This story, “Ghost Gobbler,” appeared in the May 1986 issue of Outdoor Life.
He materialized one April morning out of the fog that hung heavily on a western Arkansas mountain. That wasn’t so unusual. Every experienced turkey hunter has seen it happen when the woods were damp and quiet and dawn seemed to be dragging its feet. A gobbler materializes. He’s there, and you didn’t hear him or see him coming or even expect him.
This one came from behind me and to my left, and when his movements brought my senses to full attention, he was only 25 feet away at the most — and he saw me, too.
In the few seconds it takes for everything to happen, it’s surprising how much goes through your mind. There’s the immediate shift of heartbeat into high gear, the realization that the gobbler has the edge on you, and the indecision that usually gives him an even bigger edge.
That morning, something else registered in my mind. The gobbler’s beard was 10 inches long, maybe 11. It wasn’t unusually thick, and I have several better ones on the wall of my den, but this beard was one in a million. The lower two or three inches were a beige or light tan color that looked almost white against the dark breast.
As suddenly as he had appeared, he left, head low, putting distance and pine trees between us in a hurry. I wanted to shoot — did I ever want to shoot — but I didn’t, even when the gobbler flew just at the edge of my gun’s range. I knew I had little chance to kill, and I stopped in time.
I moved one-half mile up the ridge and spent the rest of the morning waiting for the fog to lift and for another gobbler to materialize. By midmorning, the sun broke through, but the woods remained quiet. At noon, I began the long walk back to camp, wondering whether I would have another chance at the gobbler with the frosted beard.
At that same time the day before, I had been pretty disgusted with my efforts to take a gobbler. My old friend Clyde and I had made several trips to the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas. Clyde was nearing 70 years of age. He had more years of experience hunting the wild gobbler than any man I’ve met before or since. We usually camped in the same place and hunted the same ridges behind our camp, an area we had grown to know very well. But that year, other hunters had moved in and claimed our campsite, so we had been forced to a new ridge. It was a good spot to hunt — a long, fairly wide ridge where Clyde could hunt without much exertion. On opening day, I moved well down the ridge, away from camp and the immediate area where Clyde would hunt.
I didn’t hear a gobble that morning. It was chilly, so I decided I’d see where this big wide ridge went to and warm up while doing it. I walked two or three miles, stopping to call and listen.
I sat down when the sun grew warmer and would have dozed off had it not been for a crow. The black rascal was giving something what-for, and that prompted a gobble only 200 yards from me, followed by another and another.
I moved closer, confident that I had a chance to bag the gobbler even though it was nearing midday. I did something I have not very often done: I moved too close. I got within 100 yards of the bird, but I was moving slowly and saw him before he saw me.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just him and me. There were four hens with that old strutting tom. Miraculously, none of them had seen me. Because the woodland opened a bit, I could watch them, and I figured I was hidden well enough to call the whole bunch right to me. As I called, the hens fed, and the tom strutted and gobbled. Then, they all moved slowly but surely the other way and finally angled down off the ridge. After about one hour of silence, I heard a last gobble way down below me, and I decided it was time for lunch back in camp and a nap.
Late that afternoon, I went back to look over the beautiful stretch of woodland that was torn up with the scratchings of wild turkeys. I walked down off the side of the big ridge and found a finger coming off it that was 300 or 400 yards long, perpendicular to the main ridge. There were big pines along one side and huge white oaks along the other. Here, too, the leaf litter had been raked up everywhere by turkeys.
The spot was so beautiful that I just sat down there. I neither heard nor saw anything that afternoon but returned the following morning in the fog, and that’s when I first spotted the gobbler with the white-tipped beard. This was the place we came to call the “phantom ridge.”
When we headed homeward that spring, I told Clyde about the bird with the strange beard. He told me that he had killed a gobbler with such a beard once but that the bird wasn’t a ground raker. I asked if he thought the turkey would still be there the following year, and my old friend reckoned he probably would be.
“We’ll get him next year, then,” I said, not knowing that though the gobbler would indeed be there, Clyde would not. He died two months later of a sudden stroke.
