Last week’s persistent deluge made the simple idea of turkey hunting hilarious, not to mention extremely chancy.
In my case, survival alone was enough.
Of five guys in our neck of the Brown County woods, only one bagged a turkey in the opening five-day season. The second season, lasting seven days, now is underway.
Lou Matsko of Springfield believed the high winds of Monday’s opener would drive turkeys toward the creek bottoms, and he was right. As a gray light spread through cloudy skies, he found himself surrounded by gobbling toms and clucking hens. Matsko had managed to creep through the pre-dawn blackness into Turkey Heaven. It was right where he had heard some birds gobble at dusk the evening before.
As the sky lit to form a background filtered by the dark forms of leafless trees, Matsko saw the bearded silhouettes of several gobblers roosting on branches above him. At least another three were in trees behind.
Matsko made a few soft “tree yelps” to let the birds think a comely hen was at his spot on the ground, and the gobblers began competing for his attention. Two flew down behind him and bellowed for his company. He nearly felt their breath on his neck.
“They were just eight yards away, but I didn’t dare turn around,” Matsko said. “I was afraid if I moved I’d spook ’em, and they’d warn the other birds that still were in their trees. I’ve had birds spook other birds before, and I didn’t want that to happen again.”
Matsko sat perfectly still, hardly breathing. Suddenly, one of the roosting turkeys jumped from its tree, landed in front of him and went into a full strut.
“In eight years of turkey hunting, I’ve never had so many turkeys all wanting to work me,” Matsko said after bagging a 25 1/2-pounder with an 8 7/8-inch beard, the heaviest recorded so far in Brown County.
Three hours later, shortly before 10 a.m., Jim Mulvihill of Chicago sat among the oaks and hickories of his own little woodlot several miles away. He, too, would be the only one of four hunters in his party to bag a bird all week.
“Nothing was going on,” Mulvihill recalled. “Every now and then I’d move another 50 yards or so and make some calls. I finally got close to this stump in the bottom where three of us had killed turkeys in other years.”
Then he heard a soft “cluck” from his left. A hen was coming to challenge his decoy, followed by a higher strain of clucking that Mulvihill interpreted to be a jake.
“She made a series of raspy clucks, and just then two gobblers opened up on the hill behind me,” Mulvihill said. “I mimicked that raspy cluck and they responded.”
Meanwhile, the hen and jake left up the hill on the other side, but Mulvihill convinced the gobblers she still was there. He sat as still as a stone while they circled around him, then one appeared from the brush to his right.
“It must have seen me, or at least felt something was wrong,” Mulvihill said. “It stopped and made a warning `putt’ and I knew I had just one chance in that split second. I brought up the gun and rolled the bird just as the second one flew away.”
Mulvihill’s trophy was a 21-pounder with a 9-inch beard as just 15 birds were recorded in the turkey-rich west-central Illinois county that opening day. Most toms gobbled only for an hour or two after they hit the ground. They disappeared, probably following hens to feed in peripheral corn and wheat fields.
I chased one up and down the steep, rain-squishy slopes of Black Beauty Coal Company’s splendid Clear Creek mine area, alternately dashing and crawling across seven ravines, but never approaching closer than 200 yards. That turkey was blessed with a full harem of hens, and I definitely was not considered part of his flock. He cagily kept his distance.
Terry Sale, our host, laughed when he saw me emerge from the woods with blood dripping from thorn-torn lips. He, too, had enjoyed the experience of being out-thought by a bird with a brain the size of a walnut. It was early in the day when Sale made his critical move, just 50 yards from his spot of first choice to a place that looked better.
“Twenty minutes later, I turned around and there was this huge gobbler standing exactly where I’d been sitting,” he moaned. “Of course, I had no shot.”
It rained all Monday night, making the ground even softer and the steep, watery ravines more difficult to cross. My plan on Tuesday was to mimic Matsko and hunker in the bottom, hoping the turkeys would come to me. I would follow the creek from an access road until I heard some gobbling at daybreak.
A friend dropped me at an embankment and I managed to slalom down the 40 feet of muddy slope. Ahead I saw a flicker of water and headed there to get my bearings. I figured to walk the creek or the bank, whichever was quieter.
Three steps from the bank, I sank to my crotch in sediment. “Quicksand!” I thought, but it was only mud. I was in so deep, I had to plan a way of turning around and “paddling” out, pulling with my gun butt as a climber uses his hammer.
Then I had to go back and get my boots, which had been pulled off by the mud.
Sockless, soaked and 20 minutes late, I finally began a hunt that spooked one gobbler from its roost and spent 1 1/2 hours trying to cajole another from the safety of an open plateau. This bird kept telling me to come on up, and I kept asking it to please come down. It finally strutted away.
Maybe in two or three weeks there will be enough leaves on the brush to let a hunter sneak close, but now the woods were bare and open and the turkeys remained in full command of all they saw.
Once again, Sale had a merry moment as I emerged with a five-inch blood scab along my cheek, courtesy of another thorn. He had been forced to hunt without his turkey calls when another fellow grabbed his vest in the darkness. That fellow left Sale his own vest, and went into the woods without shells and eyeglasses, which also fell on the ground by the truck. A fourth guy went into the woods and fell asleep. It was some hunt, featuring the squish of mud, futile silences, blurred vision and soft snores beneath the oaks.
Tuesday night the rains continued, punctuated by thunder and lightning. Now the creeks were full, the ravines treacherous and the turkeys deathly silent. They gobbled once, all around 7:45 a.m. when they left the roosts, and that was that.
Wednesday night brought more of the same, sans the thunder, and heavy rains continued Thursday morning. Even the local geese refused to fly. In all of waterlogged Brown County, only seven birds were killed in the last three days.
“In four years of turkey hunting, this was the first time I’d never even seen a bird,” said Glenn Lancaster of Henderson, Ky. But he could be forgiven, being the zany fellow who still went hunting without his glasses, at least for one fuzzy day.
