Leaning back against the trunk of the old locust, I've got the best seat in the house this morning. All around me crows caw, owls hoot, geese honk, cardinals call "cheer, cheer." A raccoon scuttles past on his way home to bed after a night's foraging. Cock pheasants sound off so close by I can hear their wing beats as they stretch and crow like barnyard roosters.

Every few minutes, the electric gobble of the turkey cuts through the din in the busy timber--he's right where I left him last night, in the branches of a maple tree 100 yards up the creek bottom.

Straining my ears for the woofing of huge wings, I yelp quietly on the slate as soon as the turkey flies down. The tom gobbles back immediately. I answer, and he gobbles again 10 seconds later, the sound telling me he's closing the distance between us rapidly.

The tom first rolls into view atop a bank 45 yards away. He's blown himself up like a beach ball and tilted his fan to catch the soft dawn light. He manages to look both majestic and faintly ridiculous at the same time, as only a strutting turkey can. The bird follows a deer trail down the bank, stepping daintily as if trying to negotiate stairs in heels and a hoopskirt.

Once inside gun-range he obligingly stops, deflates, and looks around. The crash of the 12 silences the morning woods, save for the thrashing of the bird in the leaves.

Understand here that I am not one of those callers who can readily converse with turkeys in their own language on a wide variety of topics. So far, my repertoire remains limited to "What's your sign?" with "Do you come here often?" thrown in for variety. That particular morning, however, hackneyed pickup lines were exactly what the tom wanted to hear. Besides, I knew he came there often; I'd been watching him for days.

Expert callers may be able to coax turkeys across rivers and through hoops, but 90 percent of turkey calling, for most of us, lies in being where the turkey wants to go. Learning to call well is important, but, as my first turkey hunting mentor put it: "If you're in the right place at the right time, it doesn't matter what you sound like. You won't be able to keep that turkey away with a baseball bat."

Words, indeed, to encourage us all.

The Right Time

When and where are the right place and the right time to be in the turkey woods? Regarding time, a biologist might answer by explaining the gobbling cycle. Early in the spring, when the gobblers are willing but the hens aren't ready to breed, the toms will gobble frequently and come to a hunter's calls, due to the shortage of receptive hens in the woods.

Later, as the toms become occupied with real hens, they gobble less. Finally, as the available hens are bred and take to the nest, toms will again gobble and come to a call. Bear in mind that, gobbling cycles aside, turkeys will do what they feel like when they feel like it. A skillful caller told me once, "Four days in a row, I set up the same way on three gobblers roosting together. The first three mornings, they wouldn't have anything to do with me. The fourth day, I didn't do anything different, and they came running."

The Right Place

If the right time varies with the stage of the gobbling cycle and the whims of your individual turkey, the right place depends on the bird's itinerary. Watch a turkey and you can pattern him like a whitetail, learning where he roosts, where he goes in the morning, and where you can set up to intercept him.

Scouting begins shortly before the season--the flocks you saw filing by your deer stand in November will have broken up come Opening Day. By February or March, however, the gobblers have staked out the territories where you'll find them during the season. Spend as much time listening as you can, and learn which way the bird travels after fly down. Many toms follow a predictable path from the roost after fly down. Make a note of the times and places you see turkeys out strutting at field edges. Put it all together on a map, and form a picture of your turkey's routine.

As the season wears on, sometimes, your scouting may be done for you; it's proper turkey hunting etiquette for one unsuccessful hunter to give "his" bird to another. One spring, a friend virtually moved in with a turkey on a creek bottom, staying late to put him to bed at night, then arriving early to set up near his roost before dawn. With monotonous regularity, the bird would fly across the deep, rain-swollen creek first thing in the morning, leaving my friend on the opposite bank, wondering what he'd done wrong. At the end of a frustrating week, he gave me the turkey, told me where it roosted and how it ignored him in favor of the greener pastures of the far side.

The next morning I made a long detour to the nearest creek crossing, a rickety iron bridge a mile downstream from the roost. My flashlight picked out gaping holes in the planks, the beam making gray-green circles on the surface of the black water gurgling past. I walked down an old abandoned roadbed, received the usual number of branches in the eye, crossed two ditches, ripped my pants on an invisible stand of barbed wire, and at last found a place to sit opposite the roost well before dawn.

As the sky lightened, the tom began gobbling, and I shifted the muzzle of the Model 12 on my knees a few inches in the direction of the sound. Five minutes before sunrise, a hen flew down and walked within 10 feet of my stand, yelping. Why compete with the real thing, I thought, putting my calls aside. The tom appeared moments later, slanting down over the creek and landing heavily at the far edge of 10-gauge range, fanning his tail the moment his feet hit the ground. He marched in after the hen, thrusting his head forward to gobble aggressively, on a course to run over me if I hadn't shot.

