"Ten One-Hundred"

Anyone who spends a lot of time in pursuit of wild game makes a few adversaries out of his quarry now and then. Deer hunters are famous for this. They settle on one or two standout bucks that they spy on their game cameras, and spend the season obsessing over how to get downwind of them. They come up with clever names for the object of their obsession, like Droptine, Shifty, Dove Field Runner, Eye Guard and Swamp Thing.

Turkey hunters are even more prone than deer hunters to fits of hapless infatuation. Most turkey hunters I know – myself included – spend the first two or three weeks of the spring season enjoying the cacophony of gobbling, going to every turkey that sounds off at daybreak. The first few weeks of the season are typically a buyer’s market, and any turkey that acts right and is capable of being worked is just as good as the next one. Gobblers, during the first one-third of the season are, in a word, fungible.

But then something funny happens every year around mid-April. Just when it seems like the hunting can’t get any better, the birds hit a wall. They enter what is commonly referred to as The Lull.

I’m no wildlife biologist, but so far as I understand The Lull, it is a period when, due to either the turkeys’ adaptation to three weeks of hunting pressure, the relative futility in trying to woo hens who are becoming more interested in laying eggs and nesting every day, or both, gobblers really don’t do a whole lot of gobbling. Not much more than the occasional walk-up gets killed during The Lull. It’s sort of like sitting over a chufa patch in the afternoon, except you don’t already know where to set up your ambush and you’re not nearly as certain of success.

My experience during The Lull has been that only a select few dominant toms will continue to gobble. Most everything else shuts up. These “boss gobblers,” or so they’re called, ostensibly have bullied the subordinate toms into submission, securing for themselves uninterrupted airtime once the pickin’s get slim in the lady-friend department.

Two years ago, one such bird earned itself the unusual moniker of Ten-One Hundred. If you’ve seen that iconic Southern movie classic, Smokey and the Bandit, then you recognized immediately what this gobbler’s name means. If you haven’t, put this magazine down (okay, finish reading my piece first; then put it down), run to your nearest purveyor of DVDs and fork out the dough to purchase this piece of cinematic timelessness. And by all means, pick this magazine back up and finish it after you return. I’ve got kids.

In the film, Bandit educates Frog (played by Sally Field) that “ten-one hundred” is unofficial CB radio code for, well, going Number One. And as Frog points out, “it’s better than ten-two hundred.”

Back to our story. Around 7:50 one unpromising morning, I walked down an old dead-end woods road that drops off into a drain where I knew Ten-One Hundred liked to strut and gobble. I found a good spot under a young magnolia that provided plenty of cover and shade, and made ready my setup. After clipping various branches and brushing in the spot, I acknowledged Mother Nature’s unmistakable call. Better to embark on a blind sit with an empty bladder, I thought, so I pushed myself up off my turkey seat to answer the call, as it were.

I walked down the ridge about thirty yards from my setup to relieve myself. The hardwoods which predominated this portion of the habitat had dropped enough leaves over the winter that my trek up and down the ridge was a noisy one. Truth be told, I didn’t think I was going to encounter a longbeard that day, so I took very little care to silence my movements. I trudged up and down that ridge, kicking, shifting and crunching every oak leaf I came across. I coughed. I cleared my throat. I did everything that would secure an F in Turkey Woodsmanship 101 before retaking my seat.

I plopped myself back down in a not-so-tactful fashion and pulled down my face mask. My shotgun lay on the ground beside my right leg. I adjusted my hat and facemask and looked up, only to see the unbelievable sight of Ten-One Hundred standing in the middle of the road with the sun shining brilliantly upon him. There he was, not 10 yards away from me in front of God and everyone, darting his head and eyes in a constant search. I guess he’d mistaken my sounds for a hen scratching in the leaves.

I froze, motionless. I dared not blink. I’d never been so close to a gobbler before; he looked mammoth, with his big, red head and iridescent chest. Of course, my gun lay obsolete on the ground beside me. It may as well have been a conductor’s baton or an umbrella.

After a few moments, he walked up the road, right past me off my right shoulder. When he passed, he could not have been more than five yards away from me. I didn’t know that I could hold my breath that long, but I didn’t draw in a molecule of air until he and his occasional clucking were long since out of earshot.

I was not aware that relieving oneself was an effective way to call up a mature longbeard. Ten-One Hundred, however, provides the hypothesis. Unless a coyote got him – and I seriously doubt that to be the case – he is now two years older and that much wiser. Of course, I plan on going after him when the opportunity presents itself.

