Our wild turkey tags arrived in the mail on a Saturday. Successfully drawing, and then retrieving the tags from our pumpkin orange mailbox, is the start, and certainly two of the easiest steps in the process of fooling a gobbler.
Putting a bird on the ground, however, is a lot like the terrain we hunt. Riddled with ups and downs. This season, certainly more so.
My hunting partner, 18 and typically a picture of strength and agility, the one who extends a hand when I step into a badger hole hunting sharptails and waves me off when I offer to help drag my deer to the road in November, had knee surgery about a month ago and full recovery is the carrot dangling beyond his grasp at this point.
He’s off crutches before the early April turkey opener, but still married to physical therapy, a list of do’s and don’ts, and a knee brace that adjusts to the desired range of motion by pushing two red buttons.
Sometime in late February, as we turned the venison of several deer into burger, sausage and bacon in a friend’s heated garage, talk turned smart as the heavy bins of ground pork and venison got lighter. We strategize ways to get my son, my hunting partner, to the turkey blind without further physical damage in the downhill dark.
Finally, it was decided without much of a solid plan, one that wouldn’t spook the birds in their treetop roosts and rain on the chances of anyone pulling the trigger after sunrise, that we just would. That we’d simply find a way.
Unmentioned, yet floating in the back of my mind is that the turkey season is only the half of it. With spring a certainty at some point, ice will start pulling away from the shorelines on North Dakota lakes, exposing enough open water to make a decent cast for northern pike and other fish swimming in the shallow, first-to-warm waters.
Yet, many of the same obstacles — rocks, uneven ground, ankle-grabbing vegetation — that would hinder us from limping to a ground blind could simply block our path to some of our favorite shore-fishing spots.
To many (myself included), our situation is trivial, a simple annoyance that will eventually be remedied with healing and time. By comparison, and this is a sobering reminder, there are certainly others with far greater difficulties and their remedies are not so simple.
So, if we must eat a turkey tag and surrender some of the best fishing of the year, so be it. Disappointing? Sure. A reminder of how good we actually have it? Certainly.
“As you look across North Dakota, you see a lot of passion. You see a lot of people who choose to make North Dakota home because of our outdoor resources,” said Jeb Williams during an interview last fall for North Dakota OUTDOORS after being appointed director of the North Dakota Game and Fish Department. “We know North Dakotans are hard working. We know they’re well-educated and can go just about anywhere in the country to make a home, but to choose here, in part, because of our outdoor opportunities is a really powerful thing.”
Can’t argue with that.
