The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

My father carried the shotgun, Colby’s twenty gauge, empty and broken open over his forearm, the way he taught me to carry one when I was nine.

We walked in slow. My father used a walking stick and stopped every hundred yards. Nobody said anything.

In the dark I could hear Colby breathing and the leaves under our boots, and once a barred owl way off asking who cooks for you.

At the big white oak my father stopped and laid his hand flat on the bark the way you would touch a horse.

Colby walked out into the open in the gray light with Jory’s decoy and stuck the stake in the ground about twenty steps out, facing back toward us.

Then he came back and sat down between my father’s knees against the tree.

My father handed him two shells. Colby loaded the gun and closed it with the muzzle pointed up into the oak, the way he had been shown.

Then he laid it across his knees and put the box call on the leaves by his right hand.

I sat behind them, against the next tree over. I had a camo jacket of my father’s that smelled like cedar and pipe smoke.

I pulled the collar up and watched the sky go from black to gray to the color of a dove.

The first gobble came at five fifty-one. I know because I was looking at my watch. It came from down in the creek oaks, and it rolled right up the hollow and went through me like a train.

Colby’s shoulders came up to his ears. My father put one hand on his back and left it there.

“Let him gobble,” my father whispered. “Give him one little tree yelp. Soft. Then nothing.”

Colby picked up the box call. I watched his hands shake. He drew the paddle across the cedar three times, soft as anything, and set the call back down on the leaves.

The gobbler cut him off before he finished. Then he gobbled twice more on his own, and I heard the wings, heavy, beating down through the branches, and then the thump when he hit the ground.

For a long time there was nothing.

The sun came up over the far ridge and laid gold light down the hollow, all the way across the green grass at the edge of the timber, and the birds started singing, and there was nothing.

Then I heard him drum. If you have never heard a gobbler drum, it is a sound you feel more than hear, a low thrum, like somebody running a tractor a long way off.

He came up out of the creek bottom in full strut. His fan was spread, his head was blazing red and white and blue, and his beard was swinging.

He saw Jory’s decoy and stopped dead and gobbled so loud the decoy almost shook.

“Wait,” my father breathed. “Wait. Let him come. Gun up slow when his head’s behind that tree.”