Six hundred turkeys.
I cannot picture so many turkeys in a single cornfield, but that's what Toby saw from his deer stand one day last winter. What would such a flock look like? Ants swarming over a picnic? Tadpoles wriggling in a pond? Bison crossing the plains?
Unable to imagine this embarrassment of turkeys, I'd be of a mind to disbelieve Toby entirely if I weren't driving down the road to Kirksville, Missouri. Any hunter worth his box call chalk can tell you Kirksville means turkeys the way Stuttgart means mallards. If 600 eastern wild turkeys are congregating in a field anywhere in the world, it's here, astride the Missouri-Iowa border.
Only three hours south of the orderly square cornfields of home, the pastures and timbers of southern Iowa and northern Missouri have a distinctly Appalachian look. Clay roads snake in and around hills and hollows. Instead of the neatly tended farmsteads of corn country, funkier homes mix in with the farmhouses: A-frames, trailers, and shacks, many of them abandoned, a few with world-class collections of rusting vehicles in the yard.
Low, timbered ridges line up behind one another in rows, shading from green to slate gray in the distance. On a calm spring morning a chain reaction of gobbles will roll from ridgetop to ridgetop, like an incoming wave, and later the birds will strut in hillside pastures.
When I arrive at camp with three tags and a large cooler to fill, however, I find that all is not smiles and stacked gobblers in this turkey hunter's mecca. There's a video crew here, their planned three-day stay now stretching into a week; they still haven't been able to coax a turkey into gun range on camera.
Our hosts, Modern Muzzleloading, Inc., would really like their guests to see first-hand how well their new blackpowder shotgun rolls turkeys. Unfortunately, aside from an overexcited two-year-old tom who mis-stepped fatally on Opening Morning, the gobblers are hardly lining up for the honor of making (and becoming) muzzleloading history.
The problem with the turkeys is simple: they're being turkeys. A wet, late-arriving spring has delayed nesting, and the hens stay with gobblers every minute of the day. The gobblers show little inclination to leave their harems and come to a call, no matter how skilled the caller. Most of the time, they don't even bother to answer.
Bob, a world champion caller who is supposed to star in the video, addresses the talent assembled at the farmhouse with an incredulous wave of a sandwich.
"Do these turkeys know who they're messin' with?" he asks petulantly.
My optimism dims only slightly; last year I carried a 24-1/2 pound gobbler out of these woods, and this is northeast Missouri after all, henned up toms or no. Somewhere out there is a gobbler with my name on it.
Next morning, I leap out of bed, dress quickly, and join the crowd milling in the kitchen drinking coffee, microwaving oatmeal, and grabbing sticky rolls from a mountain of 12-packs on the counter. In the hallway, I bump into John, who's already hunted 10 states this spring, if you count two visits to Georgia separately. He's virtually asleep on his feet, still in his T-shirt and underwear, wearing the glassy-eyed, thousand-yard stare of a man who's seen six straight weeks of 3:30 a.m. wakeup calls.
"Morning John," I say, remarkably chipper for 4:00 a.m.
"Go smack a gobbler for me," says John groggily, his eyes finally focusing on his empty sleeping bag with profound regret.
Dawn on the first morning breaks cold and cloudy with intermittent showers. It's hardly good gobbling weather, but the tom Toby has scouted for me answers his owl hoots eagerly. Four or five other birds light up as well. Toby guides me to the fenceline the gobbler follows in the mornings as the bird walks uphill to strut on the logging road. Setting up 20 yards behind me, Toby begins with soft tree calls.
Not long after, I hear the sound that will plague us throughout the hunt, the croaking "yawk, yawk, yawk" of an insistent hen in the draw. Behind me, Toby is doing all he can, throwing the sound of his calling with a cupped hand so well that I sneak a glance back to see if he's sitting behind me or walking up and down the ridge.
The toms ignore his efforts in favor of hens who sound to me, as real turkeys always do, exactly like beginners pounding away on box calls. Gradually, the sound of gobbling settles to the creek bottom then dissipates like morning fog. I look back at Toby. He shrugs and stands up.
"Now's what I call the quiet time," he says, as we walk back to the truck "from 9:00 to about 11:00. There's no point in hanging around and spooking him. We'll go hunt somewhere else, then stop back here about 11:00 and fire him up."
After a short hunt elsewhere, during which we see and hear nothing at all, Toby and I return to our original calling site. We sneak along a fence at the foot of the hills that slope down to the creek bottom. As we're working our way along the bank, Toby grabs a handful of my shirt and points urgently to a draw ahead and to the right.
I hear "click, hummmmmm" like the sound of an electric motor switched to life, the spitting and drumming of a gobbler very nearby.
Quickly we sit against the only trees at hand, a pair of skinny, barkless dead elms, me with the gun propped on my knee, sighting on up the draw towards the hum, Toby behind, clucking softly. Roast this one or smoke it? I'm thinking. Minutes later, though, the humming fades slowly away. The tom's not spooked, just completely uninterested in a hen just a few steps out of his way. It's as if we're not even here, which prompts the Zen question: If we call a turkey in the forest and none comes, are we making a sound?
