In The Field — Spring Turkey Hunt

His head glowed a phosphorescent white in the early morning’s crepuscular light, like a dimly lit light bulb tangled in a crisscross of shadows. Darkness still obfuscating everything else inside the forest’s murky wood line.

At its edge, where it gave way to a green field that stretched to a mountainous horizon, an aggressive hen was attacking a decoy, too inanimate to submit. Unlike her, this hen was a ruse — hollow and plastic, only capable of spinning in merry-go-round circles around the central stake that held its body upright against her constant assault.

Beside her, though never the objects of her attention, were two other decoys, a jake and a hen, who bore a silent witness to her offensive.

Meanwhile, haunting the stillness of the cool mountain air was an almost inaudible “zip” and water-drum beat emanating from his proud, fanned-out body — beard dragging below his lightbulb head.

I shook out a gobble call from the shelter of the white pine that propped me up, my shotgun resting on my knee, pointed in the direction I hoped he’d emerge. If it weren’t for her violent decoy fixation she might have seen me gobble, might have “puck puck pucked” a warning call as she fled the mannequin-filled scene I’d hastily assembled in the pre-dawn darkness.

His head — already a luminous white — glowed even brighter at the challenge of that familiar sound. As he stretched out his neck in reply he caught sight of the lifeless jake, forever frozen in its precocious quarter strut. The jealousy was simply too much for him — he came charging out of the tangle of branches and the mosaic of shadows that had protected him.

A cannon-like boom splintered the morning’s carefully-cultivated silence. The hen exploded in flight, leaving the tom’s still form on the ground behind her as the wood’s edge came alive in the shape of a man, who was coming out to claim him.