April Specter

I wasn’t raised a hunter, least of all a turkey hunter, though no doubt my Calvinist forefathers sluiced a few beneath the pines of Plymouth. I grew up on the outskirts of Boston in a town that was the very soul of restraint. We dressed in gray flannel, delivered firm handshakes, and spoke in crisp sentences. Children spoke only when spoken to. The ivy-covered houses were proportional to their manicured lawns. The silver-haired gentlemen played golf, their wives played tennis, and if any of our neighbors hunted, they never publicly revealed such recklessness of spirit.

I say all this to clarify that I was raised on restraint, with defiance swiftly punished. I remember one Sunday when I informed my mother, using locker-room slang learned in the all-boys primary school I attended, that I was opting out of my duty as an acolyte at our Episcopal church and would continue my spiritual journey from the comfort of our TV room, substituting for the sacrament a bowl of Frosted Flakes. My mother summoned my dad, who plucked me from my Tassel Weejuns, plunked me onto the kitchen counter, and emptied a bottle of Tabasco sauce on my tongue.

I never missed another Sunday, and I still come undone at the sight of Tabasco.

Over the years I wended away from those ivy-clad walls and sought environs less suppressed. Somehow, after dodging the temptations of puberty and the enticements of college-era hippie-dom, I came to hunting, where I found something primal and unrestrained. I muddied my boots and bloodied my hands and rejoiced in the rawness of it all, the absolution of loss and the desire to be good at something as seemingly ignoble as killing. And then I ran afoul of that April specter, the eastern wild turkey.

In the beginning, our relationship was convivial. Turkey hunting was a pleasant bridge between the end of duck season and the first predictable mayfly hatches. Faced with the prospect of a new sporting endeavor, I traded most of a bank account for a 1906 LC Smith 12 bore, choked full and fuller; a suit of waxed cotton in muted colors; and a pair of leather-lined rubber boots of the kind favored by European royalty. I looked good in the pre-season sunlight, though I had, perhaps, wandered beyond the bounds of restraint.

I mentioned this to my wife one evening, over our fifth consecutive dinner of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

She laid down her fork and smiled at me gently. “Excess? Really? You?” Then she reached for her hidden bottle of Tabasco.

*

That first year in the turkey woods was an education. I assumed that turkeys were stupid and easy, incapable of dodging even a slow-moving sedan. I assumed there was little to learn. I looked sharp, there were turkeys about; how hard could tagging a turkey be?

My first sense that matters might be more complex came during pre-season scouting in April, when I watched a roost a few miles from my hilltop home where four gobblers had taken up residence in some twisted, towering wolf pines. I heard their dawn chorus. I had them pegged. I was confident of taking my limit of longbeards within the first days of the season. The night before the opener, I watched it all transpire across drooping eyelids. The birds would fly down across the tar road, alight in a hardwood strip, and work out into a cow pasture in the rising mist. And there I’d be, well before dawn with an oak at my back and my toes wiggling in my Le Chameaus. I could already smell the roast turkey and morel gravy.

But at my first call the birds disappeared downhill and into the ether. As days passed they grew increasingly wary. I rose earlier, set up with more caution, called less and less. Light filtered through the pines, waves of morning birdsong broke over a sleeping world, and the turkeys never showed. I sat there, morning after morning, thinking about wanting—wanting to shoot a turkey, wanting to shoot one real bad, willing to do almost anything to achieve success.

The turkeys seemed to sense my rising ethical turmoil. Gobblers began haunting the road I travelled to work. They appeared in the yards of neighbor who I knew were gone for the day. They puffed and clucked and strutted before picture windows. They materialized in wide-open spaces right after the 11 AM cutoff. And every time I’d stop, the truck idling, a pair of No. 5 mags jiggling in my hand, and I’d wonder: Would anyone see? Would anyone hear? Would it really be so bad to just go ahead and get that first bird out of the way?

And every time I couldn’t do it. You can take the boy out of the starched shirt, but you can’t take the starched shirt out of the boy. Or the taste of Tabasco.

