We sat and waited. Hunting in the evening was better in the sense that I could see everything. The forest floor was covered in a bedding of fallen leaves and sunlight broke through the trees in luminous rays. A bumblebee buzzed around my head, then hovered over my leg before continuing on his way. After about ten minutes my student told me to get the gun ready as he had spotted a coyote to our left. A couple minutes later as it came into better view, we realized it was a farm dog and two of her pups trailed behind her, making a broad arc past us on their way to the west.
Later, my student confessed he was worried they would scare away the turkeys but in fact, they may have scared them toward us because a few minutes later, he excitedly told me they were coming up on our left. I looked and readied my gun, remaining as still as possible so as not to alarm them.
“Those are jakes; you can shoot any one you want.”
“They’re still out of range right?”
“When they cross that log, shoot.”
I waited for them to get nearer. Then, as they crossed the log, they headed behind a grouping of trees as they approached the decoy. I sensed my student was getting nervous and wanted me to shoot sooner rather than later, but I had to wait until they cleared the trees. As soon as the lead jake cleared it, I slowly released the safety. I aimed for his head. I exhaled a calm yoga breath and pulled the trigger.
Immediately I prepared to fire a second shot if necessary, but he told me “you’re good; you got him.” The turkey flailed about for a couple minutes, but he assured me that was just post-mortem muscle twitching. Once the turkey lay still, we went over to see my catch. “Nice shot; you got him right in the head. He’s really big and fat for a jake.”
He filmed me talking about the hunt for a documentary he’s making and then we took the bird back to the farm to prep the meat. He showed me how to cut off the fan and beard for mounting them. Then we plucked the chest so we could cut out the breast meat. It was odd because the body was still warm. After getting the breast and legs, I insisted in opening up the stomach out of curiosity. (I had enjoyed our dissection unit in 9th grade biology class.) Will the knowledge that that turkey ate a lot of clover and seeds ever come in handy? Probably not, but I’m still glad I did it. We left the rest of the carcass for wild animals.
With a Tupperware container of turkey meat and a plastic bag of feathers and beard, we headed to the house where I loaded up my car. Before leaving, I went inside to wash the turkey goo off my hands. I looked in the mirror and decided I’m quite fetching in camo.