When April finally came again, I went to the Ouachitas and camped on that long ridge. With me around the campfire the evening before opening day were two friends new to turkey hunting, and I gave them advice and answered their questions just as Clyde had answered mine years before. But I could see him sitting t}1ere, and I could hear him say, “So, you’re an expert now.” The fourth member of our party, Jim Spencer, was sage but silent.
It was my eighth year of turkey hunting, and I had 22 gobblers to my credit, all taken in Missouri and Arkansas. I knew by then that the advice I could give wasn’t going to help my friends much. They had to learn many things by making their own mistakes.
Dave Meisner and Norm Beattie had traveled from Des Moines, Iowa, for their first turkey hunt. They were very concerned about their calling, and though I assured them that calling is the least part of the hunt, I don’t think either one believed me. Just before sunrise the next day, Norm called up two toms that never gobbled, and he missed his shot.
Dave and I headed in another direction and got a gobbler to answer our call. He was in the valley below, maybe 250 yards away, and he gobbled his head off as he came up to find the hen. I situated Dave about 30 yards ahead of me on the trace of an ancient logging road. The gobbler came up the trace at a brisk pace and stopped about 60 yards from Dave. Something just wasn’t quite right. To Dave’s credit, he never moved an eyelid while the turkey circled him just out of range and walked just above me on the slope, where I dropped him at 35 yards. He was a 21-pound tom with a I0-inch beard.
I bragged a little about my ability to call a gobbler around another hunter, though I had really tried to call the bird to Dave. He jokingly labeled me a game hog.
Jim Spencer had found the phantom ridge. I could tell by the way he spoke of the beauty of the place, the abundance of turkey sign, and the stillness beneath the towering pines and hardwoods. And then there was the gobbler, a big one that came up behind him and never gobbled.
“Naw, I didn’t get the son of a gun,” Spencer said. “He kicked leaves in my face.”
Jim tried an afternoon hunt and returned to camp one hour after dark, shaking his head.
“I went back up there to get that turkey,” he said, “and I’ll be danged if I could find that finger ridge again. It’s just like it disappeared. First thing I knew, I got lost, and I’ve been trying to find camp until now. That ridge is a strange place.” That’s when we started calling it the phantom ridge.
Jim went in another direction the following day, so Dave and I made the long march to the place where the phantom ridge and that frosted-beard gobbler were supposed to be. We never found the perpendicular ridge. We returned that afternoon to look again, and somehow we wound up on it. Dave agreed that it was a fantastic spot, but there was silence. We stayed late, hoping to hear gobblers flying to roost in the valley below, but we heard nothing, so we headed back. In the dusk and cloud cover, Dave remarked that he hoped we weren’t lost. I laughed and told him that in all my years in the Ozarks and Ouachitas, I had never been lost. I should have known I’d regret saying that!
It began to rain just after darkness set in, and I finally admitted that somehow we had indeed gotten lost. It was no laughing matter. The temperature had dropped to about 38°, and I knew that we were in for hours of steady rain. We dropped down into the valley, followed a creek downstream, and struck an old logging road. Even in the rain and darkness, I could tell that a four-wheel-drive vehicle had traveled it not too long before. We followed and, three hours after dusk, tramped into another hunter’s camp — cold, wet, and tired. We were miles from our camp, so he gave us a ride back.
Dave went with Jim the next morning, so I took Norm Beattie with me. We tramped west again along the long, wide ridge, beneath dripping foliage dappled with new dogwood blossoms. We stopped at the place where I knew the phantom ridge should have veered off to the right, but it wasn’t there.
We were going to walk just a little farther, but Norm said he thought he had heard something. I smiled to myself, knowing that beginners often hear gobblers all night long and a week after returning from a hunt. Only to appease Norm, I gave a soft call, and a gobbler answered from down the slope. Norm and I separated by about 35 yards, and I continued to call. The tom answered often and began moving toward us up the slope. I admit that I thought about the gobbler with the frosted beard, but I told myself that even if the old gobbler were still there, he wouldn’t gobble that much and come that readily. But he was, and he did.
