The Miracle

Mike Dodson with 9 1/2 pound bass he caught at Bull Shoals

He was right in the middle of an honest to goodness miracle in the woods, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there. Mike Dodson was an honest to goodness outdoorsman who knew well the woods and rivers and the ways of the wild. He and I hunted and fished for everything together, back in the good old days. We hunted and fished for everything, from Arkansas to Ontario and Manitoba. The miles have separated us for the past 20 years, but the memories keep him close.

Just the other day, Mike sent me a picture of a nine and a half pound bass he caught from Bull Shoals lake on a single-spin, and invited me to come down and help him catch some more now that the moon is bright and the bass are hungry. No matter what lake you are fishing now, if you go out while the moon is full and high, and fish until it is sagging low in the west and turning color, you are going to have a better-than-average chance to catch a big bass. But it will be hard to hunt turkeys at first daylight without going to sleep.

Mike and I hunted the wildest of wild turkeys in the Ozark and Ouachita mountains together when I lived in Arkansas. We’d pitch off into steep canyons before sunrise, and cross to another ridgetop just because of one old gobbler. But as I said, that was back in the good old’ days. We aren’t so much too old to do that today, I credit it to being wiser, not older.

In the nineteen-eighties, I did a lot of guiding in Arkansas, taking float-fishermen on Crooked Creek, the War-Eagle and Kings Rivers, guiding some on Bull Shoals Lake as well, and occasionally on the Buffalo. In the spring, I guided turkey hunters in both Arkansas and Missouri, for more than a dozen years.

The miracle I am talking about took place one spring way back there when Mike and I set up a camp deep in the woods for an out-of-state ophthalmologist-surgeon and his father. Neither had ever killed a wild gobbler. The first morning, the older man demonstrated that he likely never would. Mike took him to a spot where two gobblers were sounding off, spent most of the morning there and came back thoroughly dejected.

“The old guy coughs constantly,” he said, “and he can’t hear and he can’t see well enough to kill a turkey if I could get one close. This morning I had one 60 yards away and he started coughing and looking around to try to find it and spooked it. What’s worse is, he can’t hardly walk more than a hundred yards on level ground without resting for a half hour. It is hopeless.”

I told his son what Mike had told me, and he smiled and said he figured there wouldn’t be much chance of his father killing one. He had lived with worsening lung problems from years of smoking, and couldn’t hear or see much. But he wanted to take him on a trip like we were on where they could be together, and have a chance to at least hunt and camp and enjoy the outdoors one more time, together.

We were being paid well, and Mike accepted that. His job was to do his best, and he would do it. The next morning it was a half-hour after sunrise before the old guy could get up and around, and Mike eased him off to a nice wooded ridgetop split by a faint old logging trail, and set him down overlooking a ravine where gobblers were roosting. They sat there for a while, with Mike calling and the old timer coughing, and lo and behold, a gobbler answered well below them on the wooded hillside.

The old guy couldn’t hear it.  Mike decided to try to do the impossible anyway, so he placed the old man up against a big tree and sat down behind him so he could whisper instructions in his ear. As he called, the gobbler came up that steep woodland hillside, gobbling away, getting closer and closer. Just under the rocky edge of the ridgetop, he gobbled so close the leaves on the trees were shaking, and the old guy actually heard it. The excitement of that stilled his coughing, and Mike showed him how to put his shotgun against his shoulder with the barrel on the ground, so that he could help point the gun toward the gobbler if it ever showed itself, and he tried to guess what route the old tom might take to come up over the rock strewn hillside.

It was going to take a miracle, he thought to himself. Mike called again, the tom gobbled and he was right where he needed to be. A bright red head came popping up over a ledge, but the old hunter didn’t see it. The big tom stood there a moment, looking for that hen, then his head went down. When it did, Mike lifted the old timers gun barrel, pointed it to where he thought the gobbler would pop up again, and when that bright red head reappeared, he whispered, ‘shoot’. The shotgun roared and the blast echoed off a distant ridge.

The old man’s son and I were a mile away, but we heard it. We couldn’t know what had happened, but Mike told us later. The gobbler disappeared, and Mike heard it flopping around. The old hunter had never seen it. He thought he had missed. Mike went halfway down the ravine to retrieve the tom, and when he got back with it, he found his aging client sitting against the tree, his mouth open with amazement, his eyes moist with tears of happiness. He could see the gobbler just fine as Mike laid it at his feet. And he was spry enough to do quite a little dance of joy before a coughing fit overcame him.

“It was a miracle!” Mike told me, his eyes bright with happiness. “Nothing but a miracle!”

And I suppose indeed it was. We had a great week camped there. The next day the younger hunter got his gobbler when I called up a pair of them halfway through the morning. Mike and I got a tip at the end of the hunt that was more than I usually got for a whole day of float-fishing. I never heard from the guy again, and I am sure his father has passed away by now. But I am equally sure that he remembers well that week of turkey hunting. I’m sure Mike remembers too… like it was yesterday. It isn’t every spring that you are part of a miracle.

But there are more memories to be made. Old friends can’t be forgotten, and I intend to hunt turkeys this season with Mike Dodson, and fish in the moonlight where I might just miss a strike or two because of a lack of concentration that recalling old stories can cause.

This week, if you are an old-timer, and remember how to grab ‘yeller suckers’, you ought to be able to find some. And if you like to eat mushrooms, it is a good time to be looking for them too. ‘Ain’t spring grand’… as Ozark folks are inclined to say.

