"Joe Bourne of Houston, TX displays a 23-pound gobbler he shot while hunting with his brother Wade in Tennessee."

Each spring my brother Joe Bourne visits from Houston, TX to accompany me in the pursuit of these wily birds.  This year he showed up to hunt on Apr. 4-7.  This is earlier than he normally comes, but since he's heading to Argentina later this month to hunt doves, he planned his Tennessee turkey trip early in the month.

 "The weather can be a little risky in early April," I'd told him when we were looking at dates.

"I'll take my chances," he responded, and we moved forward with our plans.

"A little risky" turned out to be a huge miscalculation.  When Brother Joe was flying up from Houston, a monster cold front was blowing in from Nebraska.  Turkey hunters want clear, calm, warm mornings.  That's when toms gobble best.  However, we were dealt cold, rainy/snowy weather with winds gusting to 25-35 mph.  That's the kind of weather that makes turkeys crawl into holes and turkey hunters want to stay in warm beds instead of braving the elements and going up against the highest of odds.

Still, we were out there.  My son Hampton, home from college, joined us the first morning.  We heard a gobble or two right at dawn, but that was the totality of our turkey contact for the day.  We hunted until noon without seeing a bird.

The next morning, a Sunday, Joe and Hampton headed to another location while I went to church to teach my Sunday School class.  This time they heard several birds gobble right at dawn, had a close call, then came in time to join us at church.

The atom bomb of weather came in that afternoon - a cold front with perhaps the worst April weather I've ever seen.  The temperature hovered in the low 30s.  Snow would fall, then rain, then snow again.  Treetops were whipping back and forth in the wind.

These same conditions prevailed Monday morning, and we felt we had little chance to find a gobbler, much less shoot one, in these conditions.  But we were out there!  As I told him, the only time we didn't have a chance to get him a bird was when we weren't in the woods.

An hour later we were questioning our own sanity!  The weather was bone-numbing.  At one point I commented, "This day is the very definition of the word 'raw'."  We were bundled in clothes we normally wear duck hunting.  We eased through woods and around fields, calling periodically and glassing the openings for any sign of feathers or knobby heads, but our efforts were to naught.  We hunted morning and afternoon with no results whatever.  Finally, sopping, we'd had enough, and we headed home. 

"We've still got one morning left," I told him, trying to sound encouraging.  He was flying out of Nashville late the next afternoon.

That last morning dawned cold and cloudy, but the wind had laid.  We'd decided to go back to the spot where Joe and Hampton had had their close encounter on Sunday morning.  Our strategy was to slip quietly around the edge of the field in the dark, set up close to where we hoped turkeys were roosting, then see what happened.

What happened was that shortly after setting up (against a decomposed hay roll that felt like an air mattress), a turkey gobbled behind us, and hens started tree-yelping.  Finally, a chance! 

The tom was farther back in the woods than the hens.  My hope was that the gobbler would sail into the field before the hens flew down, and we could call him close enough for a shot.  However, the old boy flew down in the woods, and soon all the hens started leaving their roost trees and heading his direction. 

One hen stayed on her limb, however, and she began cutting and yelping - a lovely song to a turkey hunter's ears.  I started answering her, mimicking her calls.  We had a running conversation as Joe and I held our position and hoped something would happen. 

And so it did!  Suddenly I noticed movement in the field to our left.  A turkey was walking our way some 25 yards in the opening.  I whispered an alert to Joe.  Gobbler or hen?  When the bird turned sideways we saw a rope of a beard swinging from his chest.  "Shoot him!" I urged my brother.

We had a good screen of brush in front of us, and Joe got his shotgun to his shoulder without being noticed.  Boom!  The gobbler did a back-flip, and quickly we were up and beside him, admiring this bird that we'd never heard but that couldn't resist the enticement of the cutting and yelping that had lured him from his roosting spot.

Back at the check station, the tom weighed 23 pounds.  He had a 10-inch beard and 1-inch sharp spurs - a nice gobbler indeed!  We'd succeeded in getting Joe a turkey, and he departed later that afternoon with a feeling of accomplishment that comes only after struggling for 4 mornings, then getting the wrapup we'd hoped for.

So thank you, Yogi.  Joe and I won the game on a home run in the bottom of the 9th.  And I had a reaffirmation that persistence is perhaps a turkey hunter's greatest weapon.  Never say die.  Keep on keeping on.  It ain't over till it's over.  I'm sure there are other clichés that fit, but you get the picture.  Into each turkey hunter's life a little rain must fall, but sometimes a gobbler comes with the sunshine that follows!