A Shift in Perspective

I came to turkey hunting from the waterfowl world. For years, my attention had been commanded by the rhythmic cadences of a barking call and the girded anticipation of ducks fluttering through gnarled trees.

I learned to duck hunt in the sloughs and woods of the Arkansas Delta; a place steeped in duck hunting lore and the craft of call making. The craft rides a current of esteem that runs throughout the eastern half of Arkansas, but it spills out of its banks when it hits the state’s Grand Prairie. Chick Major, Mark Weedman and, more recently, call makers such as John Stephens have steered the pursuit and substantively added to the tone of conversations around duck calls.

In the past few years, I’ve availed myself of the geographical access I have to that legacy of craftsmanship. I’ve met decoy carvers and call makers who have answered my questions and candidly shown me how to turn an insert or coax a bill from a chunk of wood. There’s a kind of alchemy that occurs when a form is pulled from a solid piece of timber. The transformation of bulbous burl to raspy cutdown is a special thing. Taking a chunk of pressed, discarded cork and making it convincing enough that a bird considers it a peer is magician’s work — a strange combination of mimicry and misdirection formed from observation and optimism. A successful hunt with handmade tackle is addictive. It makes the adventure greater, the ruse more rewarding.

I hoped to bring some of the validation I’d experienced duck hunting to my spring travels throughout the Southeast. I planned to make a decoy and a quirky slate call from a box turtle shell that had been in a drawer for a decade or so. I thought shooting a turkey over a hand-carved decoy would be easy. Well, maybe not easy, but at least doable. After all, I had done it before (built a decoy, that is). In fact, I had built a small flock of floating decoys and convinced more than a few braces of mallards that they had found a good place to land. That was with ducks, which are a different animal from a testosterone-laden gobbler. But still, I thought it was comparable.

As is often the case, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. During a busy season that stretched through April and May, I never put my decoy and a gobbler together. I found a few toms this past season that dropped their guard long enough for me to put a bead on them, but never as a result of my decoy. It convinced a bobcat that stalked up to about 12 yards of the effigy and decided to sit for a few minutes, examining the strange bird. The bobcat stayed long enough that I was convinced I sounded enough like a turkey and the decoy looked enough like a turkey to convert at least a novice. Twice, hens came to the decoy, and one particularly raspy matriarch of the northern Tennessee mountains attacked it. Otherwise, though, it never came together.

I was pleased with the slate call I’d cobbled together with a terrapin shell and a spike shed from a whitetail. It was admittedly a low-volume call, but the sound it produced was plenty turkey-like to get involved with birds at several locations.

Also, as is often the case with chickens counted early, failure became an impetus for a change in perspective. Carving a decoy and making a call fundamentally changed the lens through which I considered turkeys. In ways I had not fathomed, the intricacies and particulars of head shape, volume, tone and silhouette began to demand my attention. The dopamine rush of chasing a hard-gobbling bird was tempered a bit by more subtle considerations. I started looking more intently for the visual suggestion of a turkey while hunting. I found turkeys in tall grass I wouldn’t have spotted the previous season. After shaping and reshaping the head and body of my decoy countless times, I began to associate the shape of a quartering-away hen turkey with the curves of an acoustic guitar or violin. That realization gave me a new perspective on how to look through the monotonous vertical view of shin-deep grass, and I started finding birds I would have previously overlooked.

Likewise, through the process of refining the slate call and trying to coax the most range out of a modest creation, my ears began to pick up on the space between the background noise. A friend said that to him, a far-off gobble sounded more like a subtle break in the regular noise than it did a distinction of its own. I rolled that thought around in my head for the rest of the season. It started to make more sense. Coupled with a few instances where I was tipped off to birds by just picking up on the sound of them walking or scratching, my auditory involvement with the turkeys became more voyeur and less exhibitionist.

My encounter with the raspy old hen in Tennessee was the culmination of those shifts in my hunting perspectives. On a misty May morning with a steady drizzle, I called from the military crest of a mountaintop pasture. The air around me was gray, and visibility in the open was limited to about 50 yards. In truth, I was calling more out of obligation than real faith in a response, but I was rattled out of my malaise by a series of yelps that sounded more like a braying donkey than the dainty staccato notes I had come to expect. Clumsily, I ran to the edge of the field and managed to put my decoy out before shimmying under the five-strand fence and tucking up in the thick underbrush.

Seconds later, I heard another rusty hinge of a yelp just before that fiddle-shaped silhouette crested the top of the hill. Forty yards away and a bit higher in elevation, the hen bristled and shook herself with authority. She stood in the gray light in air so thick and wet we might have been inside a cloud. She stood there, a solid black shape as authoritative as any gobbler, and looked down on the silhouetted interloper. She pointedly made her way to the decoy, and the next two minutes were a glorious display of what seemed like every sound a hen turkey could make, including barely audible purrs to clucks so loud and pointed that sounded like hail colliding with a tin roof.

At one point, the hen circled the decoy, puffed up as much as she could muster and pecked at the decoy. I watched as she transitioned from fury to befuddlement to suspicion. Every step of the way, there was some new sound to absorb or a head movement that let me see the bird a bit more fully. Eventually, she saw me while I was trying to get away with stretching an awkwardly positioned leg and made her retreat, but the experience left me with a flood of images and sounds I’m still picking through. I go through the encounter like a Rolodex of memories and set aside the moments that made the biggest impression on me.

Some of these revelations, I’m sure, can be chalked up to the rumination of failure. No one wants to feel that they’ve wasted their time, and no doubt there is some nugget of truth there. I believe there’s more to it, though. If I had embarked on this endeavor and had easy success, I would have stopped paying attention to a lot of things when the trigger was pulled. Instead, a long spring became a classroom that emphasized how much more there is to be garnered from my relationship with the wild turkey. I want to hear more of the quiet, contented purrs and clucks. I want to be able to make those sounds myself. I’ll carve a decoy that’s a tad more convincing now that I’ve had a season full of birds burned into my brain. I love all of it. All that carving, waiting and trying to be better. I love the craft of turkey hunting.