I called that gobbler so much he probably started answering just to tell me to shut up.
I have been a deer hunter most of my life, but turkeys are a different kind of stupid. A deer will walk into a frozen cornfield and stand there while you drop him. A turkey will hang up at ninety yards, stand on a log, and gobble at you for forty minutes like he’s got a mortgage against being quiet, and the second you do the wrong thing he is gone so fast you’d swear the woods closed behind him.
Last spring I finally had a good bird patterned. A longbeard. Big old boy, beard dragging in the clover, and he had been running the same ridge every morning like he had somewhere to be. Every time I heard him I was in the truck, or on the wrong side of the creek, or the wind was blowing straight up his nose. You know how it goes. I told myself it was bad luck. It wasn’t. It was me being lazy about getting there before him.
The morning it finally lined up, I did it right. I was sitting against a big white oak a full hour before first light, hen decoy set out in a little opening, my back to a tree wide as a pickup door. I could hear him before the sky even went grey, gobbling on the roost maybe two hundred yards off through the timber. I made a couple soft tree yelps on the slate call and shut up. That’s the rule they all tell you. Call like she’s interested and then let him do the walking.
He pitched down around shooting light. It was a quiet morning, cold for April, and I could hear his wings slapping the air when he flew off the limb. He hit the ground and gobbled once, and it rattled right through my chest. I sat there grinning like a fool, and then I did the dumb thing. I called again.
Not because I thought he needed it. Because I couldn’t stand the quiet. Because if I sat there any longer without doing something my leg was going to fall asleep and my hands were going to shake and I was going to talk myself out of the whole setup. So I hit the slate again, a little louder, and I gave him a full cut and a yelp and a couple more yelps after that, because one call is never enough when you’re nervous and the bird can’t hear how bad you need him to come now.
He went silent.
The Longest Half Hour
If you have never sat in the woods and listened to a gobbler go quiet after you opened your big mouth, you have not lived through real regret. A deer doesn’t talk to you. A turkey does, and then he stops, and that silence is him telling you exactly what he thinks of your calling. I sat there for maybe thirty minutes, gun on my knee, sweat running down my back even though it was forty degrees. I replayed every yelp I’d made in my head and every single one sounded louder than the last.
I finally couldn’t take it. I clucked twice on a mouth call, real soft, the kind a little hen makes when she’s feeding and doesn’t care about anything. Nothing. I waited five minutes. I clucked again, two more, and I let it die.
Then I did the thing that actually cost me the bird, and I want to be honest about what it was because it took me three more mornings to understand it. I stopped. I didn’t call again, not for the better part of an hour, and I fidgeted, and I checked my phone, and I pulled my glove off and put it back on four different times. I gave up on him without saying so. In my head the hunt was over the minute he went quiet, and once a man decides a hunt is over, he might as well stand up and walk to the truck, because the bird up the ridge can feel that decision all the way down to his spurs.
Somewhere around nine I heard wings. He had been there the whole time. Not hung up, not spooked, just standing off in some brush I couldn’t see through, waiting, the way a gobbler will wait when his hens don’t come running to him. He was maybe seventy yards out. I never saw him. I heard him flush, and then I heard him fly, and then I sat on that white oak and listened to the woods go back to nothing.
What a Hung Up Gobbler Actually Is
Everybody talks about hung up birds like it’s the bird’s fault. “He hung up on me.” It took me a while to say it right. He didn’t hang up. I called him too much and then I quit on him. A gobbler will strut out to sixty, seventy yards, find a spot where he can see, and set up. He is not stupid. He is waiting for the hen to come to him, because that is his whole job, and if the hen keeps yammering nonstop from the same tree, she sounds less like a hen in heat and more like a man in a chair who can’t keep his hands still.
The old man I finally asked about it, a fella who has killed more birds than I ever will, told me something I have not stopped thinking about since. He said a turkey can hear how scared you are. I started to argue and he held up his hand. “Not the volume,” he said. “The hurry.” That’s the whole thing, and I have tested it enough since to believe him. When a man is wound up, every call he makes is a little too loud and a hair too fast. A real hen doesn’t call like she’s late for something. She calls like she’s got all day, because she does.
The Second Chance
Three mornings later I got him.
Same ridge, same white oak, same decoy, and this time I got there in the dark and I sat with my back against the tree and I made myself do the hardest thing I have ever done in the turkey woods, which is do almost nothing. When he gobbled on the roost I gave him three soft tree yelps and I put the call in my pocket. When he pitched down to my right, I did not call. When he cut the distance in half on his own and then stopped to strut behind a blowdown at about fifty yards, I did not call. My leg went to sleep. I let it. My nose itched. I let it. I sat there so long and so still that a grey squirrel walked across my boot and a pair of jays started hollering at each other over my head like I wasn’t worth their time.
He came out of the blowdown at twenty-five yards, drumming, and I watched his whole chest shake with it before I ever raised the gun. When I shot, he folded on the spot, and the last thing that longbeard did on this earth was gobble at a hen who had gone quiet forty minutes ago and let him come looking.
I sat with him for a long time before I got up. I won’t pretend I got teary, I’m not built that way, but I did say out loud, to nobody, that I owed him one. I had called that bird in before, and I had run him off by being in a hurry. This time he came because I got out of the way.
He was a good bird, eleven and a half inches of beard, sharp spurs, and he ate fine. But that is not the part I remember. The part I remember is that first silent half hour on the oak, the morning I learned that the difference between a hung up gobbler and a dead one is almost never in the bird. It’s in the man sitting under the tree who can’t make himself be patient enough to let the silence do the calling.
