The Coyote’s Gobbler

The one the coyote pup chased to me.

It is late in the spring for white bass to be spawning in waters I normally fish, but my friend Rich Abdoler and I found them this past weekend, spawning at the same time that crappie were spawning. That doesn’t happen often.

We caught a stringer-full of fat crappie on light tackle, casting small white and yellow jigs up against the banks. But catching crappie when you know there are white bass to be caught on topwater lures is like settling for oatmeal cookies when you know there’s strawberry shortcake to be had. It’s like listening to opera music when you know Hank Williams can be heard just around the corner. Like eating a baloney sandwich with your wife when you know you could have had a steak dinner with Dolly Parton. Yeah, now you are getting the idea!

Well, if you have ever seen a two-pound white bass female take a surface lure in some flowing current, you still may not fully understand what I am talking about. We found them in a creek, somewhat filled by all the spring rains, but with clear green-colored water hiding a swarm of white bass. And the rods were bent for an hour or so like no crappie can bend them. I guess I am like everyone else, when I can eat crappie, I am glad I fished for them, but when I am catching white bass that get up close to three pounds and sometimes exceed that, it is hard to stop fishing for them. It is a late spawning season, but the later it comes, the more successful it will be, as a rule. You have to enjoy it while it is there, because it doesn’t last long enough. Like Hank Williams and strawberry shortcake, you just can’t get enough of spring.

I didn’t intend to write anything more about the turkey season. It was a tough season on hunters because of all the rain, and a very late nesting response. Never have I seen flocks of turkeys together so late in the spring as they were this year. Hens stopped mating, it seemed, and gobblers were together in groups of three or four instead of getting off by themselves. I would be calling a gobbler which had hens around him, and another gobbler or two right there. It doesn’t work very well.

When I did call in toms, they came in threes and fours, and there are too many eyes to make it easy to get one of them real close, get the gun barrel on him and shoot him. Having said that, sometimes you get lucky, and I have to tell this story, even though it is going to be very hard to believe. I promise, this happened, just as I am about to describe it.

It was the middle of the last week of the season, and I was in the woods at mid-morning when a gobbler got really vociferous in a field bordering the woodlands. I snuck to the edge and spied him out in the green grass, about 100 yards away, strutting and answering my call with a passion. He was alone! Hallelujah!

So I set up in a great spot, figuring that he was going to stay right there and answer me and not move. He did just that, and I watched him strutting and gobbling for about an hour and a half. Towards noon, a hen ambled down the hill and fed around him, not on a nest, as she should have been, and not interested in mating. He got interested in her, so now he is 150 yards away. Of course my calling is so good I have aroused the interest in a second gobbler, and down the hill he comes, strutting and gobbling and in the mood to fight. They charge each other, and 200 yards away, they have one big brawl, jumping and purring and wrapping their necks around each other like turkeys do, trying to spur each other with those little daggers on their legs. I don’t know which one it was, but one of them got tired of the fight and started up the hill with all the strutting gone, while the other followed, strutting and blowing and trying to get the other tom to spar with him some more. They are now 250 yards away, and I have known for awhile it is all over, I am not going to call in either of them.

But then out of the woods not far away, come a charging young coyote filled with vitamin water and vinegar, and hoping to have himself a gobbler for dinner. They were distracted enough with themselves not to see him right away, and he got close. This isn’t some old wily veteran coyote, it is a youngster, not even a year old, and not much bigger than a red fox. Ten yards from the gobblers, he notices they are bigger than he is, and slows his charge, wondering just how he is going to turn a 25 pound tom turkey which might just outweigh him, into a two- or three-day feast.

Slowing up to think about it cost him. One of the gobblers runs a ways and takes to flight, and is headed exactly away from me, gone and free from worry. The young coyote turns his attention to the whipped gobbler, and makes a run at him, hoping, I think, that the old tom will die of a heart attack, so that he can get his young jaws on his neck without getting flogged. That second gobbler makes the mistake of flying the other way, being no buddy of the first one, and perhaps remembering that down along the timber a seductive hen had been calling for quite some time!

He flies right at me, and I am so stunned I can’t find my shotgun as I watch him. Just in time I find it, leaning against the tree beside me, and I am looking at a huge gobbler coming at me with wings working, not gliding at all. When they want to, those big heavy toms can fly, and gain altitude. He’s bent on landing in a sycamore tree right before me, and I remember all the times I have bragged that you would never see me shoot a wild gobbler off a limb. That was then, when I was young and couldn’t foresee such a difficult season and some gobbler landing in a tree at noon.

The shotgun roared, and the big gobbler, which had just started feeling safe on that limb, plummeted 25 feet to the ground. Ah, it is a wonderful feeling to have called in a turkey and killed it, so I sit there relishing the moment, and I notice that 100 yards out, that young coyote is charging toward my turkey thinking he is the luckiest coyote in the world.

I almost didn’t get there first, but I made it a stand-off, warning him that if he grabbed that dead gobbler I would fill him with number six shot. He looked at me, and for just a moment I felt sorry for the little guy. He was skinny, with little pointed ears and an expression on his face that I have seen on mine after missing a turkey, or losing a big fish. He needed something more substantial than meadow mice and prairie voles. But to the larger predator goes the spoils. He is out there somewhere, my little helper, still hungry. And I have had some fried turkey, from the oddest turkey hunt I have ever been on. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good, and when it comes to hunting and fishing, I am seldom very good if I’m not lucky.

See this weeks photos on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net.