My Turkey Has a First Name, it's D-E-A-D-MEAT.....

Blog down, blog down!

Or rather, blogged down. I've been blogged down, you see, and that's why there have been fewer posts these days. I knew my productivity would take a hit when I left the warm, squishy confines of Facebook, and now it's cold in the big, wide world, and the seasons are changing and the cancer fund-raisers are funding, and the morels are coming up, secret fungal gnomes of the forest, appearing for a limited time only, under a spreading chestnut near you....

However, I am no Sham-Wow impresario. Operators are not standing by. You, dear reader, are your own operator.

What did I do in the last several days? Well, I finally entered the fray of the Spring Gobbler hunt. As my old hunting mentor puts it, "It's the best of all hunts." For the uninitiated, Spring Gobbler goes thusly:

You are after the boy turkey, and you imitate the girl turkey. If you're really sexy, the boy turkey comes to check you out, and while you distract him by acting all coy and stuff--bedecked from boot-to-beaver in Scrubby-Moss camouflage--you shoot him in the head with a high-powered shotgun. And then hopefully eat him for lunch, because you have to be out of the woods by 1 p.m. What could be better?

My first two days of GobblerQuest 09 was in western Pa with my hunting guru, Art Barlow. Art is as organic a hunter as they come, and deserves his very own posting one day, which I will no doubt write. For now, suffice to say that one goes into the field with him, ostensibly for game, but one inevitably comes out of the field with a larger, enhanced sense of Nature itself. To wit:

In terms of turkey hunting, Art chalked it up as the worst two days in his hunting career---which is some half-century of serious pursuit--but here's what we saw and did: Jumped a velvet-horned buck as soon as we got into the woods; talked to the hawks; happened upon the aftermath of a hapless ruffed grouse, ended by some kind of badass (fox, owl, opportune stoat... who the hell knows); was buzzed by a screaming Pileated woodpecker; and found the most perfectly formed bear print that any of the three of us had seen. The third guy was Billy--the chap one wants at every turkey hunt, otherwise known as He Who Really Knows How to Call. If it were softball, Billy is the guy who would come off the bench, work the other guy into a 3-1 hitter's count, blast one out of the park and then flirt with the ball girl as he rounded Third. Billy is the ringer. He has a wooden box call that Art's dubbed "The Strad" and he's mostly interested in calling birds...the shooting is left up to other parties. Oh yes, and he's developed a nose for ferreting out edible wild mushrooms. One of Billy's idea of fun is to get up at 4 a.m. and shoot video of the birds coming off the roost at dawn. I'm just sayin'...

And so, our two hunting days produced nary a shred of Turkey bird, but a Master's Thesis in CSI: Clarion County. We sucked in the high-spring air and used a hunter's forensic skill to deduce who ate whom, who pooped where, and how the wild owl might best fill his raptor's belly on a sumptous morning in May. On the way back, we took a side trip near the burial mounds of local veterans dating back to the War of 1812, and also to what's reputedly the smallest Post Office in These United States...
Note the blogger, outfitted in arguably the only camouflage Dance Theatre of Harlem baseball hat in existence. There's a story there, involving Ben Vareen backstage at the Kennedy Center, but that's for another time.

As is my third and fourth mornings of turkey hunting... in which Blaiser gets the turkey to talk back, and then breaks his radius....

But before we even contemplate that, get hip to this: the water--any water, really--in greenery's finest. We spent a dreamy Wednesday afternoon on the Clarion River, Art & Sheila, his wife, in their canoe, and me in a borrowed kayak from the excellent bankside host, Jim.

Be thankful for dappled things in the poetic manner of Hopkins. And also, for things in bathing suits...

Paddle about in whatever suits you. As Ratty put it, to Mr. Mole, "There is nothing- absolutely nothing- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." It's all there for the taking, just out of sight, like the morel, the trilium, the albino stag. ..