Is turkey hunting really all that?

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Yesterday, 07:56 PM
Fivehourfrenzy

Is turkey hunting really all that?
Everyone makes it sound like turkey hunting is so unbelievably intense and demanding and difficult. I've never been. Is it really as hardcore as everyone says it is?
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Here is my answer:



Turkey hunting IS that intense. I class it as a second religion. I consider myself a good Methodist boy. I am also a turkey hunter. It's just that strong. Why?

One reason is the method. If you go after turkeys with a rifle, they're about as easy to pick off as groundhogs. If you bait them over a corn pile, you can kill several with one shot out of a 12 GA. The trick is deliberately limiting yourself to a shotgun. In doing so, a hunter brings himself down to the game and levels the playing field somewhat.

Another reason is the calling. It forces the turkey to hunt you rather than the other way around.

Third, the relationship the hunter and the turkey develop is intense. This bird wants to mate with the hunter. The hunter has to get very intimate with the gobbler and get inside his head and relate to the turkey. By the time it is all over, the hunter has really and truly connected with the bird's consciousness-- what little there is.

Last, the bird you hunt today is nearly identical to the bird you hunted yesterday, last year, a decade ago. The first bird you hunt is basically the same as the last bird you hunt, and not much has changed in that bird's head since the dinosaurs walked the Earth. Turkeys have very little intelligence, but they have a lot of hard-wired instinct. Over the years, you begin to bond with the Archetypal Bird. I am probably closer to that bird than any woman I ever dated, and over the years you get closer to that bird than your wife. I don't mean that any of this in a perverse sense. It is just that it is that strong.

Each day afield is different, each sunrise is unique, but they seem to string together in a way, and there is this continuum from day to day and year to year, and the overall effect is the feeling of being a world apart from the rest of your life. The fact that it is so doggone frustrating also adds a dimension to it. There is no great wins in turkey hunting, and most times the shot is rather anti-climatic. My greatest hunts have all been complete failures. If you don't understand that, you have not been turkey hunting.

It total turkey hunting touches on the truly sublime. It has all the makings of a shamanic journey. There is the passage into the shadow world of pre-dawn, the stalking of the ghostly spirit animal hidden in the darkness, the quest and eventual joining with the spirit animal and rebirth of the man and the perennial resurrection of the game. It is the eternal dance of hunter and hunted. It is a Jungian field trip on the highest order.

One last thing I can tell you from a quarter-century of turkey hunting: since the bird is the same, the time of year is the same, and all the rest of it is the same, you find yourself getting lost in illusion of timelessness. When I go out, I'm not looking in a mirror, and it is very easy to get the feeling that it's 1982 all over again. When you are young, you don't understand. Give it twenty years. You will.