I call it the enchanted hour because I'm a hopeless romantic and because that's better than calling it the awful hour.

Sunrise is at 5:30, God's time, 6:30 politicians' time. But by then I have been in the woods for an hour.

I love this hour in the woods, even though it is well before I can expect to shoot a wild turkey. The shooting is an improbable event but the enchanted hour is a predictable reward.

It's a hard-won hour by the standards of most. The average middle-income citizen will not flounder from a warm bed in the nub of the night, dress in wrinkled camouflage clothing that smells like a post-game NBA locker room, forego breakfast in the interests of speed, drive a dozen miles to a silent woods, then stumble a mile strewn with pitfalls to the base of a rough-barked tree, there to wait for something which probably won't happen.

And that's when things are good. Sometimes it rains. The rain never starts until you pass the point of no return, that halfway mark between the car and the rough-barked tree.

Then it comes, from a misting drizzle that seeps icily through all clothing to a slashing, lightning-filled storm that is terrifying and dangerous. I've sat numbly as a fine rain trickled down my neck and spine and I've huddled in terror as lightning snapped at the sky and thunder detonated all around me and the trees writhed in the fierce wind.

BUT MOST MORNINGS in late April and early May are soft with the pulse of new life, chilly at first, but then warming as the benign spring sun lays a hand on the landscape like a lover's touch.

Last night I tried to be a good boy in the Poor Richard tradition: "Early to bed, early to rise, etc." But it didn't work. I slept uneasily, plagued by anxious little dreams of unresolved conflict. I finally sank into a deep, dreamless and restful sleep about 15 minutes before the alarm went off.

The cabin was dark and cold when the radio clicked on. Public radio at 4:30 a.m. was New Age jazz, announced by a sepulchral baritone who sounded as if he were laying someone to rest.

My camouflage outfit, sweated in for four days, was rank, even in the chill of the cabin. It would drop buzzards from the sky once the sun warmed it and released its terrible essence.

The old Model 12 rested across the arms of a wicker rocking chair. It belonged to my father and dates to 1920, but retains the buttery-smooth slide action and tightness of Mr. Winchester's best gun ever. Its wrist is as slim as the ankle of a ballerina.

I patterned it once on a turkey head at 20 yards. It put enough shot in the paper head to kill a dozen gobblers. It has done the same thing with real gobblers, dropping them abruptly in their three-toed tracks. It is 32 inches long, full choke, holds three shells plugged.

I HEATED COFFEE from the previous morning. The pot had sulked like a sewage lagoon for 24 hours and the coffee tasted like something drained from an overheated bulldozer, but I needed it as much as I needed the handful of Super X Double X shotshells in the belt loops of my vest.

I checked my breast pocket to make sure my mouth calls were in their little plastic holders.

It was 4:45 and the coffee was steaming.

I explained to the Brittany who had shared my bed that he was staying behind and that I would leave "Morning Edition" on for him. He sighed, hopped on the sagging couch and went back to sleep. There is a great deal of common sense in the French Brittany that escapes the turkey hunter.

The night was dark and still. People die at this time, their spirit suffocated by the smother of night. I shivered and felt my way to the car. Even the stars overhead were dim. The interior light was a welcome lifeline to reality and the car itself a cocoon against murky fears.

It was a five-minute drive to where I park and then began the part I hate the most, the mile-long hike to my turkey woods.

I've done it so often that I don't need a flashlight, but the absence of comforting artificial light makes the night more menacing--or my imagination does. Bushes and brushpiles become large predatory animals lying in wait. A coon squall is a hungry panther. There are Indian ghosts and creatures from Transylvania out here--or so my jittery imagination insinuates.

I SNICKED A SHELL INTO THE CHAMBER as I walked, loaded two more in the magazine, felt to make sure the safety was on. I slung the Model 12 and stepped out, hurrying to beat the gray light already visible in the east.

There, down to my left, was the shine of a catfish pond where I go on hot July days to read mystery novels, fight ticks and flies, and catch channel catfish.

The woods to my right echoed with whippoorwills, comforting signs of life in the dead blackness. I walked the ridge trail where I've hunted quail for years, half-expecting to put up a covey. It is a heart-stopping experience to flush a quail covey in the dark of the moon, probably also for them, but damn sure for me.

The shine of the boundary line marker told me to veer into the woods for a hundred-yard obstacle course. I could limn the larger trees against the horizon, but the brush clutched and beat at me and blowdowns reached out to trip me.

I know exactly where the barbed-wire fence is but this time I miscalculated and banged into it. Barbed wire is designed to stop stampeding range steers. It plays hell with middle-aged turkey hunters.

I set course for two trees on the horizon. One boot went knee deep in an unseen little stream at the bottom of the hill. I struggled on. Unseen honey locust sprouts, just crotch high, threatened to give me the vocal range to sing "Don Giovanni" and I cursed as I straddled them.

It was all open pastureland to the turkey woods, but the first part was uphill. My winter had been long and decadent and I whuffed like a gimpy old boar hog.

I topped out, stretching for second wind, hoping I wouldn't inhale the mouth call that was soaking between my lip and gum. The turkey woods lay directly ahead, a dark presence, now outlined by the increasing paleness in the east.

