March 30, 1999 — “Dan, did you ever think last summer that in March you’d be in a truck riding down a road in Georgia listening to one fanatic preacher and one fanatic turkey hunter talk to you at five o’ clock in the morning?” asked Tim Strickland, the particularly pious pastor sitting between me and hunting guide Mike Mayfield, who was guiding his truck through the pre-dawn darkness of eastern Georgia.
No, was my answer. My thoughts never involve me being awake at 5 a.m.
I am a creature of the night.
So when I met Strickland and Mayfield for our turkey hunting outing last week at 4:30 a.m., I did so on about three hours of sleep.
“It’s rough,” said Mayfield, he too with sleep in his eyes. “But the experience is worth it.”
Wild turkeys are creatures of the morning — especially during their mating season.
At dawn, gobblers wake up with one thing on their minds. And it’s not breakfast. Males immediately begin trying to attract a harem of hens.
And it is during those early hours of courting when turkey hunting is at its best, before, as Mayfield said, the turkeys “go and do the boy and girl thing.”
We made it to Mayfield’s beautiful Long Creek Plantation — 900 acres of hunting paradise in Oglethorpe County — before sunrise, while the woods were still asleep.
“Dan, you’re very fortunate, blessed by the Lord, today,” Strickland, preacher at the Walnut Fork Baptist Church in Hoschton, informed me. “You’re getting to go to one of the best areas as far as turkey and deer in the state of Georgia. And you’re getting to go with one of the top five callers in the Southeast. I’m blessed and you’re blessed to be going to this place. It’s wonderful.”
Winner of the major turkey calling contests in Alabama and South Carolina this year, the 29-year-old Mayfield began competing on the calling circuit six years ago as an attempt to “get respect.”
As a teenager, Mayfield experienced quite a bit of success hunting turkeys. He was so successful, in fact, that some older hunters questioned his techniques, refusing to believe that a young ‘un could call turkeys better than they could. They basically accused Mayfield of cheating.
Mayfield learned early on in his competitive calling career that being able to perfectly copy the sound of a female turkey does not win trophies.
Pitch. Rhythm. These are what a judge is listening for.
“A judge doesn’t want to hear mistakes, and a turkey will make mistakes,” explained Mayfield. “I’ve heard some turkeys that wouldn’t even win a contest.”
While hunting, the turkey caller is trying to reverse nature. Normally, the gobbler is the aggressor in the mating ritual. Since the gobbler is the hunter’s target, the caller mimics the sounds of a hen trying to attract a male.
Mayfield opened our morning with a series of loud owl hoots, because the frequency of the owl’s call stimulates the gobbler to gobble. Soon after, we heard them. Barely audible, off in the distant forest, three separate gobblers made their presence known.
Little did we know, those would be the only gobbles we would hear that day.
Speaking and acting in hushed tones, we headed in the direction of one of the gobbles, and holed up about 150 yards from where the sound came.
Mayfield stuck a hen decoy into the earth and then we each took to a different tree near the edge of a large opening — Mayfield armed with 23 turkey calls, Strickland a shotgun, and I a pen.
Turkeys have amazing senses of hearing and sight. Thus, successful hunters need to be silent and invisible. Moving is not allowed. Head-to-toe camouflage, including face nets, is essential.
Once we were settled into our positions, Mayfield began to work his magic, trying a series of mouth and friction calls to see what the turkeys were reacting to that day. He was imitating a hen just waking up in the morning. “Pillow talk” is what Mayfield calls it.
It wasn’t until a hen responded to Mayfield’s call, that I realized how talented he actually is. They “talked” back and forth, cutting each other off, telling each other to stay away from my gobbler. And it was hard to tell the two apart.
But no more gobbles.
For some reason the gobblers weren’t talking to us. It surely wasn’t the weather. It was heavenly, a clear and mild morning. “The Lord blessed us today,” said Strickland of the optimum hunting weather.
Perhaps the gobblers were “henned up,” already with more mates than they could handle.
“Honestly, I thought we’d be on the way back to Gainesville by now, stopped off and eating at a Waffle House,” said a frustrated Mayfield, who, four days later, harvested a trophy turkey that had to make him feel better. Twenty-four pounds. Two beards of eight and 10 inches.
Still, for me, the thrill of the hunt — tracking the birds, watching Mayfield work — was invigorating, even for someone who woke up at 3:45 a.m.
And there was a moment shortly after 7 a.m. that made it all worthwhile. I was sitting still, propped up against a tree. A chorus of birds sang from the tree limbs. A woodpecker was hard at work in a tree to my right. The sun was rising behind me.
It was divine — dead turkey or not.