The weather forecast was for snow that night, warming and clearing by tomorrow afternoon, nice the day after, and for our third hunting day a return of cold weather and more rain. The weather, however, was but one consideration. Next we got into the actual rules of the match, and here the State of Missouri added limitations and requirements that really boxed us in. For a start, hunting hours were little more than six hours a day, from a half hour before dawn until 1 p.m.
Missouri’s second requirement trussed us even tighter. Our licenses allowed us two toms apiece, but in the interests of spreading hunting pressure over the three-week season, no hunter is allowed to take both birds the first week. If you hunt later in the season, you can take both birds in either the second or third weeks, but you cannot take your two turkeys on the same day. And every kill must be reported to the game department, by telephone, immediately if not sooner.
To me, these seemed the kind of restrictions that either would leave you empty-handed or make you a criminal, but, being accustomed to the vagaries of turkey-hunting regulations from New Jersey to the far Northwest, C.D. took it in stride.
“Let’s go look at the territory,” he said, tucking away Ralph’s back-of-an-envelope map as rain beat on the kitchen windows.
In the lowering light, there wasn’t a lot to see from the county road except mist and blowing rain, but Ralph did his best to point out some landmarks and make some suggestions—an important one being not to stray onto the neighbors’ land, this being the Ozarks, where private property is held sacred, and everyone is both a gun owner and a turkey hunter.
MORNING CAME in the middle of the night, complete with a heavy, wet snow. C.D. wanted to be in the woods a couple of hours before shooting light, but with the snow he decided the turkeys would sleep late, and we might as well have another cup of coffee. And so it was almost a softening gray when we left the car by the roadside and began our stealthy, camo-clad incursion into turkey country.
Our purpose was to get the lay of the land, make some tentative approaches by way of C.D.’s array of turkey calls, and see where they liked to hang out. From there, we could plan the next day’s serious assault. So we prowled the woods, silent, wet, and white, with C.D. occasionally yelping (that is the preferred term) to see if he would get a response.
Through the morning we located the creek, a variety of deer stands, a heron rookery in a clump of tall trees, a broken-down fence that appeared to be a property boundary, an ancient homestead consisting of a few logs, a stone chimney, and some scattered enamel pots, and one sentinel whitetail doe that appeared, disappeared, and reappeared as we made our slow progress.
Occasionally, C.D. would settle in, put out his inflatable decoy, utter a few words in turkey, and then listen intently. At one point, he turned to me and whispered, “Hear that? Down by the creek . . .” And then we moved on.
The heron rookery was a godsend. The coming and going of the big birds was better than a compass as we made a broad circling movement, trying to define the boundaries of our hunting area and figure out where the turkeys liked to be. As predicted, the clouds cleared, the sun emerged, the temperature rose, and the snow disappeared, all about the time we had to call it a day.
As we climbed to the edge of a field from a deep creek bed, a turkey hen flushed and flapped across the stubble. C.D. studied her tracks in the mud. There were tracks of a tom, as well. One more piece of the puzzle. He nodded grimly, looked around to fasten the location in his memory, and we returned to the cabin, where a pot of elk stew awaited us.
“No problem,” C.D. repeated. He had them nailed, although damned if I could see how.
THE ESSENCE OF TURKEY HUNTING is camouflage, and not just clothing. You have to camouflage your personality, as well. By this I mean you have to cease to be human. Part of it is donning clothing that makes you look like the surrounding shrubbery; another part is sounding like a turkey, or like rustling leaves; by controlling your eye movements, even limiting your thoughts. Turkey telepathy can be your downfall.
For C.D., a devoted turkey hunter, this was a natural state of affairs. He spent most of his time thinking like a turkey, if not acting like one. For me, for whom camouflage clothing most emphatically is not a fashion statement, it took some adjustment. I had done my bit, I thought, by obtaining the latest in Benelli’s super-camo longbarreled semiauto turkey gun (the Vinci, in case you’re wondering), and donning what I considered to be the best clothing for stealthy movement (Filson wool, WinterSilks underneath).
