The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

My father had Colby out of bed at four thirty, and I let him miss first hour of school.

They walked in under the stars and set up against a big white oak above the creek. Colby told me all about it after.

A gobbler sounded off from the roost at first light, so close Colby said he felt it in his chest.

The bird flew down.

It strutted out in the hayfield at the bottom of the hollow with three hens, and every time Colby yelped on the box call the gobbler would answer and puff and turn, and then follow the hens the other way.

“Hung up,” my father said, when he dropped Colby at the school door at eight fifteen. “He’s got all the girlfriends he needs. We’ll get him.”

Colby went into school with leaf bits in his hair. His teacher told me later he fell asleep in social studies, and she let him.

Tuesday it rained. Wednesday the gobbler did the same thing, out into the field with his hens, answering every call and coming no closer.

Thursday my father’s knees would not get out of bed before daylight, and he called and said so, and Colby said it was fine.

That was the morning Jory came by.

Jory farms the place on the north side of my father’s timber.

He is in his sixties and has a gray beard and drives a truck with one blue door and one red door, and he has hunted turkeys in that country since he was Colby’s age.

He had heard about the farm hunt from his wife, who had heard it at the beauty shop. Everybody in Linn had heard by then. It is that size of a town.

Jory knocked on my door Thursday after school with a hen decoy under one arm, the old kind with the folding stake, the paint worn off the back where it had ridden in a vest for twenty years.

“He’s hung up on those hens,” Jory said to Colby. “That bird thinks every hen in the county comes to him. Put this out in the open twenty steps off your tree. Then quit calling so much. Let him come looking.”

Colby took the decoy like it was made of glass.

“Bring it back with a story,” Jory said, and tipped his cap to me, and went back down the drive.

That Saturday my father’s knees were better. He called at eight Friday night and said they were going in the morning, and he asked if I wanted to come.

I had not been turkey hunting since I was a girl.

My mother used to make me a fried egg sandwich at four in the morning and wrap it in wax paper, and my father would carry it in his vest pocket until I asked for it.

I got up at four and made three fried egg sandwiches and wrapped them in wax paper. I do not know why I did it. My hands just did.

We parked at the gate at a quarter to five. The sky was black and full of stars, and the frogs were going down along the creek.