HUNTING HOUSE MOUNTAIN

One of the deep virtues my ten-year-old daughter Eline has learned in the fourth grade is to ask questions. Lately, she asks with a formal gesture, clearing her throat and making an announcement: "Dad, I have a question...." What follows can range widely, from whether we are having noodles for supper to whether we believe in God, but the question is rarely idle. Usually, too, I try to answer her as honestly as I know how, which is not always obvious or easy. So I suspected we were in for some thought-provoking talk when Eline cleared her throat the other day and announced that she had a question: "How can you kill something you love so much?"

We were driving along Still House Drive, heading east toward town on a splendidly cool, bright afternoon in late April. As we drove slowly along the gravel road, flanking Little House Mountain, both of my daughters had been listening politely to me expound at great length upon the nobility and beauty of the wild turkeys living in our woods. But Eline's question stopped me in my verbal tracks, as if I had left my numerous words behind us on the road.

Luckily for all of us, I did not attempt to justify hunting wild turkeys to Eline and Sylvia. Nor do I really seek to do that here. Eline's question was more properly a statement of puzzlement than a question with an answer. Or maybe it was best to see it as an expression of wonder, for my silence, after I murmured a response-"Good question!"-was truly full of wonder, too.

Although I have been an avid outdoorsman since I was seven years old, I came to hunting only twenty years ago, and my passion for wild turkeys really began in the spring of 1985, my first year of teaching at Washington and Lee University. As a child, I spent long afternoons in the woods near my home in Alabama, armed with a birding guide or a geologist's hammer. Always I was looking for specimens to identify, to name and know. Later, I devoted much of my adolescence to hiking and camping with the Boy Scouts, and many of the practical skills I still use in backpacking and camping date from those years. But I never hunted; that's one merit badge I never earned. It just never seemed to occur to me.

On a sunny spring morning in 1985, under a canopy of redbuds and dogwoods, my hunting partner and mentor, Sig Podlejski, called in a gobbling jake for me. Sig posted himself next to my right shoulder as the bird walked through blowdowns, its head bobbing. When the young gobbler came within twenty yards of us, Sig whispered, "You can take him," I shot, and the bird went down. At the time it seemed like a pretty easy hunt. I was excited, to be sure. While that wild bird was walking to my gun, my heart was pounding in my ears and throat, rushing with adrenaline.

I know now that I had just been very lucky, but I didn't have any idea how lucky. I was to learn that part of the story, too, and over the next several years I went to school. Like my daughter, I learned to ask questions. I talked to friends, to hunting colleagues at Washington and Lee, and I read several good books and numerous article about hunting the wild turkey. I spent a lot of time in the woods, hunting spring gobblers especially, though I went after the birds sometimes during the fall season as well. For the next several years, I pursued wild turkeys with a passion, and during the entire time I never shot a bird. For two years, in fact, I don't believe I even saw one. It was as if I had used up all my good luck with that gobbling jake in 1985.

During those years, strangely enough, my passion for wild turkeys grew and grew. It was as if they were an absent loved one, as if I physically missed them. Along with my reading, I was practicing the fine art of calling with the diaphragm mouth call, a small frame of horseshoe-shaped aluminum on which layers of latex are stretched and taped into place. I have always loved to learn languages, and here I found a new, wild language to speak. I listened to instructional tapes and was critiqued repeatedly by more expert callers. I tried several kinds of calls, mouth calls and friction calls, too, which are like writing a turkey yelp on a piece of slate with a corncob chalk. Mostly I spent time in the woods alone, calling into the silence on House Mountain, and often I felt like a ten-year-old boy again, hacking at a red clay hillside with a geologist's hammer, imagining I would find a cache of arrowheads or a single geode of shining quartz crystals.

Step by nearly invisible step, I was learning to hunt House Mountain. I remember certain moments very distinctly, and they often have to do with a lesson learned, a step taken. In the spring of 1986, for instance, I heard a gobbler answer my early morning tree call, fly off the roost away from me, gobble in response to my next call from what seemed a thousand yards away, and then, mere moments later, suddenly alarm-putt directly in front of me. On a foggy spring morning in early season of 1988, I called a big gobbler to within twenty-five yards of me, but at the critical moment I moved my gun and shoulders to track the bird as he walked across in front of me. Another alarm-putt. End of hunt; end of story. At one point, I remember, I looked at John McDaniel's list of the ten most common errors in spring turkey hunting, and I reckoned I had committed eight of them in one season. Maybe a half-dozen in one morning.

