ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601110026
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-9 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: OUTDOORS
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
It is amazing how quickly a deer hunt can turn into a turkey hunt when a flock of big birds, displaying iridescent colors of bronze, brown, black and purple, suddenly appears.
I had been watching a well-worn deer trail, my muzzleloading rifle held ready. About an hour of daylight was left on a cold afternoon.
You save time and enthusiasm for the late muzzleloading season, thinking it is going to be easy - plenty of deer left, the woods to yourself - but it never is. In reality, it is blue cold, especially this season, which closed Saturday, and the deer have been working on their Ph.D. in survival since hunting began in early October.
So you sit in a stand, or in a tree, and you ponder why you are there and if you will be able to cope with the cold long enough for darkness to arrive, giving you an excuse to head home.
Then you hear turkeys, and every thing immediately warms.
They came quietly down the ridge, 45 minutes before dark, some of them getting a running start from the high ground and gliding into the tree tops, settling in for the night. As best I could tell there were 25 or more birds.
You might think putting a flock of turkeys to bed at dusk is a guarantee that one of them would be at your dinner table the next day, but when I reflect back on my ``roosting'' experiences, I recall only modest success.
The next morning it was 10 degrees when the turkeys awakened, stretching their wings and legs, shaking themselves, preening and softly calling to one another.
I was there, having traded my muzzleloader for a shotgun. It would have been easy to pop a bird from its roost, but that would be barbaric. Instead, I fashioned a blind in a nearby downed tree, and called and ... well, I screwed up.
There's only a single letter difference between the words ``roosting'' and ``roasting,'' but in reality they are a world apart.
A couple of afternoons later I was back hunting deer, with a partner this time who was on the next ridge over from me. When we met after dark, he was late arriving, his face red from the cold, yet etched with a smile that told me one thing: He had gotten into a flock of turkeys.
There was no question what we would be doing the next morning. I told him to figure out our strategy, and make it better than the one I'd used earlier.
It was a long walk to the roosting area in the frigid, blackness of pre-dawn the next day, and we got there a few minutes too late. The turkeys heard us crunching across ice and frozen ground. Just after daylight, there were ``flop-flop-flop'' sounds as the birds moved to the ground and headed in the opposite direction. We had no chance to scatter them and call them back.
That left a couple of options. We could go home like sane people, or we could make a lung-searing climb up a ridge and attempt to circle in front of the flock. We made the climb.
From some high ground, we thought we heard the turkeys in a basin. We split up, with the hope one of us would flush them.
Forty-five minutes later, my partner's gun boomed. He would tell me, with a fat bird in hand, that he had given up and was heading out of the woods when he heard the flock above him. He circled, made a few calls and the turkeys came to him.
Nothing to it.
LENGTH: Medium: 64 linesby CNB