Liere: Now that’s civilized!

I participated in my 30th consecutive turkey opener Wednesday, but this time I didn’t take a gun.

Instead, I walked out the door at 5 a.m., crossed the creek, and set up my decoy 300 yards away from the house near a rough blind I had constructed last week. I listened to the woods come awake (my favorite part of turkey hunting), heard the tom up the hill greet the dawn with his booming gobbles, and eventually enticed him to the ground with a soft hen “cluck.”

With the season closed indefinitely, it was the best I could do. I wouldn’t kill him, but I had to know I could have. As I sat there waiting for his distinctive red, white and blue head to appear over the tops of the tangle of limbs I hid behind, I began to think about my Osceola turkey hunt in Florida many years back.

A friend, the outdoors editor for the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, had spent a week hunting with me for Merriam’s and Rio Grande turkeys along the breaks of Lake Roosevelt. The deep basalt canyons and steep, pine-studded hills soon had him huffing painfully and complaining vigorously.

Despite the constant rain, by midmorning of the first day, he had already emptied his canteen and was sitting, bootless and dripping, on a granite outcropping, looking very much like a wet cat. He was inspecting a pair of mammoth blisters and trying without much success to massage away a charley horse.

“This is uncivilized,” he complained.

“Well, that’s the nature of turkey hunting out West,” I chuckled. “I figured you knew that coming in. You get up early, climb a hill in the dark, get wet, sit around until you start to shiver, and then climb another hill.”

“Not in Polk County,” he countered. “Where I hunt, the land is flat, the temps are in the low 80s, and the rain, if it comes at all, gets in, gets out, and leaves you alone.” He gingerly began pulling a soggy cotton sock back over his blisters. “This is uncivilized,” he repeated. “You ought to come hunt with me in Florida.”

As much as I love turkey hunting in Washington State, there is one undeniable fact about hunting here – you won’t see an Osceola. You can hunt Merriam’s, Rio Grande or Eastern, but not the elusive, beautiful, Osceola swamp bird.

Two years later, though, on the way home from a vacation in Puerto Rico, I stopped in Fort Lauderdale to spend some time with my Florida friend. The plan was to stay a few days, maybe try some offshore fishing, then drive up to Orlando to do the Disney World thing. But at the last minute, my friend had been invited on a media turkey hunt for the long-legged Osceola on a large private ranch near Haines City, Florida. Could I join him? Of course I could.

The next afternoon, we drove south 4 hours into Polk County. That evening, we visited over a long dinner with eight other hunters who would be hunting the same ranch. At 5:30 the next morning, we left a comfortable lodge and eased down a flat, grassy dike, sucking in the fragrance of orange blossoms and jasmine. There were no hills to climb, no cold winds, no blisters.

In the orange glow of the rising sun, we set up our decoy on the edge of a pasture, nestling back against opposite sides of a palm trunk. A white ibis soared overhead followed by a red-shouldered hawk, and a killdeer began its distinctive shrill somewhere behind us. A wild sow pig led a brood of piglets right past our decoys, pausing only briefly before she caught our scent and led fled into the yucca.

Soon, the sun burst above the oak trees, its warmth cleansing and renewing. We sat there thus, in our own good company for 5 hours, and though I didn’t shoot a turkey, I saw enough at a distance to keep me interested.

As if on cue, all hunters appeared again around 10:30 a.m., striding up the path to a large, white plantation house on the ranch. Some carried turkeys and stories of success, some only tales of lament, but all had smiles, hearty laughter and prodigious appetites. Breakfast was a celebration, served southern style with grace and abundance. I even ate the grits.

Amid the comforting clank of silverware and the aroma of good coffee, each hunter shared his morning – nine of us joined by a common thread, confirming our sameness and our differences with laughter, sympathy and good-natured ribbing. Then the conversation was expanded to include philosophical musings and scintillating discussions about guns, politics, literature, sex, death and religion.

After breakfast, we moved to red rocking chairs on the long front porch where the stories were accented heavily with Southern wit. In the beginning, our whoops carried off across the ’gator pond at the edge of the drive. Then, there were long periods of comfortable silence and the idea of a nap became almost as intriguing as an afternoon hunt.

Thank goodness the lure of the Osceola won out, as I had come a long way just to take a nap. Pulling on my boots and gathering my gear, I headed back down the road into the shadows. Dinner would be at 7 p.m. – prime rib and baked potato followed by more conversation and Key Lime pie. If this was “civilized,” I liked it a lot.