This is not to say that I was completely inept. One spring morning in the late 1980s, I was at our favorite listening post on House Mountain when I heard a tom gobbling loudly and eagerly from the roost. He was in a tree on the ridge across from me, and a deep bowl lay between us, so I eased down my ridge to set up across from him. He answered my yelps like I was the last hen on earth. But I wasn't. A hen yelped loudly at him from his side of the bowl, and then she walked down the ridge toward him, yelping the entire way like a scratched record. Then silence, and more silence, for a full thirty minutes. I tested my patience for as long as I could, and then I called down into the bowl. He gobbled, then he gobbled again! Within thirty seconds, I heard his footsteps, and then he leaped over the contour into view, off to my right and fifteen yards below me. Partially hidden by a hardwood trunk, he drummed his wings, puffed and spit, fanning himself into a strut. I waited, motionless, staring down the barrel of my shotgun, pointing some twenty degrees to the left of the gobbler. I purred softly against the butt of my gun. Then he gobbled, and the sound rang in the trees around us! I swung the gun immediately to my right, then purred again. The two-year-old ran from behind that tree, and I still can see the way his eye was gleaming as he looked for a hen. That was the first bird I called in and killed by myself.

But the kill has never been the main point to me. Certainly I eat every morsel of every wild turkey I kill. Certainly the passion does indeed come from the predatory act. If it weren't for that act-or its possibility, in every hunt-the hunt would not be a passion. Partly that is because the predatory act requires forms of attention to the woods that you cannot give otherwise. No matter how quiet and woods-wise I try to be in hiking or biking or camping on House Mountain, I never have the intimate relationship to the woods I find in a hunt for wild turkeys. The forms of attention aren't always that ultimate form, the tense stillness with which you must hold the gun as a wild gobbler shows himself to you. That requires a puzzling combination of loose relaxation, steady breathing, and intense, beating excitement, like a balloon steadily filling with too much air.

Sometimes the attention is interpretive, and story-telling can often help you read a situation. This past spring, for example, I heard a gobbler sound off from his roost on a ridge across from my house in Still House Hollow, on the northeast flank of Little House Mountain. I was ready for action, and I made a rapid, slanting climb up to the ridge-line in ten minutes, setting up about a hundred yards above the wild bird. Then I realized, as I listened, that there were two gobblers answering my soft tree call. After a few minutes of calling to one another, the near bird flew off his roost. I heard his wings flap as he sailed out of the tree. But instead of coming toward me, he flew away from me, down toward the second gobbler! I heard them gobble together on the ground, though the sounds were so nearly simultaneous that an inexperienced listener might have thought they came from a single gobbler.

I imitated the fly-down cackle of a hen leaving the roost, then I yelped twice. Both gobblers responded immediately, in direct competition with each other but like they were egging one another on. I told myself that they would both appear directly below me. I told myself to watch for a white head, to be positive in identifying the sex of the bird. My story was almost exactly right. The two wild gobblers appeared to my right, in a grassy, bright green road cut years before by the power company. Both gobbled together as they jumped into the road, but I was so startled by the sight and sound that I didn't move. I couldn't move. The larger of the two birds was behind the smaller. He puffed himself up, flapping his wings and stretching his neck straight up toward the sky. Then he spread his tail-feathers into a huge fan. The lead bird gobbled, and I peered sideways toward him to check his beard and head. I couldn't see a beard, but the gobble told me he was a male, maybe a jake. The larger bird strutted to my right, walking behind a log or blowdown. I figured that he wouldn't spot me if I moved, but the lead bird certainly would. So I waited for the lead bird to gobble. He also turned and walked to my right, away from my gun and into the woods, looking for the invisible hen he knew should be there. Then he gobbled, I swung the gun and shot, all in one movement. When I ran to my wild bird, I almost ran over the strutting tom, still behind his log. He startled, alarm-putted, and flew off.

Most often, the intimacy and the sense of intense connection stem from the single hunter's calling to an excited, vocal gobbler. But several of the most memorable hunts I have experienced were not like that at all. One warm October afternoon, I was bowhunting from a tree-stand in Still House Hollow, and I heard a large flock of turkeys scratching and feeding below me. I called to them, using fall calls like the "kee-kee" and whistle, and soon several wild birds were answering me. I heard a smaller group detach itself from the main flock and come up the hill toward my stand. As I got ready to draw my bow, a wild turkey gobbled! My heart was racing, and only an hour before I had been driving home in my car. I drew the string back to my cheek and held steady. Seconds went by, one by one, and my arms ached. I could hear the birds, but where were they? After about sixty seconds, I had to let off the string. I breathed deeply and slowly, focusing on relaxing the muscles in my shoulders and arms. As I drew the bow a second time, I saw movement just at the contour line of the ridge below me. I called softly, and I thought I heard a raspy yelp. Again I held as long as I could, but again I couldn't bring a bird into range within sixty seconds. Nor could I hold the bow taut any longer. Again I relaxed my arms and shoulders while I looked hard down into the woods. Then I saw them. A half-dozen white-headed gobblers came across from right to left, angling up the hill toward me. My heart leaped into my eyes. When the lead gobbler came to a big oak tree less than thirty yards from my stand, I drew the bow a third time. PUTT!! The wild birds exploded into a run and leaped into the air, flying off down the ridge, back toward the main flock. I let off the bow, my arms shaking, my head shaking with wonder.

