Thin line between turkey hunting goat, hero

CAMP VERDE — Decoy Wars, Part Deux:

Mike Leggett/Cox News Service (enlarge photo) A mature Hill Country gobbler can be easily fooled when in the right mood. When he's not, he can be really hard to hunt.

Scene 1: (A wide shot of a hillside in southern Kerr County.) Short, dew-covered, post-burn grass shimmers green in the rising sun.

A hunter, covered head to toe in camouflage mesh, leans back against a solitary tree, removing a box call from his vest and chalking the striker as he prepares to try to lure a mature Rio Grande gobbler into shotgun range.

In the distance, a solitary gobbler announces his presence in the wide valley, calling urgently in hopes of luring a hen of his own down from the hill and into his boudoir.

"Yelp, elp, elp." The hunter scratches the call and launches his best imitation hen sounds, turkey 1-900 talk, eastward across the valley. The gobbler answers in his best turkey voice: "Gobble, gobble ... gobble, gobble." Subtitles tell the story: "I'm lonely and there's no man in my life," she says. "I'm comin', honey," he replies.

Scene 2: (The camera switches to turkey-eye view of the western valley wall.) Soft, golden shades of morning sunlight have draped the hill. Through tall wheat stubble the gobbler sees colors, shapes of trees and bushes that he recognizes instantly. There's no hen visible but from just over the hill he hears her call. "Yelp, purr, yelp, elp, elp."

He answers quickly, urgently, gobbling and double gobbling before her call is complete, letting the audience know that he's extremely excited. "Gobble, gobble."

Scene 3: (The camera moves swiftly now, following the tom's movements as he stops 75 yards away from the hunter on the hill.) The gobbler stops short of the road he's been walking parallel to, staring with 8-power vision into the face and extended fan of a mature gobbler decoy. "Oops," the gobbler says, turning quickly and walking away without making another sound.

Scene 4: (The camera pans away from the fleeing gobbler's snood, back up the hillside to the hunter's right shoulder) The hunter calls quietly at first, then louder, but to no avail. "@#%*," says the hunter, rising from his hiding place. "@#%*," the subtitle explains.

(Camera pans upward quickly to satellite view of Texas, fades to black.)

One cruel instant

My movie treatment. Nobody's going to buy it, but it actually happened. And just that way, too.

There's no doubt that the gobbler, which had started gobbling at least 400 yards away and gotten more excited and determined to score with our hen, saw the strutting tom decoy and figured he didn't need any encounters with bad-tempered boyfriends to spoil his warm April morning. I'm not sure he ever looked back, and I know he never called again before he disappeared into brush on the far side of the valley on Bobby Parker's Camp Verde Ranch.

It was a perfect example of how even the best turkey hunt can go wrong in an instant, in one cruel instant when we decided to use a pair of decoys and not just a hen. That turkey covered more ground than a runaway tractor and still veered off at the last moment. But five hours later, just before 1 p.m. on the same day, we had a turkey absolutely commit Hara kiri when he shouldn't have.

Driving through a densely populated exotic game pasture, we spotted a two-year-old gobbler wandering across a road and headed south toward a boundary fence. We backed away from him and ran through a stand of cedars to set up in a place where we'd called turkeys before. The wind was howling, though, and I'm certain the gobbler never heard a single call.

"I'll go get the truck," I told my friend. "Why don't you sneak through the woods closer to where we saw him and see if he might work."

We separated then, me to the truck and him through the woods, sneaking past zebras and blackbucks, calling as he went. I could see him through the cedars, so I just followed along in the truck, listening to his calls and trying to spot the gobbler if I could.

After more than 500 yards, he stopped and I could hear the little box call scratching out a few yelps. There was an immediate answer from a spot that was almost exactly where we'd seen the gobbler walk 45 minutes earlier. One more call and answer showed that my friend and the bird had moved closer together. I could see him now in my mind, choosing a spot from which he could see the gobbler coming uphill toward him but still be camouflaged by shadow and a tree trunk.

One more call and the gobbler sounded really close now, even to where I was sitting in the truck with the window down. He was gobbling but getting no answer, and I knew my friend had his shotgun on his knee, letting the gobbler come to him, searching for the hen he thought was there. One more gobble and then, "boom," the shotgun sounded, close now, just behind a little knob 100 yards from the truck.

I walked over the hill to find him picking up his bird from a little clearing in some live oaks. "I can't believe that," he said. "It was perfect."

And that's the way turkey hunting goes. One minute you're a goat with camouflage paint on your face, the next you're a hero with a turkey in a photo. When the birds are working, and they are in most of the Hill Country now, a hunt can go from zero to sixty in nothing flat. Just keep calling, walking, calling some more. It only takes one.