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Get your own "Payback" |
"Payback" by Tom Kelly
from the chapter titled Mixed Hunts
Amateur guiding for turkeys, the only kind I have ever done, as a general rule progresses through several stages, each stage crossing the line into the next depending upon the experience of the guide.
Many years ago, when I first began to hunt turkeys, all my hunts were done in the company of a member of my family.
There were not many turkeys in those days. There were even fewer people who knew how to hunt them, and those people, almost to a man, walked through life with lips and minds firmly closed. It was held as an article of faith that we were approaching the end of turkey hunting, and whatever few turkeys there were left were far too valuable to waste on a stranger. In many families, not including mine, they were considered far too few to waste on a kid, whether you were kin to the kid or not. But in almost all cases, any of the instruction given tended to be brief, consisted largely of a few examples of observation and on-the-job training, and as soon as the kid was capable of hunting alone and finding his way back to the pickup point he got a warm handshake, a slap on the back and was told to press on. He had all the dual time he needed and was now considered ready to solo.
The earliest indication of the low regard in which family members held your level of expertise, even after you soloed, was the reception given your after-the-hunt information during fall hunts.
You would occasionally run into a drove of turkeys just before roost time when you were hunting alone in the fall, shoot to make them fly off, and some of them would. You knew enough to wander around in the area where you thought some of them had landed, and did, and possibly ran two or three off the roost during this re-scattering period.
You could hardly wait to get back to the pickup point or the camp house after the hunt, because you were brimming with recent intelligence. You had just scattered an entire drove of turkeys, all by yourself. You knew exactly where the group of hunters ought to go in the morning and precisely what they ought to do after they got there.
About halfway through your presentation during the before-dinner debriefing session, you would see attention beginning to wander, your comments would be interrupted with increasing frequency, sometimes with eye-rolling just before the interruption was made.
It would quickly become crystal clear that the group believed no more than 10 percent of the intelligence you were offering. They were completely reluctant to waste any time following what you considered to be lucid instructions for operations the next morning, based upon what they had just heard. Clearly, no matter how insistent and strident your tones became, it was the opinion of those gathered that you were so ignorant of the nuances of turkey behavior that nobody could afford to pay any attention to what you thought.
What you were doing, although nobody came right out and said so, was considered the outdoor equivalent of the fear of a child who was convinced there were monsters under his bed and had let his childish imagination run away with him. The child and the bed were specific, but everything else in the situation was imaginary.
During the spring season, the group was perfectly willing to let you go to one of your own imaginary and/or improperly located turkeys if you insisted. They were even willing to drop you off where you said you wanted to hunt because you could spoil no other person's morning but your own by doing so. It was unlike the conditions surrounding scattering in the fall where nobody was willing to go to your fish fry because they were convinced there were no fish there to fry. Your private folly could remain your own private business.
All such snubs, and more, have happened to every beginning turkey hunter who ever lived and, as infuriating as they were, they were probably justifiable, at least in the beginning.
The first tentative steps on the road to becoming an unpaid, amateur turkey guide, is to have an older hunter take one of your reports seriously. He agrees with you that the spring turkey you reported you had heard gobble was actually a turkey. He accepted the fact that the turkey was very likely in the location you reported him to be in, that the location you were describing did actually exist and that it was where you pointed it out on the map. He accepted your conviction that there were no uncrossable bodies of water and no interfering property lines between where you said the turkey was, and where you proposed to listen from, assuming that the turkey gobbled at all the next morning.
If you were not going to be able to hunt the next morning, and the elderly person was, he would be willing to go to your suspected turkey location and would even go so far as to thank you for it, so long as he had found no better place to go to on his own. He only had to admit to himself that you really might know what you were talking about, and be assured that the handing off of the suspected turkey was being done privately. He was not willing for any other person to be aware that he had seriously taken a recommended location from an unlicked cub such as you.