Another time, Sig and I were hunting House Mountain on opening day of the spring season. We were on the northwest slope of Little House, looking down into the deep ravine that cuts Little House and Big House apart. We heard a large, mature gobbler way down in the ravine, and he clearly had a bunch of other birds with him. We decided to double-team him, both of us calling to imitate a large group of hens. At eight o'clock, a huge tom-probably twenty-five pounds, and certainly the largest I have ever seen-came pacing up out of the cut in the mountains. We watched him through binoculars, for he was a hundred yards away from us on an open ridge. He was in full strut, and he seemed to float up the ridge. He was surrounded by smaller birds-some hens, some young gobblers. We counted at least a dozen birds around him. As he floated up into the open, he gobbled thunderously, and the air around him seemed to vibrate with the blue color of his head. We called to him-eagerly, passionately, hopefully-but of course he merely paused before angling back down into the ravine. We named him the Sultan.

Later that morning, after Sig had left for family duties, I followed his advice and worked a different wild gobbler, farther over on the sharp slope of Little House Mountain, where the cut deepened and widened. And in fact I wound up calling that second bird in to my gun, using my mouth call and even rustling leaves with my boot to make him gobble. When I shot him, I was perched against the steep incline of the ravine, and all I could see was his powder-white head between a tree-trunk and a boulder. He was a superb animal, weighing over twenty pounds. But the absolute story of the morning and the truly awesome sight to behold had been the Sultan and his harem.

Finally, I can tell a story that is full of wonder in many ways. It happened on opening day about ten years ago. Sig and I met early in the morning for coffee and drove together to the trailhead at House Mountain. The air was wet and downright chilly, near freezing. But we warmed up as we hiked toward our traditional listening post. Typical of opening day, we had forgotten our Gore-Tex gloves, and later I realized I had also forgotten my face mask. In the graying light of dawn, the woods seemed to emerge like ghosts out of crystal clouds. The wind picked up and blew in our faces. We reached the listening post and sat down in wet leaves, waiting for a sound. At three thousand feet, the temperature hovered at freezing.

"What do you think of this?" my partner asked.

We looked up into freezing mist and wind.

"Man alive, this is unbelievably beautiful."

At first light, Sig softly tree-called, and a loud gobble burst from the cloudbank directly above us. We climbed up the rocky slope above the trail and set up, our backs to hickory trees, Sig fifteen yards to my right. We faced directly up the mountain. He gobbled again, and the wild bird was clearly roosting a mere fifty yards above us.

It was then I realized I had left my face mask and waterproof gloves behind. I pulled my turtleneck to my eyes and ducked my chin into my chest. The wind howled in our faces, whipping ice crystals into our skin. We waited, not daring to look at each other. Above us, the gobbler sounded off one more time, and his call resounded in the freezing air around us. Then silence descended like a cloud.

Suddenly, out of frozen nowhere, a second wild gobbler sounded off. He was farther off to our right, but at our elevation. The muffled gobble sounded distant, perhaps a couple hundred yards away, though the bitter, driving wind made it hard to tell. The gobbler roosted above us remained silent. Then the wind picked up even more, driving into our eyes even harder, and it was hard to believe we were hunting House Mountain-even harder to believe it was mid-April. Ice and rain mixed in the wind, slapping at our hands, soaked in their cotton gloves. We waited, huddling against the tree trunks, shrinking into our inner layers.

Minutes crept by-five, ten. Then ten more. My feet felt like ice-blocks, and I couldn't feel my toes to wiggle them. My hands were drenched against the stock of the gun, and my breath blew out from my turtleneck in crystallizing clouds. As Sig told the story later, he said to the gobbler, "OK, now either you move or I move!"

Sig rapped out a series of sharp, varied calls that rattled through the frozen trees. Then the far bird gobbled-triple-gobbled! I stole a glance to my right, and I saw Sig turn his shoulders, torquing his waist to the right. He purred, and then he purred again.

I turned, too, but I never saw them come in. I could hear movement, but I could barely make out my partner, barely fifteen yards away, the clouds were so thick. A silence passed, like a ghost, then suddenly Sig shot into the fog. Birds flew in every direction; I stared up at them as I fell over on the ground. I stumbled up and ran with my partner down to the gobbler. He rolled down and came to rest against the trunk of a shagbark hickory, just above the House Mountain road. He was an immense, mature wild gobbler, dripping wet, crystals forming on his feathers.

It was seven o'clock in the morning on an opening day in April. My partner and I were shaking, nearly hypothermic, standing next to the wild gobbler, looking at each other and at him. I had never hunted House Mountain in such adverse conditions, in such a strange landscape of fog and wind and rain, and with such a result. To call such a hunt "successful" seemed not nearly enough. The words I thought of-the words I still think of today-were "amazing" and "wonderful." Even such words fail to tell the story. Even they fail to answer the kind of question my daughter posed this spring. They simply stand for an intimate form of wonder, a mysterious connection between humans and the wild.