"Stage Fright"

Think back to when you were but a young student in school. Your American History teacher assigns you the task of articulating the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence from memory. In front of the entire class. Think back to those timeless words: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary. . .” If recalling Thomas Jefferson’s world-changing text just now made your tongue swell up, your mouth turn instantly dry, your temples break out in a cold sweat, and if you could visualize a room full of snickering, pimply-faced kids in front of you, then you know what it means to suffer from stage fright.

Stage fright is the stifling sensation of apprehension and self-consciousness that washes over someone appearing before a large group of people or performing some act on his own in front of others. High school debate team members may feel it before clashing over politically important issues. Musicians may feel it when performing a solo in a packed concert hall or on the 50-yard line during halftime. Salesmen may suffer from it during a sit. Actors can be crippled by it onstage.

Indisputably, the outdoors is a place folks go to relax, get away from it all and put the troubles of every day life behind them, if just for a couple of days or so. But even out here under the pines and the hardwoods, on the lake, and among the woods and the wildlife, stage fright can affect us, too.

I don’t know about your friends and hunting buddies, but the guys I hunt with can be downright merciless when it comes to dishing out grief and trash talk. As one of my hunting buddies recently understated their propensity in this regard, “Rog, we can be pretty irreverent some times.” We pick on each other under the best of conditions, and really savor those moments when someone misses, falls down in the muck or gets his truck stuck.

You really have to be on your guard to avoid getting picked on and run through the ringer in most hunting camps. Yet, inevitably, we all face those situations when we’re ushered out onstage and thrust into the spotlight, whether we’re ready for it or not.

Take turkey hunting, for example. Anyone new to turkey hunting goes through a prolonged period of doubt and apprehension about the quality of his turkey calling. Anyone who says otherwise has either just overdosed on Beta blockers or is a complete liar. When the novice is alone in the woods, his only critic is the turkey itself. Certainly, the goal is to get the turkey to gobble back at your calling, but if your calling stinks when you’re by yourself, the damage to your ego is manageable. After all, if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, who cares whether a turkey gobbled back or not?

Now, take the novice turkey caller and sit him down fifteen yards from a very experienced hunting buddy whose calls sound better than the hens themselves. Chances are, he won’t do too much calling on his own, out of fear that he won’t sound good, or that he’ll screw up the hunt. Asking for advice back at the camphouse and getting an impromptu calling lesson is one thing; retching out an imperceptible squawk that sounds like a diving pterodactyl and runs off a gobbler that was moments away from stepping into gun range is quite another. No one wants to be singularly responsible for ruining a hunt. That’s stage fright.

It can happen anywhere in the woods or on the water. When you set the hook on that lunker bass, all eyes are on you as you land that fish and get it in the boat. No pressure.

Walking up behind a pair of bird dogs on a perfect point. You know, the kind of point that’s worthy of being the subject of an oil painting hanging from a stone fire place in a south Georgia plantation. The point is perfect, the weather’s perfect, the day is perfect. Unless you miss when the birds flush. The look of disappointment and judgment in the dogs’ eyes is far worse than anything you’ll suffer from your friends. You’re on stage and it’s all up to you.

I’ve felt that sense of stage fright in all of those situations. I really feel it when I’m cleaning a deer and all my buddies are standing around watching. But I remind myself that everybody misses on easy singles going away from us from time to time; we all leave some choice tenderloin on the bone; most of our friends can clean a deer faster than we can; and everybody thinks his purring and clucking is better than the next guy’s. So on those rare times when we do come through in the clutch and call up that gobbler or bring down that crossing double, it feels that much better to have overcome our own personal sense of stage fright.



(c) Roger Guilian 2011

"Work Weekend: Part Two"

Later that night, the group sat down to dinner together in the makeshift dining room just off the camp house’s living room, around a table fashioned out of a hefty old red door. It was encased in a thick coat of lacquer that resembled heavy ice.

Dinner consisted of rib eye steaks, instant mashed potatoes, microwaved steamed vegetables, and bag Caesar salad, all served on paper plates. Richard cooked the rib eyes over charcoal, as the rest of the group leaned against porch railings or perched atop the assembled four-wheelers and golf carts, and supervised. During dinner, most continued to drink beer; Wayne had sweet tea. Don drank red wine from a bottle he’d brought with him. Just like his motorcycle outfit, he caught hell from the rest of the guys for his wine, too.

After dinner was complete and the kitchen was cleaned up, everyone gathered in the living room. Chris fired up the 20-year old big screen TV, adjusted the rabbit ears and pulled in a snowy broadcast of a major league baseball game. Two-and-one-third-innings later, Bill got up out of a recliner, stood in front of the brick hearth and said, “Okay, y’all, let’s figure out what we’re doing tomorrow.” Immediately, the TV went off and the group reconvened outside around the firepit which, by now, was burning with steady blue flames and almost no smoke.

“We’ve got a lot to do, but I think if we get an early start, we can get most of it done before it gets too hot. If so, we’ll spend the afternoon working around the camp house.” Bill walked them through his list of chores, and they discussed and debated which ones warranted the highest priority and which ones they could skip. Eventually, everyone agreed that the shooting houses needed to be sprayed for wasps and swept out; firewood needed to be located and cut; tree limbs and brush needed to be trimmed back along all the roads and around all the shooting houses; the fields and some roads needed to be bush-hogged; poison ivy around ladder stands and other high-traffic areas needed to be sprayed with Round-Up. The moving of shooting houses, creating of new openings for food plots, and cutting of new roads would have to wait for the time being. Bill could go a little bit overboard sometimes.

After the business portion of the evening was concluded, everyone sat around the fire and shared stories, told jokes, recalled memorable events in the camp’s history and made lofty predictions about the upcoming deer season.

By the time the fire died down well past midnight, the top of the stone firepit was littered with empty bottles and cans, a pair of flip-flops, a Skoal can, a cell phone, one of Don’s wine bottles, and a crumpled-up cigarette box. The fire slowly burned itself out while the men snored inside the camp house.

Around 1:45 the following afternoon, Chris pulled up to the camp house on a four-wheeler. A few minutes later, Pete and Lester, the fellow who’d ridden up with him the day before, arrived in Pete’s truck. Both the truck bed and the trailer behind it were full of freshly sawed water oak. They began unloading and stacking it in the wooden racks just off the back door to the camp house.

“Man, I sure don’t remember it ever being this hot up here before,” Pete said.

“Gets worse and worse every year,” Chris retorted.

“At least this year maybe we’ll avoid our usual work weekend calamities,” Pete said. “I’m ready for a cold beer.”

“Don’t jinx us, Pedro,” Chris said in his slow, syrupy drawl.

The three were still unloading and stacking the logs when Richard pulled up on his four-wheeler. Round-Up sloshed inside the white opaque sprayer tank attached to the back. The three men working on the firewood looked up to see Richard help Don off the back of the four-wheeler.

“What happened?” asked Lester.

“Ol’ Evel Knievel here got attacked by wasps when he was cleaning out the shooting house on the Horseshoe Patch, and he ain’t feelin’ so swooft.”

“Jeez, Don, you alright?” Lester asked.

“He’ll be alright,” Richard interjected. “But that ain’t all – check this out: Bill got into some poison ivy when he was weed-whacking around a ladder stand, and he’s blown up about as big as a sumo wrestler. Said on the radio that he can’t barely see to drive back in.”

“Damn,” offered Chris. “Seems like he gets into that stuff every time we’re up here. Why doesn’t he let somebody else crawl around in that stuff?”

“Get this,” Richard continued. “Tom and Wayne are way up by 34 on the tractor – stuck as hell in that drain off the back side of the field. Tom was turning around and totally sunk both right side tires. That thing’s leaning over 45 degrees; left side tires are barely touching.”

“Damn gumbo mud,” muttered Pete. “How the hell are we supposed to get them out? Just when I was starting to look forward to plopping down in that chair right there with a cold beer.”

“Well,” Richard offered, “I’m gonna get Don situated in the house; y’all load up a cooler and let’s get back out there and see what we can do.”

Pete, Chris and Lester looked at one another as the camp house screen door slapped closed behind Richard and Don. Pete hopped off the wood pile inside the trailer. Chris threw down the log he was holding in his hand.

“Told ya,” Chris said, disgustedly.

“Well,” Pete groaned. “Just your average work weekend at the camp, I reckon.”

With that, two of the men began loading a cooler with bottled water, ice and beer while the other filled up a four-wheeler with gas from a red plastic five-gallon can. Then they headed out into the heat and the critters and the woods to help their friends.



