, no more than a hundred and twenty yards from our position. I fumbled my old scratch box from my pocket and prepared to go to work. 

 

I listened intently for any sound from a nearby hen, but there was none. With the woods steadily growing brighter in the approaching dawn, I scratched out a soft cluck and tree yelp. There was no answer, even though I knew the turkey was close enough to hear the calling plainly. I waited a few minutes and the turkey gobbled again. I called again, another beautiful soft tree yelp rang from my scratch box, again no answer. I knew that the turkey was listening and refusing to answer my calling. He had completely stopped gobbling. I knew that in just a few more minutes, he would be flying down. I decided to go quiet and hope that the jinx would at least allow him to fly down within hearing. Maybe he would hit his head on a limb as he left his roost and that would addle him enough that he would actually listen to me. Maybe some of the seemingly trillions of mosquitoes would chase him by me. My desperation grew with every passing minute. Matt sat quietly by the tree next to me, occasionally squashing an over-zealous mosquito, and waiting for further developments. 

Why is it that anytime you really do not want to be embarrassed or seem under-intelligent in front of your children, the situation always works itself out to where you are embarrassed or proven to be overly under-intelligent beyond your wildest nightmares? This was shaping up, so very early in the morning, to be a red-letter day for embarrassment. How could it possibly get worse?

Time enough had passed to allow the turkey to see the field sufficiently well enough to verify that no stray coyotes or bobcats were around to invite him to breakfast. He taunted me with one more gobble, just before flying down. Proud of how he had really rubbed the jinx in my face, he flew into the field, went into strut, and began to gobble, seemingly out of laughter. I called to him several more times which only seemed to make his heckling laugh louder. With one last call, he shook his head, laughed again, and headed in the opposite direction. I was ready to give up. The jinx had struck again, and the day had gotten worse just as I was afraid of. 

Matt was intently watching the gobbler. He looked up at me with what appeared to be pity in his little eight-year-old eyes and asked: “Daddy do you want me to call this turkey?” Now, Matt was a good caller, but he had never called up a turkey by himself, although he had called up a poacher on our property at the age of five. I thought to myself: What can it hurt? The turkey is already leaving. At the very worst he will just speed up. “Sure”, I said, “Go Ahead!” 

At the time Matt called almost exclusively with his natural voice. He made a series of clucks followed by a rapid series of yelps. The turkey stopped as if he had run into an invisible wall. He craned his head high into the air, seemingly straining to listen for the hen he had just heard calling. Matt clucked and yelped again. The turkey turned to face us, gobbled, and went into a full strut. He took about three steps in our direction and double-gobbled. Matt yelped again. The turkey started toward our woodline at a steady, ground-eating walk, gobbling about every tenth step. Matt was about to call again and I told him to wait. The gobbler came about another twenty yards or so and stopped. I yelped on my box. Abruptly, he turned around and started again toward the far side of the field. “Matt, yelp again- quick!!” Matt yelped and around came the old bird’s head. The turkey stood and listened as he yelped again. With the second yelp, the turkey turned around and started back in our direction, but at an angle that would deliver him to the tree line to the right of our position. He was around a hundred yards out at this point and in a steady walk, as if he were about to be late for an important meeting. 

“Matt, if you want to kill this turkey, you need to move now. He is going to circle around us if he gets into these woods, and it’s too open in here. He will see us for sure.” “You go kill him.” Matt whispered. “I’ll stay here and call.” “Are you sure? This is the last Saturday of the season and if you don’t get this one, you may not get another chance this year.” “That’s ok,” Matt said, “you kill him. I’ll call.” 

I didn’t argue anymore. Maybe Matt’s calling was what I needed to break the jinx. I headed up through the woods to get around ahead of the turkey. If he kept the heading he was on, he would come to a shallow creek branch. I figured he would follow that into the woods. Quietly I made my way to the branch and followed it carefully back toward the edge of the field. Matt was still sitting in our original spot- calling too much and too loud, just like the hunting tapes he had been watching had instructed him to do. 

I was almost back in sight of the field when a turkey gobbled in the woods behind me. That turkey could not have possibly gotten that far that fast, I thought, there must be two gobblers. No more than a few seconds later, the turkey out in the field gobbled again, and the one in the woods behind me quickly answered the challenge. I was right between them. I had eased back close enough to see clearly out into the field, and I could see the first turkey as well, about fifty yards from the field edge. Although this was within the effective range of my magnum twelve gauge, knowingly taking a chance on potentially wounding a turkey was against my raising. Either get him close enough for a clean kill or let him walk. Those are the only options.  

The turkey in the woods behind me was quickly approaching. I leaned against a big cottonwood tree and turned to watch behind me to see if I could see him coming through the woods. Every few seconds I would strain my eyes around to check on the field turkey, who was steadily nearing the edge of the woods. Matt was still calling loudly and often. I was hoping that the turkey behind me would head towards Matt, but apparently there were some differences that needed to be sorted out between the two gobblers before the two of them could go on about other business. As fate would have it, the field turkey had the misfortune of arriving to my position slightly ahead of his would-be adversary. He was twelve steps when I pulled the trigger. The other turkey gobbled at the shot. I turned to look in his direction and we both saw each other about the same time. He turned tail and trotted away, putting loudly as he left. 

After a few minutes, Matt came easing through the woods, grinning from ear-to-ear. “Matt, buddy I owe you one. I wouldn’t have killed a turkey this year without your calling for me. I really owe you one.” “Yes sir, you do owe me one,”  Matt said, “let’s go fishing before we go home, and we will be even.” How better to square a debt with your son than by taking him fishing? I sure was not going to argue about it. Especially with the son who just so thoroughly broke the jinx that his dad had been stricken with all season long. Thank you God for the wild turkey and for little boys who love their dad.