Season one closed without a scent of success. Only the pungency of desire rising from waxed cotton.

*

Season two was even worse. As was season three. I grew weak with disappointment. I was calling well, getting responses, and still not sealing the deal. By season four’s end I even looked like a turkey hunter, with a vest-slash-seat, decoys, and a camo-dipped semi-auto with a red-dot. Still, nothing fell. I was so morally feeble that when a hill farmer neighbor mentioned that the barnyard tom he’d overwintered had gone rogue, I volunteered my services. I’m ashamed to say that my first gobbler was a hissing, guano-stained travesty that I killed mostly from self-defense. He was tasty, but I was still a failed turkey hunter.

The winter before my fifth season, I scouted long and early. I fiddled with diaphragm calls until I thought my wife might leave. I called birds within walking distance, all longbeards. I learned their patterns. I followed their tracks in the snow, in the punk ice, in the spring-thaw mud. The night before the opener, I out laid my gear, wrote First Bird in Sharpie on a three-inch cartridge, and got down on my knees bedside. Come the dawn, I promised, I’d be hauling my first turkey home.

I rose in the starlight, made coffee, fried an egg. It was warm in the yard, with the night sounds strong and the moon still up. I tiptoed through the laurels to the ridge behind the house, moving slow, moving quiet beneath the oaks. A hundred yards into the hayfield a turkey feedlot of sorts had been scratched in the duff, and I set up there and waited. A barred owl called—Who cooks for you?—and another answered right above my head. I shivered, settled back, and closed my eyes. The moon inched into the treetops, and the morning sounds slowed. I dozed, and the mosquitoes woke up. The eastern sky began to glow, and a cresting wave of birdsong pushed the sun and gobbling time my way.

I was ready. And you know what happened?

Nothing.

The woods filled with sound—squirrels, flitting birds, an undulating weasel stalking breakfast. But not a single gobble. I stared at my gun, stared at my hands, stared at the sun, and considered golf. Finally, a couple hours in, I creaked to my feet, having killed nothing but the morning.

I busted brush back to my dooryard, shucked the vest and the gun into the Subaru’s front passenger seat, and went inside for a second cup of coffee. My kids were still sleeping, the dog whined, and my wife whispered from the sleeping loft.

“Get one?”

At least she still entertained possibility.

“No,” I grunted. I went outside, started the car, held the coffee mug between my knees, and started down the long gravel cart path we call a driveway.

And there, in the middle of the drive, not a hundred yards from my front door, was a by-god eastern wild turkey in full strut—turning in the shadow of pines, lit from behind by a spotlight of rising morning, flexing and standing his ground, daring me to pass.

Which is where the story ends.

But consider: You’re dressed for turkey hunting, you’ve been turkey hunting, and you’re driving off to turkey-hunt another piece of land—still, some would say, involved in the process of turkey hunting. You’re in your own driveway, a safe distance from the house, with nothing in harm’s way for a half mile should you miss. The gun’s right there on the passenger seat, the shells are in your hand, a half-decade of wanting boils in your blood. What’s a guy to do? Except . . .

Remember. Uptight Yankee sportsmen don’t shoot birds from cars. Uptight Yankee sportsmen look temptation in the eye and take the high road. They balance their coffee mugs, put the car in gear, and inch forward, nudging a 20-pound bird out of the way with the right front bumper of a Subaru.

Uptight Yankee sportsmen, true gentlemen hunters, don’t even quaver when 20-pound birds step barely off the gravel, spit, puff right back up, and all but raise a middle turkey toe in the uptight Yankee sportsman’s direction.

But I have it on good authority that real turkey hunters load their gun one-handed, poke the muzzle out the passenger window, and send an ounce and a half of lead and a few years of hard wanting out into the oak leaves. Without spilling a drop of coffee.  And I have it on good authority that real turkey hunters sleep soundly, with hearts full of triumph and bellies full of roast wild turkey. 

First published in Gray’s Sporting Journal