(c) Roger Guilian 2011

"Work Weekend: Part One"

The temperature gauge in the top right corner of the pick-up’s rearview mirror read 99 degrees. As the truck turned off the blacktop and onto the dirt-and-gravel road, dust and sand flew up behind it the way a contrail follows a jet as it streaks across the sky. The ground was arid and dry. Weeks of no rain combined with 100-plus degree temperatures had turned the countryside into a tinderbox. The two men inside the truck peered through waves of heat that throbbed and radiated off the hood.

When the truck passed through the open gate and rounded the only curve in the road, its occupants saw two men standing around a 55-gallon drum, leaning on long poles. The poles – old-fashioned wooden crutches with metal caps on the bottom – were used as fire pokers. The older of the two men wore khaki pants, no socks, boat shoes and an old golf shirt, through which he’d sweated completely. The younger wore a tee-shirt, camouflage shorts and hiking boots. A jet of flames shot up from the drum. Black smoke rolled and tumbled overhead, batted randomly about by what little breeze there was that hot afternoon. Thirty-or-so feet away sat the firepit, already loaded with wood for the evening’s social agenda.

“Figures Bill and Richard would be the first ones up here,” muttered the driver. “They’ve already cleaned out the camp house and are burning last year’s leftover trash,” he added. “Now we get to hear about how much they already done before anyone else got here.” The passenger chuckled quietly. The truck lunged to a stop as the driver threw the gearshift into Park while the vehicle was still moving. They flung open the doors and walked over to the fire.

“Damn, Bill, y’all trying to set fire to the whole place?” asked the driver. Everyone shook hands.

“It’s alright, Pete,” Bill said. “Besides, the landowners have been promising us they were gonna run a fire through here for years. We’d be doing us and them a favor.”

Bill, the club president, started the hunting camp with Tom, his longtime friend and co-worker, more than 18 years ago. He was mildly obsessed with the camp, worked harder than anyone else at keeping it up and epitomized the role of benevolent dictator.

While the four men were updating one another on how their families were doing, what their kids were up to these days, what vacations they’d taken and how their jobs were, another truck pulled through the gate from the asphalt and wound its way toward them. Soon, two more members had gotten out and were exchanging handshakes and good-natured ribbing.

Suddenly their conversation was interrupted by a loud whine screaming down the road outside the gate. Everyone looked up the road as a shiny, jet-black Kawasaki Ninja sport bike came zipping down the road toward the camp. The machine nose-dived to a stop in front of the six men as a cloud of orange dirt caught up to the bike and shrouded it and its rider. The man straddling the bike pulled off his helmet without flipping up the mirrored face guard. He swung his right leg over the seat and then plopped his helmet on it. With his back to the group of men assembled by the burning trash, he slid a pair of aviator sunglasses onto his face and then snapped around and walked toward them. Despite the heat, he was wearing a black Kevlar motorcycle jacket with patches sewn all over it. Fingerless leather gloves still adorned his hands. He smiled a wide, toothy smile as he stepped over the neck of a trailer and squeezed between it and the pick-up to which it was attached. He stretched out his right hand as he approached the group. “What’s goin’ on, guys?” he asked.

“Not much, Mav. Where’s Goose?” chided one of members. Everyone except the biker in the black jacket laughed.

“Very funny,” he said, trying to mask his insecurity. “How y’all been?”

“Good,” answered a heavy-set man who had been poking the fire more than anyone else. “Splash any bogies on the way up here?”

“You just wish you could fit on one of those things, Chris,” came the retort.

“When’jya get that thing, Don?” asked another man.

“Right after the divorce,” he answered. “She got the kids, so I got myself a toy.”

“Ellie would kill me if I came home with one of those things,” Bill interjected. “Alright, who’re we missing?”

“Just Tom and Wayne,” one of the men said.

“Alright,” said Bill, “I know it’s hot as hell, but we have a lot of work to do. We need to clean out all the shooting houses and we need to move some of them. We gotta do some bushhogging, cut and stack firewood, spray some Round-Up, fill the feeders, edge around the camp house, cut some new fire lanes and trim around all the ladder stands and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting. I have it all written down inside. Y’all get your stuff unpacked and let’s sit down and figure out who’s doing what.”

Everyone started unloading their trucks and taking their stuff inside the camp house. A few minutes later, a maroon F-250 Powerstroke towing a medium-duty tractor on a gooseneck trailer rumbled onto the dirt road and pulled toward the camp house.

“Good. There’s Tom,” smiled Bill. “Now we can get to work.”



