C.D. looked me over critically, produced an oversized, long-sleeved, faded camo jersey, which I pulled on over the wool, and a camo cap with a face mask. This, with dark gloves, would do, he said. The point, as Robert Ruark learned when it came to ducks, isn’t what you look like to yourself, but what you look like to a turkey.
As I mentioned, the idea is to cease to be a human. It really doesn’t matter to the turkey what you are—a scarecrow, a rotting stump, a clump of frozen horse droppings—just as long as you aren’t human. In a mirror, I thought I qualified as a combination of all of the above.
And so the second morning, with a clear sky and the prospect of a warm day, we set out in deepest darkness to return to what was now semi-familiar ground, to follow the sounds from the heron rookery to where C. D. Clarke, turkey hunter extraordinaire, wanted us to be when the horizon turned gray and the State of Missouri said we could fire a gun.
IF THE FIRST MORNING was reconnaissance, the second morning was attack.
We knew there were turkeys. We even knew there were a couple of toms. We thought we knew there was a big one, or perhaps two. We knew they liked it down by the creek, near the heron rookery, and so we left the car at a brisk pace, covering ground, getting as close as possible to the roosting trees while shrouded in darkness.
When the shroud parted and the horizon was suddenly gray, as horizons suddenly are, we were in position on the ground, our backs to a couple of trees, peering through the foliage. C.D.
began playing Madama Butterfly’s “Un bel dì” in turkey. And down below, near the creek, Lieutenant Pinkerton voiced a tentative response. Tentative, but interested.
Motionless, as instructed, I waited as negotiations went back and forth. My role was simply not to mess things up, and not to miss when the time came.
Then, from the corner of my eye, a whitetail doe came nosing along the ridgeline, listening to the turkey talk and coming to see what was up. On she came, a step at a time, zigging, then zagging, but getting ever closer to me. C.D., who was angled the other way, had no idea she was there and, engrossed in his discussions with the two toms—for there did seem to be two—wouldn’t have cared anyway.
Finally, when the doe was four paces away, she fixed her gaze on my face, a puff of breeze shifted my scent, and she was off with a loud snort and a drumming of hooves. C.D. jerked around, and the turkey dialogue came to an abrupt end. He tried a few more tentative
yelps, but the toms weren’t buying it. The doe had ratted us out.
“Come on,” C.D. whispered, and moved off down the ridge, circling beyond where we thought the toms were. When we’d moved a couple of hundred yards, he angled down toward the creek, with me creeping along behind.
And this is where that one vivid memory occurred: As we crept around some brush, there, 30 yards ahead, were two bobbing red heads like giant berries. At first I thought someone had tied brilliant market ribbons on some reeds, but then C.D.’s hand flashed up and we froze. The heads bobbed this way and that as they slowly moved off along the creek. C.D. began to back up, pushing me back with him, and we glided behind the brush.
“Come on!”
As quickly as we could move without making a racket, we pulled back 50 yards along the creek.
“They’re suspicious,” he said, “but they’re not spooked. They thought there was something behind them; they just didn’t know what.”
The toms were moving toward our original position on the ridge, so C.D. made a wide circle to outflank them, found a sunlit hillside looking down toward the creek, settled us back in, and yelped a couple of times in turkey.
This time the response was instantaneous, emphatic, and enthusiastic. He gave me a quick nudge, then commenced serious negotiations. It was 11 o’clock—two hours of shooting time left—and it was now or nothing. I held the Benelli in position, resting on a long branch, and watched the grass where it disappeared down the slope.
Suddenly, there was one of those big red berries again, just that flash of red above the brush, bobbing and looking. Then a second one, and the pair began to move in a wide semicircle to our left. I couldn’t see the bodies, only the heads and a few inches of neck, as I slowly tracked them with the gun, moving only when they looked away.
C.D. kept up his pillow talk. I couldn’t tell if he could see them, or knew they were there. I assumed he could. But that wasn’t really my concern. His instructions were to look for a big tom with a beard, and shoot when I got the chance.
The two toms had moved through 90 degrees of a circle, from dead in front of me to my far left, staying 40 yards away, arching their necks and searching for the hen like swains at a barn dance. But they never stopped dead, never paused to give me a shot, and now they were at the extreme edge of where I could shoot at all.
Then, with a gentle purr, C.D. nudged the poison pawn forward. They bit, stopped, looked around, button-hooked back the way they’d come, and stopped dead once again. And looming on the edge of the board was the white queen, large as life. The Benelli’s big bead was on the neck of the closest bird, and I pulled the trigger.
C.D. was on his feet in an instant, yelling, amid the frantic flapping, “What do you think of turkey hunting now?”
“Both of them!” he shouted. “We got them both!”
Unbeknownst to me, we fired at the exact instant, both of us recognizing the perfect opportunity when it came, and there they were: two big toms, mine with three beards, C.D.’s with one big bushy beard, and both perfectly dispatched. It was 11:30.
With a mile or more back to the car, a 25-pound turkey gets heavy. As we emerged from the woods, each burdened with a shotgun, assorted packs, and a big tom hanging down our back with the wings spread like Dracula’s cape, a neighbor drove by and stopped. He rolled down his window and grinned.
“Nice birds!” he said.
It doesn’t happen like this very often, but when it does . . .
No, Wieland didn’t become a die-hard turkey hunter. No, he didn’t go shopping for camo. Wisdom is knowing when to quit. He still harbors the ambition, however, to bring down a turkey on the wing.
> If You Go
Turkey hunting in Missouri is relatively inexpensive and very likely to be fruitful. Tags are available online, and once you have your license and a copy of the hunting regulations, all you need is a place to hunt.
All the information you need can be found at the Missouri Department of Conservation website (https://mdc.mo.gov/hunting-trapping/turkey-hunting). One vital bit of equipment is a can of tick repellent, because a warm May day brings out the ticks in force.
Regarding guns, everyone has his preferences. Many authorities prescribe ultra-magnum cartridges, but while my camouflage Benelli Vinci has a 3½-inch chamber, I used Federal Premium 2¾-inch cartridges loaded with 1¼ ounces of #7 “Heavyweight” shot, with a full-choke tube. For the conditions we encountered, it was perfect.