IT WAS TIME FOR STEALTH. Turkeys were roused to half-alert, ears cocked for strange sounds, their muddled avian dreams fled with the mists of night.

Now if I fell over a log, belched, cracked a stick, sneezed, coughed, or did any of the noisy things that I had done for the last three-quarters of a mile, I would alert several potential Thanksgiving dinners.

I probed for trouble with soggy boots. The woods bulked up beside me and I felt exposed in the open. I was almost certainly close to a roost. A trail cuts through the turkey woods. It follows the ridge top for 200 yards, then angles to the river bottom.

The woods were hushed, a deep silence as if everything were waiting. I moved a few yards down the trail, tiny sounds loud. I could just see well enough to pick a tree to prop up for the next few hours.

A barred owl gargled toward the river and a gobbler responded, its challenge shockingly loud in the thick hush. I tongued the caller into position and clucked softly. Just to let him know I was there. Pillow talk, roost ramblings, the half-asleep mutterings of a turkey responding to a biological alarm clock.

Hens began yelping rustily. Wild turkey hens are terrible callers. But their discordant squawks promise untrammeled sex. The gobbler bellowed again, lust nearly jerking him off his tree limb.

I COULDN'T RESIST. I gave three soft mating yelps, my version of unrequited passion. There was an awful, suspicious silence in the enchanted forest. It was as if Mozart had strolled into a convention of whorehouse piano players and said, "Mind if I knock off a sonata?"

I huddled into my stinking camo and cursed the stupidity of wild turkeys.

A whippoorwill fluttered to the other end of my backrest, a mossy log. It said, "Whip! Whip!" a couple of times, decided I was up to no good, and flew soundlessly away like a ghost caught at dawn.

The woods came alive. At least five gobblers sounded from their roosts. A pair of Canada geese worked up a hysteria on a nearby pond. Cardinals opined they were "Pretty! Pretty! Pretty!" and a tiny bird, as indefinite as a dust mote, flitted soundlessly from tree to tree.

No one in bed will see these things. No late riser will see the renewal of life, the soft rousing of a day that will be hot and fussy by the time most are at their labors.

The enchanted hour is fresh, clean and unrumpled. It is a leisurely time when prey and predator take time out. It is a time for coy wildflowers and even more elusive morel mushrooms. It is a time to keep the safety on and let new life wash over you.

For this fine last hour on the roost, the wild turkey gobbler is king. No one shoots him from his lofty throne. He can fulminate and preen with disdain for he is invulnerable...for an hour.

Now we are king and lowly subject. It's only when he hits the ground at the end of the enchanted hour that we resume our roles as predator and prey. I shivered and worked the mouth call around. I thought of bed and breakfast and other temptations.

I put them aside and clucked enticingly.

THERE WAS A STIRRING in the half-lit trees down the slope. A dark clump became a turkey, shifting on its roost branch. Too close! A turkey sees and hears far better than I do. So, if I could see and hear the turkey, to him I was a brass band with neon epaulets. He might not know what I was, but he knew what was I wasn't: anything good.

Sure enough, fly down time came and the turkey went, amid a monstrous flopping. I glimpsed him sailing downhill toward the river bottom. Presently there was a distant gobble from a different arena. My corner of the woods was silent.

Faith is as important in turkey hunting as it is in religion. You must believe that turkeys are present, even if none sound off. You must believe that your calls will lure them to the gun, even if they don't appear. And you must believe that a gobbler always is watching you, deciding whether to step in front of the gun. Do not move, even to shortstop a tick that is flexing its proboscis.

But, as in religion, faith wavers and the flesh is weak. My stomach rumbled, grouchily reminding me it wanted breakfast. My eyelids sagged, their tiny muscles gone slack. My butt hurt. My back ached. I itched. My mouth tasted like a slime pit.

THE WOODS WERE SILENT NOW. An occasional distant shot reminded me that others were killing turkeys. The morning sun above the trees was hot through my camos. I stretched, groaning, and a sharp "Puck!" sounded just behind me to the left. I swung, knowing it already was too late and caught sight of a running bird. Red head, a gobbler, one of those irritating strong silent types that the old turkey sage Charlie Elliott calls "hush-mouthed."

I'd messed up a roosted gobbler and now had messed up a called-in gobbler.

About par for the course. I struggled to my feet, a thousand years old. It was nearly 10:00 a.m. Five hours in the woods, four past the enchanted hour.

I popped out of the woods and shambled over the pasture ridge line.

There, at the bottom of the hill 200 yards away, at the exact spot where I had bounced off the unseen barbed wire fence, stood a gobbler, gleaming in the sunlight. His head came up sharply the instant I crested the ridge. He didn't wait to see if I had hostile intent. He knew.

He turned and sprinted for the woods, 10 yards away. Then he suddenly stopped and did something inexplicable.

He turned back toward me and "gobbled". The rattling challenge was downright insulting, the equivalent of a Bronx cheer, an uplifted middle finger. It was insult to injury. I fought down the urge to shout something like, "Yeah, well, your mother wears gum boots, too!" and merely sighed.

The gobbler strolled unhurriedly into the woods and the day again was quiet, hot, and empty.

I shifted the uncomfortable weight of the old Model 12 and moved on. There's always tomorrow and tomorrow...