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Thoughts on Love

All through the winter months, we’re treated to the sight of huge flocks of turkeys scratching out a living in our neighbor’s frozen cornfield. Watching 100 or so birds unalarmed at your car idling along the roadside, it would be reasonable to assume that nothing could possibly be easier than shooting a turkey.

And that would certainly be true if you used a rifle, with which you could pick one off from 100 yards. But that’s the difference between hunting and shooting, or, in this case, between hunting and poaching.

The spring hunting season allows you to take only gobblers, and because you can use only a shotgun or a bow and arrow, your effective range is reduced to about 30 yards. How do you get within 30 yards of a tom? You don’t.

The only chance is to get the tom to come within 30 yards of you. How do you do that? Feminine guile. You’ve got to convince that gobbler that the seductive clucks and yelps he’s hearing are coming from the mouth of a hot little hen.

There’s a delicious irony in this: all of us hunters, who could certainly appear threatening to the non-hunting public – dressed as we are in full camouflage and carrying 12-gauge shotguns – can only have success at this sport by doing our best to imitate a lovesick hen.

With that in mind, I awoke at 4:00 one Saturday morning last May, got my gear together, and headed up to the top of the hill. Moving along the ridgeline in the gradually brightening dawn, I slowly went through my whole repertoire of calls. After my owl hoots and crow caws failed to trigger a reflex gobble, I began my hen impersonation with a box call. By now, the woods were waking up with the sounds of chattering red squirrels and busy blue jays. A woodpecker blasted away on a hollow tree. But still no gobbles.

Up top, with valleys opening up to me on three different sides, it’s as if I have my own transmitting station, and I can broadcast to a tremendously wide audience. But not with a box call. To really get some volume, it takes lung power, so I switched to the mouth call. The first time I put one of these strips of latex in my mouth, I did what everybody does: I gagged. And when I blew through it, it tickled so badly I doubted I’d ever get a sound out of it. But over the years it has come to seem perfectly natural to have a bunch of rubber stuck to the roof of my mouth. And I sure can make a racket with it.

So I reared back, and I got all needy and lonely and desperate. I wanted that tom and I wanted him now and I wasn’t about to give up until I’d gotten his attention. I carried on for 15 seconds and stopped only because I ran out of breath. 

And as soon as I was done, I heard the most beautiful sound – a gobble. It came from way down below, though I couldn’t pinpoint it. Cautiously, I dropped down a few hundreds yards at a time. Each time I stopped, I got into a good position and let him know I was still available. And each time, way down below, I got a gobble back. Farther down, farther still, then parallel to our house, and still the bird was below me.

After a half hour of approaching my guy, I knew he was just ahead in a beech grove. I approached as close as I dared. I clucked, he gobbled. But I could not get him to budge. He’s with a hen. I know it. Otherwise, he would have moved some. And she doesn’t have to make a peep. Why do I have to do all the work here? We’d been having a perfectly nice conversation, but now he seems less interested. His gobbles aren’t so quick. Why doesn’t he call me?

It’s not that I was jealous exactly. But then from off to the west, not very far away, I heard a hen clucking. It couldn’t be my rival, it had to be yet another. I pleaded with my tom but couldn’t get anything out of him. Minutes passed.

The new hen kept clucking and yelping. Persistent little thing, I thought. I kept still, knowing that if the tom got drawn to this new hen, he might show himself to me en route. But this hen seemed a little too persistent. With all the gobbling I’d gotten out of the tom, I figured we had attracted another hunter, and sure enough, I soon heard a slow shuffling through the leaves. The would-be hen, about 6 feet tall, in full camo and painted face, and carrying a shotgun and a decoy, shambled toward where the gobbler had been sounding off.

In turkey hunting, you learn to take your puny little triumphs wherever you can: I saw him, he didn’t see me, I win. The tom, of course, was the grand prize winner, because he’d stolen away, luxuriating in the company of a real hen.

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