Turkey hunting memories ; no trigger pull required
This is the short version.
We parked the car and walked through a dark woods to a place where we sat with our backs to trees and listened.
It rained.
After daylight we started to call.
Eventually we had three toms coming toward us. They picked up hens along the way and didn’t come in to the gun. It rained more. The toms were still talking to us, hours later, but we were wet and went home.
It’s not the whole story.
There was other stuff out there, and the combination made the hunt memorable. Most hunts are like this, by virtue of how we absorb details — even when we’re just walking through the forest dressed like camouflaged bull fighters, trying to not trip over limbs and fall, scattering our dignity and the contents of our pockets.
That has not happened to me, at least in a while, but I understand it could.
We would certainly feel foolish on our hands and knees using the flashlight of our cell phone to find the striker from the slate call.
Considering this, we step lightly as we walk.
There are other things.
The glow of fawn lillies in our path look like small stars, and we make a note to pluck one on the way back to the car, although in all likelihood we will come back by another route.
We step over shooting stars too, thin blankets of the dainty purple flowers that in the breaking dawn are delicate reminders of things ephemeral.
Cut dirt, black and upturned, are the running tracks of deer or elk that burst across the shallow topsoil this morning, or last week.
All the limbs fallen from the trees seasons ago, their needles shed and bark peeled away making them slick in the early rain, appear to be shed antlers. We know from experience that they are not antlers and walk by.
Ducks paddle in a pond that is silver in the morning light, as they talk their feeding talk that sounds like, “getbackbackback backback.” Then a goose on the pond has caught our silhouettes and starts its long scolding. The chant is loud and raucous. It is picked up by other Canada geese that have used the swamp forever, and we chide ourselves in hushed tones because the geese will surely alert any tom turkey that we’ve come gunning.
Somewhere across a meadow a coyote has watched us since we hit the trail along the field. It stands motionless and invisible. We don’t know it’s there and don’t see it turn tail, so to speak, and if we had seen it go, we may wonder to ourselves how old is that phrase, “turn tail,” and where was it first uttered?
There’s a lot of talking in one’s head on a hunt.
When more light fills the forest, I stand up from the tree that I have been using as a back rest and go looking for another place because the first spot you choose in the early dark is often not the best one. When I return I can barely make out my son sitting against his tree, a fir with gray bark, because of his camouflage clothing and face paint. He realizes this and raises a hand. This is me, not a tree. His shotgun barrel pokes out and wiggles as he stands up.
I tell him about a heavily used elk trail where a herd must have cleared a bank as it tumbled into the canyon, or clawed its way out.
It’s just over there, I say.
We use our hunting voices which are the same ones you would use around a sleeping baby.
We find another spot, knock limbs off small trees, clearing a field of fire in case it comes to that, and as soon as I cut from a box call, a tom gobbles back.
It’s often difficult in the slanting Panhandle country to know how far away a tom is, by their call. Sometimes, though, they will fly across a canyon to meet a hen.
Not far from where we sit you can see the lake. Yellow pine from an old homestead measure twice the hugging girth of a person’s outstretched arms. Getting to town, back then, must have been a bear.
Idahoans.
What can you say?
And that’s just the first hour. It’s not even 7 o’clock yet.
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Ralph Bartholdt can be reached at rbartholdt@ cdapress.com.