Photo by Philip Jordan

Every year, I look forward to spring break from the Botetourt County high school where I teach so that I can travel out of state and out of my home region to turkey hunt. So for six days, I had been on the road in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Scott County in far southwestern Virginia. I had killed two birds during Virginia’s fall season, and I thought that I would have easily tagged out before spring break began, but to my chagrin, had been unable to do so.

Adding to my dissatisfaction was the fact that my week-long road trip had been fraught with frustration. In North Carolina, two hunters on ATVs had run off a longbeard. In the Volunteer State, twice on the same outing hail storms came to wreck my chances just when multiple toms were approaching. On another Tennessee hunt, dogs had spooked turkeys that were on their way in. Finally, in Scott County, a thunderstorm and feral dogs combined to shut up a longbeard and a jake that were almost within shooting range.

And so it was that on Monday before school, after a week of having proverbially all the time in the world and not killing a bird, I decided to go to my favorite Botetourt County farm, my “home farm” as I call it, where I have killed five turkeys this decade. But with only 90 minutes to hunt and my past week of failure, I was not optimistic.

I teach my high school English students that one of the definitions of the literary term irony is when an outcome is different than expected. And as just about anyone who hunts spring gobblers knows, this pastime is steeped with irony. I had scouted the property the day before and had heard a gobbler repeatedly sounding off at 9 a.m., so before dawn broke, I was set up in a hollow about 100 yards down the mountain from where I thought the old boy might roost.

I know the conventional wisdom is to position oneself above a gobbler, but I was afraid that if I tried that gambit I would spook the turkey off the roost in the pre-dawn murk. Better to be cautious, I thought, and then make a move, if necessary, after fly down.

In this case, the conventional wisdom was correct because when the lonely longbeard sounded off on the roost, as I knew he would, he was only 75 yards away and dawn had already broken. I sat helpless and frustrated (that word again) as the frantic bird gobbled repeatedly from his chestnut oak. When I saw him fly down just 65 or so yards away, I gave him some soft yelps. However, he was not impressed with those come-hither sounds or the hen decoy that I had placed in front of me before sunrise.

So for the next hour, I sat motionless and watched the tom strut back and forth, rooted to the same spot and still 65 yards distant. It was then that his racket attracted a hen and she joined him on his strutting ground. The commotion also drew four other gobblers that, out of respect for their apparent superior, skirted his strutting zone and marched right past my position, just out of shooting range. I called to the approaching quartet, but they were apparently on a mission to somewhere else.