For Me, It's All About 'April Madness'

 

Nothing bores me more than “March Madness.” It is a contrived celebration if there ever was one and made for sordid city folks afraid of spending a night alone in the woods where country folks live.

Nothing rings more hollow and empty than the sound of a basketball hitting an empty gymnasium floor at midnight, or at any other time of the day as far as I am concerned. You can have all my share of it, and welcome to it.

The madness I want, and the sound I want to hear, is that of a boss turkey gobbler sounding off at dawn in a gathering peach colored sunrise just over yonder in that line of giant cottonwoods. That’s an “April Madness” I’ve been hooked to for close to fifty years now. Hard to believe. Time passes fast when you’re having fun.

It has been well known for decades that all bird activity, both migratory and breeding, is keyed to the amount of daylight in the sky. When days shorten, birds that migrate do. All birds breed when the weather is nicest for them, and for us as well.

Pam saw a bluebird carrying twigs to a nest in the backyard just this morning.

The poet asked famously, “What is so rare as a day in June?” Not a day in March if you ask me. If there is a better time to be alive than a day in April in Oklahoma, I don’t know when it might be. I said, “Better.”

Turkeys in Oklahoma have been breeding and carrying on for better than a month, now. Deep South states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida started hunting the birds this month. Traditionally, Oklahoma’s turkey season begins near the end of the first week in April and ends near the end of the first week in May, giving the birds plenty of time to re-establish their numbers in our climate zone.

I first hunted turkeys in Oklahoma way back yonder in the spring of 1967. John Eakes, then a math teacher at Charles Page High School, asked me over lunch one day would I like to make a little weekend money by traveling with him to service a fleet of combines he used every year to follow the wheat harvest to the Dakotas. Engine oils needed to be changed; filters needed to be replaced; bushings and bearings greased; and winter-flattened tires repaired.

It was arduous, tedious work that needed to be done before summer for John’s sideline business to thrive, and Pam and I could use the money to buy a couple of $1.29 a lb. round steaks for the grill. The four-hour trip down to Granite, Oklahoma that weekend in old, wild Greer County put me smack in the middle of some of the best wild turkey hunting in the world, a sport I knew less about than I did rocket science.

We had just finished greasing up some wheel zerks in John’s combines which he stored every winter in the lot next to the old Nance Hotel, owned by Jack Nance, his father-in law, when a short, crew cut character named Bill Williams, a guard at the Granite State Reformatory, pulled in next to where we working to say hello.

John had known Bill since back in the day when John had first started dating Jack’s daughter, June. They had little in common other than a liking for Jack, his family, and a need to exchange pleasantries over old times. John Eakes was not a hunter. Bill hunted to the point it got him in trouble with his wife.

Bill wanted to show us the turkey he had shot maybe two hours ago. It was in the back of his truck. I had never seen a wild turkey in my life and barely had even heard anything about them. I wanted to see that turkey. John couldn’t have cared less. There were lots of oil and air filters left to change, and we were burning daylight.

I walked over to the back of Bill’s truck to “see the elephant” as folks used to say.

Looking at that bird, sprawled in Bill’s truck bed, a smear of turkey blood near its head lying on the steel bed of the truck; that monster bird of twenty-two pounds,  à la ten-inch beard, changed my life. I could not have been more impressed had I been looking down at a small pterodactyl. I had to have one.

I told John that, in just about that way, and begged him for two hours of daylight the next morning in order to get one. He gave it to me, and Bill took me down to the local hardware store to buy a tag, and told me the only gun he had that I could use was an open sighted .270 deer rifle that he would lend me along with two or three 130 gr. bullets, but that he “fer shore” knew where there were some more turkeys if I wanted to take a crack at them with the rifle.

Jeeminy Christmas. Thinking about it now makes me wonder if I, or both of us, had lost our minds.

The next morning with the smell of April tornado moisture in the pre-dawn light, and clouds like torn grey rags building out of the south, Bill took me to a place where the turkeys gobbled like crazy, and something crazy, something “mad” happened.

The first place we sat down in a line of North Fork of The Red River cottonwoods, Bill called up a coyote that jumped from behind us into the space exactly between where the two of us sat. The only reason he didn’t land on us was because we didn’t give him time. I think I jumped a little higher than Bill did.

It was crazy. It was mad, and I said so.

“Aw, shucks,” Bill said, “that kinda’ stuff happens on a turkey hunt all the time.”

I marked it down as something to remember.

Later that morning, I missed a huge gobbler at a hundred yards or so, Bill insisting that I shoot, which, with the open sights and all (rifles being legal turkey guns in that day), I felt I would have had a better chance throwing a handful of sand in the direction of the gobbler, but I had gotten the shot Bill had promised. And a good deal more.

I’m still hunting them. Crazy things are still happening. The madness still comes on me in April.

Copyright © 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen