Around 23 or 24 years ago, Manitoba set their first season on wild turkey. I was living in Toronto at the time but my brother (and main hunting partner) called with the news, we concocted a phoney business reason for me to fly back and we set out to get ourselves a turkey or two.
Now, no one we knew had hunted turkey, I'd only seen them once before and all we had to go on was a little bit of instruction that came with the Quaker Boy box call my brother had bought. We learned we were supposed to be out and set up while still dark, the birds roosted in trees and we were supposed to use the call. Hell, at that point we didn't even know what they sounded like.
So we stumbled around in the dark in the woods we intended to hunt till we found a big tree. Seemed like as good a place as any, sat down and carried on a whispered conversation trying to figure out what to do when it got light. Suddenly as the first fingers of dawn were stretching up in the east we were startled out of our complacency by the incredible gobbling (neither of us had heard a gobble before). So loud!! One problem. We could not figure out what direction it was coming from. Again the gobbling and again we were both mystified as to where it was coming from. "It's over there", I said. "No, it's from over there" my brother said, pointing in the opposite direction.
As it got lighter, this happened at least five times. We were flummoxed trying to figure out where the gobbling was coming from until, as we peered off into the woods around us, a big tom flew down into our line of sight.....from directly above us. We both looked up and there were another 4 birds on the large branch we had sat down under.
Those birds had been laughing at us for an hour.
