Published: May 31, 2008 09:04 pm         

Nothing like the country

So here I am, or I should say there I was, sitting in my truck, the rain beating down, a chill in the May 10 morning air.

I ask myself, “How can a soggy, 13-pound gobbler with a 4-inch beard sitting in the bed of my pickup truck make a man my age so happy?”

I realized then that I can’t put the answer to that question in so many words, but that I am so grateful that it is true.

My truck was parked on the side of a mountain in the Eastern Panhandle of Almost Heaven, though I was surrounded by so much green that it could have been a dale in Ireland.

Water was everywhere, running down gullies and creeks, dripping off my nose and falling through the mountain air. Do any of you remember a more rainy or chilly spring gobbler season than this one? On the last day of the West Virginia season, May 24, I was still wearing a fleece pullover and medium weight thermal underwear on my legs, and glad to be dressed in such a fashion.

The young gobbler now strapped to my field tag was accompanied by a twin jakebird and two hens when the group wandered past the ground blind in which I sat just a few minutes before 7 a.m. There had been no gobbling. I know a few spring turkey hunters who pull the trigger only in the direction of longbeard turkeys, letting jakes walk. I am not one of those hunters.

Every gobbler that I have taken has been a trophy to me and this little feller was no exception. I was king of the world that morning. You know the feeling.

Here is the cool part, the world of which I was king could have been the same world I hunted when I was a teen-ager or young adult. Nothing had changed, at least not much, in these West Virginia mountains. Thank God for that.

I don’t mind so much the counties in West Virginia posting signs at their borders saying that they are certified business locations, just as they don’t follow through with it.

I decided to wait a while before driving off the mountain. The road on which I would leave runs past another ground blind from which a hunting companion was hoping to fling an arrow at a gobbler. I wouldn’t want to come over the hump and into view of his blind just as a longbeard was approaching.

Although I was sitting in a 2004 pickup truck, my favorite radio station, WVSB 104.1 out of the West Virginia School for the Blind in Romney was playing the same songs I listened to when I was old enough to kill, but not for voting. That’s a line from Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction.”

WVSB plays the old country songs. I heard Patsy Cline belt out “Walking After Midnight.” Then Tammy Wynette let fly with “Apartment #9.” Finally, when Jim Reeves and his clear, articulate voice (he would be a failure at rap) came over the air with “The Blizzard,” I completed my trip backward in my very own mountain time machine.

In “The Blizzard,” the good guy is traveling across the high plains riding a lame pony named Dan. Could be in western Kansas, who knows? Anyway, during the song, the pair progresses ever closer to Mary Ann’s where, we are told, hot biscuits await. They are nine miles away, then seven, then five, then three. The weather worsens. Dan seems to lag. “You’ll be the death of us, Dan,” the cowpoke says.

Bottom line, the pair dies in the blizzard 100 yards from those hot biscuits at Mary Ann’s. The pony just couldn’t make it any further so the cowpoke stayed with him to the death, his hands “froze to the reins.”

Now that’s country music.

And that wet and little gobbler in the back of my truck? Well that was as good as a 25-pound wallhanger as far as I was concerned.

Maryland harvest increases

Bob Long, turkey biologist for the Maryland Wildlife and Heritage Service, said the statewide kill of 2,833 is up 15 percent from a year ago.

In Allegany County, 345 gobblers were bagged, a whopping increase of 33 percent. Garrett County hunters checked in 327 turkeys, up 8 percent, and Washington County accounted for 281 bearded birds, up 5 percent.

“The increase came during the first three days of the hunt when the weather was sperfect,” Long said. “After that, the harvest for the rest of the season was very similar to what we saw last year.”

There were 134 gobblers killed throughout Maryland on the one-day youth hunt.

Long said that this spring’s harvest was made up mostly of older gobblers. Young male turkeys, or jakes, accounted for only 22 percent of the kill.

“That pretty much reflects what we thought would happen,” Long said. “We didn’t think we had a lot of jakes out there this spring.”

Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.