I saw his head first, as usual, a bright red flag jerking its way up the wooded hillside, bobbing up and down like an apple on a string. Then I saw the beard, the last few inches light in color.
I was between Norm and the gobbler. If there was to be a shot, I would have to take it. I fired at what could not have been more than 40 yards. At that distance, my three-inch magnum shell loaded with No. 4 shot should have killed him. But the gun or I, one of us, missed. The gobbler put his head down, covered 30 yards in 2V2 seconds, and lifted into flight down into the valley.
That evening, I wondered aloud how I could have missed. It was the first time I’d ever shot at a turkey that I didn’t get. I had used two shells a couple of times, but I always got the turkey. But now I had missed one, and I remembered what Clyde had said: “A hunter spends his first year or two thinking that killing a gobbler is next to impossible, and then he gets one or two or three. Next thing you know, he figures he’s an expert because it worked so well. About that time, he gets too confident and misses one or two or three. Then he starts wondering whether he’ll ever get another one.”
I got a turkey on the last day of our Ouachita trip that year, a 17-pound jake that I shot on a windy morning. He gobbled like a veteran but ran to my call like an anxious and clumsy teenager at his first dance.
It was just Jim and me the next year, and he brought topographical maps that he said would help us figure out where the phantom ridge was. But the maps showed several fingers coming off the ridge in that area, and the maps made the lay of the land even more confusing.
At daybreak the next morning, Jim and I paused on the long ridge to listen and heard several gobblers. I went toward one, and he went toward another.
At 7 a.m., while calling one gobbler, another answered, nearly upon me. I shifted position and waited. The tom came right in, saw me at 35 yards, and dropped his head to the ground just as I shot. When he flew, I figured he was a goner, but I missed the second shot, perhaps because I tried too hard to put shot in the head or no place at all. I didn’t see the beard well, but I was sure it wasn’t discolored. I kicked a stump or two and cussed my rotten luck. Right there on that ridge, I had missed two turkeys in two seasons.
One hour later, I heard another gobbler down in the valley where the first bird had flown, so I went after him. I called to the gobbler from two locations, and he answered me fairly well but didn’t move much. I guessed that there was some obstacle between us. There was — a small fork of the creek. Once I got across it, the gobbler was close enough for me to shake hands with him. I saw him stick his head out of a small draw and then stand there, looking at me. It would have to be a quick shot. I tried it, but the gobbler was much faster than I was, and I didn’t catch another glimpse of him until he was well out of range and taking to flight.
As I sat in camp and felt sorry for myself that afternoon, bad weather moved in, and a storm was upon us when evening came.
I stayed in camp most of the next morning. Jim went out and got wet, and returned to report that the gobblers had been quiet. During the night, the sky cleared and the woods grew quiet. The sun would rise to a cloudless sky, and the pines would stand still and silent.
Somehow, I staggered onto the narrow, sloping saddle that led to the phantom ridge; I was just a bit late that day. Along the western side, where the pines were largest, there was a bluff that provided an overview of the valley below. It was steep, too steep to walk down. I sat there, called once, and a gobbler answered from the other side of the ridge, which sloped gently into a hardwood forest. The gobbler sounded quite a way down, so I moved closer and caught a glimpse of him maybe 100 yards away.
After sitting beside a big white oak, I called again, and the gobbler headed toward me with two hens behind him. He stopped at about 80 yards and began to strut, gobbling occasionally as he moved in small circles. He was a big, beautiful gobbler, but that wasn’t what made my hands shake. It was the beard — nearly a foot long, it seemed, the lower end nearly white.
As he strutted, circled, and gobbled, one of the hens came toward me on a run. She stopped only 10 to 15 yards away, and though I hugged the white oak, still as a statue, she knew there was danger.
Putting softly, she returned to the gobbler, and both hens headed for the valley. The old tom strutted some more and gobbled when I called, but I knew where he’d go. For an hour or so, he gobbled regularly in the valley. By midmorning he was quiet, but I didn’t give up. The valley was deep and the ridge on the other side would be a rough climb, but I decided I would have a better chance there than where I was.