And I’ll drink plenty of coffee and a couple of bottled waters before I do.



(c) Roger Guilian 2011

"The Woods"

A hundred miles and twenty-five years east of here, there once stood a stand of woods. I’m not a good judge of acreage but I’d guess they consisted of half of a quarter section; maybe a little less. To this day I have no idea who owned the property. But since it bordered my yard a few feet from the back door of the little apartment I grew up in, the neighborhood kids and I considered it ours.

Everyone referred to it as simply the Woods, and from my earliest memories until the ninth grade, chances were that’s where I could be found so long as we weren’t having Thanksgiving, Christmas or a hurricane.

Biologists talk about diversity of habitat and carrying capacity. When it came to providing a place to grow up and make memories, the Woods' carrying capacity was virtually unlimited. The Woods were so diverse, they could double as the jungles of South Vietnam to a group of boys playing war one day, and mimic a private hunting preserve to that same group of boys who wanted to scratch out a few doves, squirrels and rabbits the next. Among its many iterations, the Woods served as a campground; a place for curious boys to stash a Playboy lifted out of someone’s older brother’s room; a perfect replica of the set from Raiders of the Lost Ark; an ideal place for a first kiss.

I knew every trail, every opening, every twist and every turn. Even today, I can close my eyes and trace with my finger in the air all the paths and trails – from the opening at the head of the main trail just a few long strides from my back door, all the way to where the woods stopped abruptly at what was then new development. Townhomes and apartments served as our southern and western borders, while my back yard bounded us on the east and an asphalt street – named Rogers Street of all things – hemmed our northern edge.

Most days, I’d burst out of the back door headed for the Woods in full stride; I gave nary a goodbye to my mother as the door slammed behind me. Depending what was on the day’s agenda – whether I was meticulously packing my “army stuff” for a full day of playing war, or simply planning a structure-free day of hide-and-seek, dirt clod fights or BB gun shooting – my mother may have gotten to see almost nothing of me before I disappeared into the Woods. It was a different time back then, or so it seemed. A better time. A time when a mother could allow her son to explore such a vast expanse on his own and know that he’d be back come dark. I never gave it a second thought at the time. Now that I am a father, however, I cannot conceive of how my mother was able to do it. I am grateful that she was, though, because it gave me the freedom and the confidence to explore and learn things on my own; to confront a variety of situations and to prevail over them.

Not to mention the fun I had. I can still remember how the spikes on a green pine cone would leave paper-like tears along my palm and fingertips as I heaved it like a hand grenade at my friends. I remember the unforgettable aroma of the dirt. The sound the cicadas made on warm evenings, and their hollow, crunchy sheds that still clung to the pine trees after they matured and flew away.

The way I choked and hacked and gagged after a friend and I inhaled our first cigarettes sitting atop a huge dirt pile way back in the Woods near their western edge. The way dirt clods would disintegrate into puffs of grayish-black sand upon connecting with their targets when conditions were dry; the grease-like smears and considerable bruises they left when conditions were wet. How we incinerated the first dove we ever tried to cook over an open flame, yet forced ourselves to be men and eat it anyway – and pretended to savor it.

And I remember the way life and death felt in my hands when I picked up a bird or a squirrel I’d shot with my beloved Daisy PowerLine 880. I experience to this day the same curious mixture of pity and regret and thanks and exhilaration when a quail or dove are brought back to me, or when I lift a fallen doe’s head by the ear, or when I hoist a longbeard by its feet. I have an enormous sense of gratitude for the place where I first came to know and appreciate that emotion because, without that emotion, what we do becomes not hunting, but merely killing.

The Woods were such an immensely special and important part of my growing up, it’s hard to conjure up a memory of my adolescence that doesn’t include them. They are the backdrop of countless photographic records of my childhood. They were a source of enormous enjoyment for me; no doubt a source of consternation for my mother. But they afforded me a happy, confident childhood and first ignited in me a love of the outdoors.

Today, any time I catch just the right whiff of honeysuckle or trod along freshly tilled ground consisting of just the right dark sandy soil, I am transported back in time to a place where a happy young boy ran free as a bird through the wild acres of his youth. Now, thanks to the Woods and all the special times and memories they provided, the man who long ago was once that joyful young boy still enjoys great days outdoors.



(c) Roger Guilian 2011