I shot until around 1:00 and then headed for home. At 1:15 he called and told me he had a big tom down. Apparently he heard 2 toms firing off in different directions when he got on the hill. After a gobble that sounded closer, he yelped aggressively and a minute later the tom was sneaking in silent. The other tom was still gobbling when he left.

So stick it out. Or if all you can do is hunt from 11-2, go for it. After all, you won’t kill any turkeys on the couch (or on the bank of some carp infested lake).

You can apply for elk and deer online here.

The whole time I could here a tom getting closer. Every few minutes he’d gobble again and be closer. Finally I had to pack up or risk spooking him right where I want him to roost. With a few more minutes before I had to get dinner going I grabbed rod and took a spin in my canoe:

I caught 3 crappie in 3 casts, all in the exact same spot. The third one was so shallow I could see him strike the little crankbait. Until today I had no idea they were even in the pond. I suspect this is a biology problem for the future… For today it was a fun way to pass the evening.

I took a friend around to some of my favorite places to shoot fish during a flood. Got soaked to the bone but we put together a nice stringer of fish, mostly buffalo.

I keep thinking about a morning last September, the last time he was healthy enough to hunt. A recent flood was receding and there were teal everywhere. Dad and I waded out into a marsh with Wild Bill between us. It was cloudy, humid and misty, and the mosquitoes were as thick as the teal. If you had watched that shoot from a distance you would have thought a kid was flanked by two adults, and the kid was losing his mind. In reality the kid in the middle was 70-something years old. He was whistling, howling, hollering, and most of all, shooting. Dad and I each had a dog that spent all morning bring ducks he shot back to us. He was enjoying life the way only Wild Bill could do it, in flamboyant and dynamic style.

About the time I was old enough to shoot my Dad took Bill in as his partner on a duck blind near Mound City. He was there for my formative years, as both an outdoorsman and an adult. He was there when I shot my first banded duck, and he gave me the deer rifle I use today. He never said a word when a dumb 16 year old kid made a bad call in the blind, he just smiled and let me take my lumps with words of encouragement. It wasn’t ever about him. On our annual Canadian fishing trip he could have caught more fish with someone else in those early years, but he was always happy to let me “guide” him, even as I was just learning to run a boat and had no idea where I was going.

He was also a model of grace in the way we should all approach life. He’d traveled abroad in the service and worked abroad as a single young man. Much later in life he traveled extensively as a competitive ballroom dancer. He had a worldly base of knowledge that was uncommon, particularly among people of his generation. He had a Coca-Cola museum in his basement and drum set in his bedroom. You could never completely grasp his experiences. While he had no children, he did put a bright young family friend through college when his mother didn’t have the resources. He was fiercely loyal to his friends. If I needed to call someone at 3am to come make my bond three states away, he’d have been my first call, and he’d have been there.

My words cannot do communicate to you the excitement in his voice when a puffed up old tom would start heading our way. “Zackman! He’s coming our way Zackman!” I’d nod, hoping the turkey couldn’t hear him, and hoping he would be quiet and hold still as best he could for the next few minutes. Sometimes it was a struggle. Even though most of his classmates had hung up their guns years ago, he was as excited as someone who had never even seen a turkey.

He lived every day I knew him with that level of excitement for life. I consider myself blessed to have known him.

But for now I’ve got to get some sleep. Missouri Rifle opens in 8 hours or so.