See Mike Dodson and his big bass on my website at www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.  Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  Or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net

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Callin’ Gobblers is Easy, But…

Turkey season is here; time to spend three weeks about halfway worn out three-fourths of the time. Get to bed early, let the garden go, learn to take naps in the warm sunlight leaning up against a tree. It is time to become one with nature; time to find mushrooms, look for arrowheads and suffer through occasional shots of adrenalin to your system each time a gobbler sounds off at whatever distance he might be… always either too far or too close. It is time to worry about ticks, marvel at the beauty of a dogs-tooth violet, and dry your damp socks at mid morning on the branch of a redbud tree. It is time to confine your fishing to the afternoon hours, and forget the bills.

I was just a kid when they opened the first turkey season in the Ozarks. Coach Weaver bought a turkey tag, a couple of turkey calls and a camouflaged shirt and went out before class every morning, coming back with stories of ‘almost’ and ‘darned near’. He darned near had one about every morning, it seemed.

In the pool hall back home, I sought the advice of the old timers, the Front Bench Regulars who had hunted gobblers before. Old Bill and my grandpa had killed dozens of wild turkeys when they were young, before so many had died of diseases brought by domestic farm birds, before spring burning, free ranging hogs and land practices began to destroy nests, and over-hunting thinned the flocks.

“Well, I’ll tell you boy…” Ol’ Bill said one April evening as he cut off a plug of tobacco and propped one foot on the edge of the spittoon. “Wild turkeys is easy to get if you don’t care so much about sleepin’!”

I pushed my homework to the side as pool balls clacked together and the screen door slammed. Ol’ Jim came in and plopped down on the front bench beside Jess Wolf and Virgil Halstead. He was Ol’ Bill’s main competition when it came to hunting and fishing stories, and amongst the Front Bench Regulars, the two of them were the most highly regarded outdoorsmen.

“You see in the spring, they get out there roostin’ together, sometimes 20 or 30 to a flock, and at daylight, they fly down and the romancin’ and matin’ commences,” Bill continued. “That old gobbler, he don’t care if you sound like the sweetest hen in the hills, if’n he’s got a half-dozen others right there on the ground beside him what’s treatin’ him like he’s Rudolph Casanova himself!”

I had no idea who Rudolph Casanova was.

“So what you do is, you listen late in the evenin’ when they all flies up to roost. You can hear ‘em a long ways off… whoof, whoof, whoof, here and whoof, whoof, whoof, there.” Bill used his arms to simulate a turkey flying up to roost as he gave the sound affects.

“Then a couple hours or so before dawn, you sneak back out there and rampage around, whacking the trunks of those roost trees like you was a mountain lion climbin’ up after ‘em, and they all fly off panicked an’ confused in the dark, ever which direction. The idea is, you scatter ‘em out to where they is here an’ there, and then you just wrap up in your old coat right there and nap awhile.”

It didn’t sound like what Coach Weaver would have done, but then, he hadn’t killed one yet either. I kept listening, my mouth open, intent on his story, as usual.

“You’ll get woke up by that ol’ gobbler soundin’ off when it’s just gettin’ light, and that’s when you get ready and be shore you’re hid really good, cause an old tom can see better’n a hoot owl with a good set of readin’ glasses.”

“An old gobbler can see a gnat flex his wings a quarter mile away,” Ol’ Jim throwed in. 
Bill glared at him as if to let him know he didn’t need any help, and he went on, “But you don’t go to callin’ him ‘til you hear a ‘whoof-whoof-whoof’ here and a nother’n there. That means them hens is flyin’ down an’ he knows it. But they’re all spread out now an’ he ain’t sure they can find him nor he can find them, so when you start callin’, he comes lookin’.  An’ you’ll hear him a gobblin’ an’ a struttin’ an' a blowin’. Then you’ll see that old red and white head stickin' up in the brush like a flag, and you’ll be shakin’ like a moonshiner at a revival meetin’. But you wait ‘til he gets about 30 yards away, an let him get his head behind a tree, an’ when he comes out you cut down on him an’ it’s all over but the braggin’. Time to go home for biscuits an gravy.”

“Go tell that Coach feller that he can hire me and Ol’ Bill an we’ll help him get a gobbler,” Ol’ Jim said. “Two dollars an hour and breakfast.”

I told Coach Weaver what I had learned, and it put me in good stead with him, but I think everybody got a good grade in Phys. Ed. anyway. I never did try Ol’ Bill’s method, although Grandpa told me it worked awfully good in the old days. It got to where there were so many turkeys in time that it just wasn’t necessary to go to all that effort. We’ve learned that a little later in the season when the hens start to nest and an old gobbler gets to where he comes off the roost lonely and ignored, just a mediocre turkey caller can lure him within range. But once he gets within range, you need to have a little bit of the woodsmanship that Ol’ Bill and my grandpa had. An old gobbler ain’t real smart, but he’s always got one toe on the panic button. Every year it seems I let one or two get away because I forget that!

I still hear Ol’ Bills last words on turkey hunting, many, many years ago, that evening in the pool hall.  “Boy, callin’ gobblers is easy… killin’ gobblers ain’t.”

I have made myself another really good cedar box call, and I am ready. But I have noticed that this spring, there are an awful bunch of turkeys together, not broken up good like they should be. What that means is, you may have to be out there late in the morning to get some old gobbler off to himself. Most hunters leave too early in the day. Ol’ Bill never would have done that!

Want to see some really good eagle photos? Jim Gaston, at Gaston’s White River Resort, has taken some great pictures of nesting eagles that are just spectacular. Jim is a dedicated photographer, and he gets some great photos. You can see many of them on his website, which is of the same name as his resort. I have put a couple of them on my website too. You can see them at www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.  E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.  If you have never seen my magazine, The Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, we have some sample copies to give away.  Just send five stamps, and we will mail you one.

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