Meleagris gallopavo silvestris

Spring gobbler season runs for another week in Virginia, but my season has already ended. I got what I came for and I'm ready to bring it to a close. On my first turkey hunt I somehow managed to call in a large tom, make the shot at about 20 yards and score my first ever kill.

The Eastern Wild Turkey is said to be the second hardest turkey to call in, after the Oceola or Florida Wild Turkey. I wouldn't know. All I know is ol' Tom came straight to me when I gave him a couple of clucks on my H.S. Strut Small Frame SM Double D mouth call. I think I suck at using the mouth call, but apparently my feeble, raspy attempts were sufficient to make the bird curious enough to come take a look. It probably helped that he came from behind me down a hill. I was sitting with my back to a tree and when I heard him gobbling I sort of rolled onto my left side, bracing my trusty Mossberg on my knapsack. So I was pretty well concealed behind the tree and he had to come downhill toward me zigging and zagging through the forest to get to me. When he was in range he had to step around a fairly large tree and just as his head poked out from behind it, I took the shot.

I was using a XX-Full turkey choke and Winchester's Longbeard shells. Everything went exactly to plan, the shot staying well within the pattern I had verified back in autumn when I was preparing to go out for Fall Turkey. I hit him in the head and neck and not a single pellet touched the body that I could see. One shot and he went down. 

The longest mile

I carried the bird down to the cabin whole and set him up on the shooting table (I hope my uncle doesn't get upset about that - I didn't know of a better place to work!). Thanks to YouTube, I was ready for the next part of the experience. I didn't do anything fancy. It wasn't my intention to roast the whole bird Thanksgiving style, so I just followed what is shown in the video and let the coyotes and the carrion birds have the rest. It also helped that I had completed a knife skills class at the local cooking school. After the first incision it was all just cooking. It took about 20 minutes altogether to bone out the breasts and legs. Much easier than I had anticipated. After all was said and done, the bird was cleaned and packed in the refrigerator, we had had a beer and eaten a sandwich and were back out in the woods by 1:30 pm.

Time for a Yeungling and some butchery

My hunting companion and I ate the tenderloins that night. Those are the little cutlets under the breasts. Absolutely scrumptious with just a bit of salt and pepper on the grill. Then, when I came home the next day, the Managing Partner, inspired by the return of the great white hunter, elected to prepare a celebration meal from the legs, obviously the tougher of the two cuts of meat. She very slowly braised them whole in some vegetable stock and white wine with some tomatoes, onions, garlic and mushrooms. After a couple of hours of slow cooking, she removed the meat from the bone and served it over rice. Couldn't be beat!

Braised, boned, served over rice

The breasts are still in the fridge and I'll probably throw them on the bar-b-que grill this weekend. This was a really great experience after three years of hunting without ever taking a shot. I'm a blooded hunter now, and a turkey hunter at that.

The Rut

The autumn has come and soon it will be hunting season. Okay, it's already hunting season, but I can't go yet on account'a I got this job and all. So, following the emerging pattern over the last two years, I'll take to the mountain during the week of Thanksgiving. It's becoming a family tradition, heading to the mountain with my uncle and whatever other family members are willing to come up and spend time tramping around the frozen forest from predawn to post-dusk.

This is what it looks like at my parents' house at Thanksgiving. How 'bout yours?

Of course successful hunting trips don't just happen. Like everything else in life (delightful Thanksgiving meals, for instance or securing the right to an adequate standard of living) they take planning and preparation. This year I got a non-resident lifetime Virginia Hunting License and bought the requisite Bear/Dear/Turkey tags early, so I'm legal. The paperwork is in order and I'm all set should Game Warden Timmy inquire about my bona fides.

A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

So, with my '42 Swedish Mauser I'm all set for deer. With the proper planning this year I should get five full days in. Many of the hunters up at Paddy Mountain extend their season by going out for the late muzzle-loader season, which could add another couple of weeks of opportunity, and my uncle offered to lend me a spare muzzle. But that would require an additional license and the season goes from December 13 - January 3, during which I'd probably have a hard time getting away from work and family obligations.