(c) Roger Guilian 2011

"The Show"

If you don’t hunt turkeys, you may not appreciate the next thousand or so words. If you do, however, you’ll no doubt relate.

To the casual observer and the non-hunter, a turkey is a turkey is a turkey. A dead turkey is nothing more than the opposite of a live turkey and little consideration is given to how it ended up that way. To those unfamiliar with the sport, it doesn’t matter how a longbeard winds up getting hoisted up by the legs; hence, little appreciation is shown by those not anointed when one of us actually harvests a gobbler.

Those who don’t turkey hunt have virtually no appreciation of the tactics and accoutrements of the sport. Such is not the case, however, with deer hunting, fishing, bird hunting and other outdoor endeavors. One does not have to hunt deer to know that, for the most part, deer are shot with rifles from some distance up a tree. And one does not have to fish to know that fish are caught on hooks which are tied to the end of a line that is extended from a pole.

How many times has an aunt or a co-worker or a cashier asked us, “Did you catch any turkeys last time?”

Likewise, how many times has someone you’ve been talking about turkey hunting with expressed surprise at the discovery that turkeys are not shot from hundreds of yards away with long rifles, and that we don’t sit in shooting houses to do it?

“Really? You just sit there on the ground and try to shoot them up close with a shotgun? Aren’t their heads really small and hard to hit? Wow. That sounds hard.”

Yeah. Tell me about it.

But like most things in life, turkey hunting comes in layers. Regrettably, not every turkey hunt which is prosecuted in the spring woods is honorable, or even difficult. Lots of turkeys die just moments after flying out of their trees or after strutting for an hour for a harem of hens as they scratch up a chufa patch. And as much as it pains me to say it – again, regrettably – mine appears to be the extreme minority view.

For not all turkey hunts are created equal. The beginner takes what he can get, even if that means bushwhacking a gobbler he sneaks up on as he rounds a curve in a winding woods road. Some beginners get lucky and call up a nice gobbler that cooperates. After dropping the hammer on the unsuspecting tom, these hunters immediately lose respect for the sport and take it for granted. “How hard can this be?” they think to themselves. “Why are those old-timers always going on about how difficult this is? I must be a natural.”

These fellows are cursed, and most usually don’t hear another gobble or see a turkey track in the dirt for at least ten years.

Some kill jakes. They even go back to work and tell people about it.

Then there are walk-ups which get killed in the afternoon. These unfortunate birds are not relegated to being harvested by beginners; the truth is, a hefty percentage of turkey hunters who have a longbeard just appear within gun range are going to line up their bead on its neck and make it do the upside-down bicycle. I’m not necessarily faulting anyone for doing this. But there isn’t much pageantry to the spectacle.

There are turkeys that die after being intercepted on their way to roost. While blind luck can produce this successful result, it is usually the result of some modicum of scouting and understanding of the bird’s tendencies. This certainly makes it more honorable than ambushing one over a chufa patch at 4:30 in the afternoon, but it’s just a hair above bushwhacking at the same time.

Moving up the scale, calling in one or more hens with gobblers in tow is a respectable tactic, and one which requires an understanding of turkey behavior and how to hunt them. Hen eyes are arguably more acute than gobbler eyes and calling up a handful of hens and still harvesting the gobbler that walks in after they’ve entered gun range is a feat.

No one should ever be faulted for killing a stupid two-year old. These new recruits almost always exhibit an eagerness and determination that make the whole day seem sunnier. They gobble good. They come to the gun good. They prance and strut and do their thing. In fact, the real challenge with a two-year old gobbler is not making the shot, but avoiding getting run over by the bird in the process.

While all of the above are examples of common types of turkey hunts and dead turkeys, none of them typically involves a longbeard putting on “the show.” And regardless whether folks agree that these hunts are lacking in some respects, most will agree that they lack the ultimate prize of any turkey hunt: Watching the gobbler put on the show.

When a longbeard puts on the show, he just acts right. He does it all. He struts. He drums. He blows up like a big, black basketball and does pirouettes in the dirt until breaking out of strut, extending his neck and hammering a gobble that turns your hat around. He may be hung up at 80 yards or he may be well within gun range. He may never close the distance, or you may be so enraptured that you can’t bring yourself to pull the trigger. No matter. You did it. You called up a gobbler and he put on the show for you. When that happens, you’ve had yourself about the greatest day outdoors that can be had.



(c) Roger Guilian 2011