Hens often leave a gobbler after early morning mating activity. If that happened, I might still be in the driver’s seat, so I climbed the opposite ridge, found a good sunny spot, and lay down to take a nap.
About 10 a.m., the old gobbler confirmed my suspicions that he had remained in the valley. He woke me up with a gobble, ignored my calling for 15 minutes before he gobbled, and then gobbled again 15 minutes later.
By 11 a.m., he was gobbling fairly consistently again, but he wasn’t coming my way. Ever so slowly, he was working his way back up the steep side of the phantom ridge toward his early morning strutting ground. I had to get there before he did.
It took me 20 minutes to cross the valley, circling wide around the gobbler but hurrying over the big rocks and fallen trees, sometimes moving up the steep incline nearly on all fours.
I beat him, and I set up in a small thicket very close to the place he had frequented at dawn. The big tom was gobbling only about 100 yards below me on the slope.
I called once, and the gobbler quickly answered, 30 yards closer.
I finally saw him at 50 yards. He was coming up the slope at a steady pace, looking and lusting for the hen, or maybe suspicious and looking for me. There it was, the long, light-tipped beard flopping back and forth as he walked. My heart switched into overdrive. He was 45 yards away, and I needed only a few more steps. Under my breath, I begged him to keep coming.
At 40 yards, he stopped, head high, watching and waiting. He puffed up, then gobbled again and waited and watched. Finally, he stepped up on a fallen log, and there he stayed while the morning dragged on. Now and then, he huffed up into strutting posture. I prayed that he’d jump off that log and move because a small tree between us protected his head much of the time. After 20 minutes, I began to think that I should take a quick shot when I could hit his head. A small move to my right with the shotgun at the proper time would miss the sapling. My eyes were watering, and my vision was becoming hazy.
A blue jay shrieked nearby, the gobbler’s head came up, and my shotgun was at my shoulder in the blink of an eyelash. I leaned to the right, and the woods echoed with the blast.
I came to my feet a fraction of a second after the No. 4 shot hit, aware that I had lost the feeling in my right leg, aware that the gobbler was down, hit hard. In his throes, the big bird gained his feet, and for just a minute, I thought he would go back down. His wings drooped, and it was plain he would not fly away. Flopping and falling, he headed up behind me toward the west side of the ridge. If he had headed downhill, I’m sure I could have intercepted him. But if he gained the bluff, I’d have no chance. Hurriedly, I squeezed off a second shot, but his head was down, and either I missed or the body protected the head and neck. With one shell left in my gun, I ran after the gobbler as hard as I could run, aware that it was a dangerous thing to do but knowing full well that I had to get him before the gobbler gained that high ground. He seemed to gain strength as I lost mine.
When I last saw him, he was 50 yards away, and the bluff was before him.
With all of my strength expended, I gasped for air and looked over the steep hillside where the gobbler had disappeared. On my hands and knees, I conceded defeat. There was no chance
Oh yes, I looked. But first I lay on my back, completely exhausted from the 100-yard uphill sprint. But eventually, I skirted the bluff and searched futilely. I had called him in; I had outsmarted him; I had killed him. I knew that night as I sat near the campfire, listening to the owls and the coyotes deep in the forest, that the gobbler with the frosted beard was no more. Once again and for the last time, the old gobbler had beaten me. He was the victor, finally, after all.
Read Next: My Grandpa Ditched Me on My First Turkey Hunt. I Was Nine
In 1985, Jim Spencer and I returned to the Ouachita Mountains and found a new Forest Service road along the broad ridge. It was wide enough for two big semis and must have cost millions in taxpayer dollars. The massive clear-cut made the area unrecognizable. The beautiful forested ridge is now an ugly scar, a desert of stumps and slash. And, like the gobbler with the frosted beard, the phantom ridge as we knew it is no more.
Someday, nature may again prevail, and trees will grow where the gravel road winds. Maybe there will be wind in majestic pines and oaks along the phantom ridge when today’s fresh-cut stumps have decayed. And maybe there will be another old gobbler and his harem, and the challenge of yet another spring hunt.
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