Returning to camp we find 22 pounds of tangible proof that turkeys do indeed exist as more than disembodied gobbles and hums: having managed finally to dress and make his way into the woods, John caught a tom "in the hall" between his roost tree and his hens at five minutes past 6:00 this morning. We hear this story second-hand, from Bob. John is passed out on the couch.
Encouraged, Toby hatches a plan similar to John's for the next morning. We sneak onto the site of our previous day's hunt from a different direction, early, on the same ridge where the birds are sleeping, as close to the roosts as we can get.
"I brought 'em a girlfriend," says Toby, showing me a glimpse of an inflatable decoy folded under his coat as if it were a cheap watch he planned to sell the bird. If a gobbler wakes up and see the hen first thing, he may fly right down to her.
This morning, not one, but eight birds open up at sunrise. They gobble, strutting back and forth out of sight; then we hear the raspy "yawks" from the hens in the other direction, and the gobbles once again fade away.
"Now we shop around 'til we find the one turkey who wants to come in," Toby announces, pulling off his headnet and standing.
We shop 'til we drop. Toby pauses every hundred yards to call, first clucking lightly on a diaphragm, then yelping aggressively with a box call, before moving on. Nothing answers, although we do finally see a gobbler, visible only as a strutting black dot on a distant hillside across the river. As we watch, he's chased by a cow. Toby and I are in a mood to root for the cow, but the turkey sails safely into the woods and disappears.
Around noon we're walking a ridge down a logging road when lightning strikes. Toby's quiet purr and cluck draws a gobble right back in our faces, just 50y yards away, over the crest of a steep bank running down to the creek.
We stop dead.
"Deja vu all over again," whispers Toby. I nod expectantly and hurry to the nearest tree, pumped with anticipation. Almost a year ago to the day, on a ridge just like this one and at exactly the same hour, Toby drew a similar close-range gobble. He called once more after the woods settled and five minutes later I killed the gobbler--his breast gouged with spur marks from mating season battles, wingtips worn down from constant strutting.
This year, it's no sale. Toby runs through his entire repertoire. We hear no response from the bird, unless you count rustling in the brush when he decides to leave us.
We keep walking.
At 1:00 p.m., we drive to Iowa and trudge up and down more silent hills, doggedly putting one foot ahead of the other until a bird answers us in the distance around 6:30. Unbelievably, he actually comes to the call, strutting directly towards us across a pasture.
At 60 yards, his bright head turns almost neon colors--a veritable blue-light special for this tired shopper. He's 25 yards from our hastily set decoy and closing, slowly but steadily. I press the safety button and line up the beads on his neck, waiting for him to take those last few steps into range.
Then, from the wood's edge to our right comes a single, insolent, yet somehow not surprising "Yawk." I catch a glimpse of the hen's back. With the late afternoon sunlight glinting off her tightly folded wings where she crouches in the open, she looks to my jaundiced eyes like a 10-pound cockroach; the tom thinks she's beautiful. He turns, still in full strut, and glides smoothly away from us, as if he had casters instead of feet.
The next morning Toby and I split up, and I blunder through the darkened, unfamiliar woods until the timber opens into a hayfield. Clearing my throat, I venture a tentative hoot. Turkeys shout back from all directions--12 different gobblers, near as I can tell.
After flydown, there's a bird gobbling non-stop 75 yards to my front, another the same distance behind, plus half a dozen others chiming in nearby. You'd think one of these bird would just walk by in shotgun range on his way to someplace else, even if they're not coming to the call. But no. Over the next two hours they clam up, one by one, and slip away unseen.
I console myself by picking a headnet full of morel mushrooms, then spend a couple of hours walking the ridges and yelping. Returning to the roosts, I yelp and cutt, trying in vain to strike a bird returning to the site of the morning's commotion.
At noon I meet Toby, who didn't shoot a turkey and hasn't found many mushrooms, either. Between us, we haven't seen a single bird all morning, despite being surrounded at daybreak.
"Any other year, I could tell you where the birds are spending the day, so at least we'd have the chance to ambush one. This season, I don't have any idea," he says.
Coming from Toby, who lives and scouts here year round, this is like hearing Dagwood Bumstead confess he's lost his way to the refrigerator. Cooler empty, all three tags unpunched, I head home.
Luckily, rising before dawn, sitting in the woods and hearing turkeys gobble is very much its own reward, because otherwise this trip has borne an uncanny resemblance to the classic rocks-and-burlap-bag snipe hunt, with me as victim. How can you go to northeast Missouri and hardly even see a turkey, much less kill one?
Toby calls at season's end: "Yesterday I hunted Sunrise Lake and heard 25 birds gobble. Couldn't do a thing with any one of them. I gave up and went to another place nearby. When I stepped out of the truck and yelped once, three birds gobbled right back. I called again and one peeled off and came right in and stood 25 yards in front of me. When you finally find the right bird," he says, "it seems so easy."
Which is like saying, when you finally win the lottery, getting rich is simple; all you have to do is cash the check.
I ask Toby if I can hunt with him again next year.
"Come back to camp any time," he says wryly, "We've got plenty of birds left."
Just two or three shy of 600, at the very least.
Copyright (c) 1997 Philip Bourjaily. All rights reserved.
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