So this year I figured I would go out for Fall Turkey in addition to deer, which will extend the season at least as long as black powder would, and probably more. Plus my license runs through the Spring Turkey season so I can potentially go out again in April. Last year while I was ostensibly deer hunting, I heard what could only have been turkey up the hollow overlooking which I had established my stand. And this year while scouting around I found two turkey feathers quite close to the hunt club. So I've kind of got turkey fever. With that in mind, I turned my attention to my tools. I have a Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun left to me by my uncle, but it had a 28 inch barrel with a fixed modified choke; good for deer, but not so much for turkey which require a very narrow choke to keep the shot in a tight pattern. So I picked up a 24 inch turkey-specific replacement barrel and an XX-full choke tube - the narrowest I could find.

A proper turkey gun. Mossberg 500A, with a 24" vent rib bead sight blued finish barrel 90135

...and an XX-Full choke tube.

A few weeks ago I went up to the range to figure out what ammo to use. I've settled on Winchester Long Beard XR. I also tried Remington Turkey Loads, but the Winchester held a much tighter pattern much farther out. The description of their revolutionary polymer technology seems a bit gimmicky, and I worry that I am filling the woods with tons of plastic, but in my highly unscientific survey, they really did perform far better than the competition. For the moment I'm sold.

So now the ol' Mossberg is a proper turkey gun. Maybe not a perfect turkey gun, but good enough. And shortening the barrel by 4 inches makes the gun feel infinitely less cumbersome for a little guy like your faithful author. By contemporary standards a turkey gun should probably be all camo'd out. Apparently turkeys have good eyesight, and the conventional wisdom is that you need to be completely invisible. I've been advised to wear the equivalent of a camo burqa, and to paint my face in festive RealTree™. Turkeys are known to have very good hearing too, which is why, when hunting them you need to be vewy, vewy qwiet. Since this is my first foray into the quest to get a gobbler, I'm not quite ready to go full Rambo. I reckon the pilgrims managed to kill turkey with blunderbusses while wearing buckled shoes. So I should be fine in my LL Bean camo and Mossberg 500a.

Historically valid proof that the Pilgrims used blunderbusses to hunt turkeys - Gobble gobble BANG!

Speaking of shoes, that's another preparation I've made for the season. I got the old Chippewa Arctic 50s out of the closet and put a coat of beeswax on them, the better to keep the tootsies toasty and dry. I used the Justin boots beeswax-based waterproofing they gave me up to the Alvin Stokes General Store when I bought the boots last year. I am of the opinion that beeswax is by far the best treatment for waterproofing, and the fact that this was free from the manufacturer pretty much sealed the deal. And sealed the boots! The treatment darkened the leather a bit, which I like a lot. The Arctic 50 only comes in a colorway known as Bay Apache, a pleasant medium brown, but if I had my druthers I would have preferred a darker color in the first place. So form follows function and I couldn't be happier.

Newly waxed Chippewa Arctic 50's

During the summer The Managing Partner and I made a scouting trip up to Paddy Mountain to do some maintenance on my blind. It was always a kind of ramshackle affair to begin with; well situated with long sight lines in several directions, but with no more cover than a hastily assembled brush pile. We spent a couple of hours gathering up branches and leaves to construct a serviceable camouflage barrier which should obscure my presence. By the time I'm sitting in it, the blind will have been there for several months, so hopefully the wildlife will have come to take its presence for granted and won't notice the little man now sitting in it. 

So I got my gun set up, my boots are waxed and the blind is in tip top shape. The leave slip has been turned into the boss, and the plan is to spend the entire week up at the Twin Spurs Hunt Club. We will come down from the mountain long enough to make our way to Chester Gap for the Thanksgiving feast with family. Then it will be back to the mountain for the last couple of days of the deer season. Judging from the impending polar vortex, I'm sure going to be glad to have those fleece lined boots.