Good Things Come...Failures, long wait, calling duel ends with first gobbler
By Dick Ellis
“That’s a gobble,” my brother John Ellis whispered from his position tucked in against a brush-shrouded fenceline splitting the crops and woodlots of Grant County bluff country. “For sure he answered you.”
The gobbler’s response to my calling was distant, so ‘far and out’ in fact, that I could not hear it. I let loose again with the diaphragm call in my mouth, singing as loudly as possible through the triple reeds with a raspy promise of female companionship, and demanding that Tom come now if he wanted the payoff.
“He’s answering,” John said again. “No doubt he’s answering. He’s got to be down in that valley 400 yards.”
It was 10:45 Wednesday morning, April 13, 2011 opening morning of the first of Wisconsin’s six, five-day split turkey seasons. In almost five hours of hunting, our calling had not provoked a gobble. We were in Zone 1, hunting near Fennimore. In front of a nasty storm system that would soon send temperatures plummeting and rain, sleet and snow throughout Wisconsin, we hunted Wisconsin’s beautiful southwest in the total comfort of 73 degree weather and bright sunshine.
Grant County valleys fell steeply around us. In front of us, rolling, checker-boarded spring fields of tilled brown and alfalfa green reached to the horizon, surrounded by bordering woodlots that sloped to the farms below. Melding together as one, it all makes Grant County a wonderland of hide and seek for the Wisconsin turkey hunter.
A hen decoy anchored in the dirt blew and spun in the wind at 25 yard. Beyond that another 15 yards, a stick protruding from the ground would “tell” John where a turkey was still outside his shooting limitations. Better yet, it would tell my brother when a Tom had stepped inside his quick-kill zone. He knew it well. John, looking for his first filled turkey tag after two seasons of falling short, was a hunter well prepared and motivated by lessoned learned.
A long, cat and mouse game with a nice gobbler had ended two years before at 50 yards with John’s sour note on the call and a bird running for safer ground. In 2010, he had flat out missed a Jake. This spring, he had purchased turkey chokes for the over-and-under and shotgun loads packing a wallop, and practiced to 40 yards. His old Dodge pick-up was camped in my driveway by 3:00 a.m. ready for the two-plus hour ride to Grant County Wednesday.
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| John Ellis with his first gobbler, a 19-pound plus Tom taken in Grant County during season one of Wisconsin six split five-day turkey seasons. Ellis was against a tree in the brush shrouded fenceline in the background when the bird was called from a valley hundreds of yards to a decoy anchored in the alfalfa | Gobbler recovered near his decoy in the alfalfa, John Ellis begins to carry the19-pound bird back toward the ambush point. |
All the preparation in the world though, can’t guarantee turkeys where you want them. With permission to hunt secured long ago and the first hint of orange in the east, we parked on the farmer’s familiar back-40 and embarked on a long hike inside the bordering woodlots to our first ambush spot. We set up on a hardwood finger connecting two woodlots over the crest of a field destined for crops, placed our decoy, and began to quietly ease any birds on the roost from slumber with a wake-up call. Unexpectedly, not one gobble answered our serenade over the next several hours.
The reasons we hunt though, fell over us. Mallards flew just overhead as we planted the decoy and a wood duck screamed its greeting to a new day. Three deer fed in front of our location before a large doe literally nosed the hen decoy with curiosity, ultimately scaring itself into flight. Soon, a coyote on a mission to find breakfast moved through the shadows of a new morning.
“Why did you stop calling?” John asked as we picked up our decoy and packed our gear to move at 10:00 a.m. “Those jakes wanted to come in.”
“Uh Oh,” I said. “What Jakes? I fell asleep for about 10 minutes. I never saw a turkey.”
John carried a new game plan. Instead of putting into play a proven run-and-gun strategy of moving on the inside edge of the woods, setting up, calling, and moving again in the hopes of triggering a gobble, we cut the farmer’s field 800 yards to a position overlooking the deep valley. My first call for companionship brought the distant gobble in response that I could not hear.
For 75 minutes, the conversation continued and escalated as the gobbler made the climb to this boisterous hen high above. Along the way, he was brought to a frenzy as he answered every hunter’s “kiss” sent his way with another series of gobbles. I reminded John of one constant in turkey hunting, a lesson learned on my personal journey of both successes and failures.
“If he shuts up, get ready,” I whispered to John. “He’s coming in.”
We knew the gobbler was up now with us. His demand for her to come to him was overwhelming in volume. “No,” I quietly answered back as the seductress. “Come and get it.”
Finally….silence.
For 10 minutes, I watched from my position behind as John raised the scattergun slightly and his head tilted so that his eyes could fix left on the sloping field. Tense time had arrived, with no room for error. The black gobbler came quietly on the scene, slinking low to the ground as he approached his hen. Inside the shooting stick, he came directly to her. With the uncanny assistance of man far below, John was given the perfect shot; the Fennimore noon whistle sounded, and Tom, almost touching the decoy, stretched his head high in curiosity. The 19-pound plus bird dropped to a full load of number 5 shot packed in a three-inch magnum.
Surely, somewhere far below near Fennimore, someone heard the last muffled sentence of another Wisconsin hunting story roll over the high country of Grant County.