As you spend time in the woods, pay as much attention to the lay of the land as to the route of the tom. Turkey hunters, like generals, come to grief when they overlook seemingly minor features of the terrain. For Napoleon, it was that sunken road at Waterloo. For me, most recently, it was a golf course. I'd been walking through some unfamiliar woods one early morning, yelping away to draw a gobble, when a tom answered in the distance. I plunked down on the spot and began a long-distance dialog. Soon, along with the sporadic gobbles and early morning bird calls, I heard some unfamiliar sounds: an occasional "thwock", the sound of electric motors whining, and, finally, human voices.

Peering through the trees, I made out the squat form of a golf cart, which stopped between me and the turkey to disgorge a talkative foursome. The gobbler and I were separated, it turned out, by the second tee, and while a very good caller could perhaps have lured him across the fairway, even experts tend to lose turkeys in the rough, so I left.

An obstacle need not be as wide as a fairway, however, to keep a turkey from coming all the way to you. Sloughs, creeks, ravines, fences, even brush piles, can prevent a bird from stepping into range. Last spring I called up a flock of four jakes that ran eagerly across a burned field to the sound of my cutting just inside the treeline. Their feet raised black puffs of ash as they came, the fourth bird in line stopping to strut experimentally, then folding his tail and scrambling to catch up with the other three.

The jakes disappeared behind a brush pile just outside shotgun range, then all four heads poked over the top at once, including the head attached to the set of drumsticks I'd already picked out for the roaster. They looked for the hens and, seeing none and being jakes, forgot immediately why they were there and wandered off, leaving me alone in the woods to regret not having set up five yards closer to the deadfall.

Roosting a Bird

After you've patterned a tom's movements and studied the terrain, try to roost him the night before the hunt. If you know exactly which tree he's sleeping in, you can plan your early morning approach precisely.

How close to the roosted tom should you set up? Due to various predawn miscalculations over the years, I have managed to set up directly beneath roosted birds as well as three-quarters of a mile away from them. I can safely say that somewhere in between is about right. Better to err on the side of being too far away; you might call the turkey closer, but you won't have a chance at all if you spook him off the roost. I'll throw out 150 yards as a ballpark figure.

Late in the spring, as the trees leaf out and obscure the turkey's view, you can creep nearer to the roost. How close is too close? Some stealthy hunters I know set up only 50 or 60 yards away. I am uncomfortable if I can see a turkey in a tree, since chances are very good he can spot me. Think about how easily you can spot a deer from an elevated tree stand and imagine that you are the hunted, not the hunter, when setting up on a roosted bird.

I thought about those keen eyes boring down through the early morning gloom as I crept towards my first turkey, feeling very much like Jimmy Cagney tiptoeing past the guard tower in a darkened prison yard. But the turkey never stopped gobbling, sounding off regularly every 45 seconds from his perch in a mulberry tree on the banks of the Iowa River. I'd had my choice of four or five gobbling birds that morning, and picked the one with his back to the wide, slow-moving river. He had twice the chance of coming my way, I reasoned, as a bird free to fly down in a 360 degree arc.

At sunrise, I saw the tom jump out of the branches, then slink through the brush towards me. He paused only once to periscope his long neck over a bush, looking for the shy hen who could manage no more than a dry-mouthed peep. He kept coming and I realized, to my complete amazement, that I had actually called in a turkey. He passed the brush pile I'd picked as my 35-yard marker, and I flicked off the safety and squinted down the rib.

At the shot, the turkey fell flopping into the mud. I ran to the bird, strewing head net, gloves, and calls in my wake. Yet before I made that frantic dash out to the dead tom, back while I was sneaking hesitantly towards the gobbling bird, I knew very clearly that no matter what happened next, the early morning timber in the spring would forever be the right place at the right time for me.

Locator Calls

Hearing a turkey's gobble is its own reward. The sound says, simply, "spring" every bit as succinctly as the honking of southbound geese conveys "autumn" or the cooing of mourning doves announces "summer." And, of course, if you hear a turkey gobble, you know where he is. Toms gobble at hens, at one another, and at startling sounds. Recently, I heard one gobble back to a 12-gauge.

Locator calls prompt turkeys to gobble, an immense aid in calling them to you.

The barred owl hoot is the most popular locator, and while most people confine its use to dawn and dusk, one very successful hunter I know hoots no matter what time of day. Listen in the woods, he points out, and you'll hear real owls at noon. Crow calls, wood duck whistles, coyote calls, the "wocka-wocka-wocka" of the pileated woodpecker, and the shrieking of hawks will all provoke gobbles, sometimes.

The gobble call will often draw a response, but it should be used only when you know you have the woods to yourself. Cutting and loud yelping will spark an answer at times, too. If you try them, realize that the turkey you hear gobble back may be on his way to you, and be ready to set up with a minimum of commotion.

Sidebar: Second Turkey

If you take a nice tom early in the spring season and have a second tag to fill, wait for a few days, then return to the same place you killed the first bird.

Subordinate gobblers know where the old boss was meeting his hens. Once these survivors have worked out a new pecking order, the new boss gobbler may well frequent the old boss's haunts in search of the latter's hens.