Photo by Ralph Hensley

Oct. 31, 2004, was a rainy day in the eastern Ozarks. I'd hunted turkeys during three of the six previous days of Arkansas' all-too-brief fall gun season and had made contact with turkeys all three days, but hadn't been able to close the deal.

I scattered a flock too late in the afternoon for them to get back together, and I couldn't get back there to hunt them the next morning. Then I got a good scatter on a flock at midday, but they flew across the White River, and I couldn't follow. The third time, I'd found a flock of adult gobblers and managed to split them up, but they did what most adult gobblers do in autumn: They disappeared as completely as if the ground had opened and swallowed them up.

Now, Sunday afternoon, the last day of the season, I was making one last try, hunting in the rain. I'd left my truck on the side of a seldom-used Forest Service road in Baxter County and made a meandering circle along a series of more or less connecting ridges, covering about five miles and coming back to the road a half-mile from where I'd parked.

Walking back down the shale and gravel road, I'd already given up on the fall season and was out of hunting mode, mind on other things, thinking about the stuff I had to do in the coming week. I was within sight of the truck when I heard a soft cluck on the downslope side of the road. I stopped, walked quickly to the edge and was rewarded by the sight of a dozen turkeys blasting off across the soggy valley below me like a covey of dark giant quail.

Fifteen minutes later, sitting in the wet leaves against an oak near the bottom of that valley, I pulled the trigger on a young gobbler with a beard the size of a cocklebur. He was our Thanksgiving bird; he was delicious.

My experiences last fall were typical of fall turkey hunting. You do a whole lot of walking, and if you're lucky, there's a flurry of fast-paced action at the end of it. Maybe that part about the walking explains the disinclination of many Arkansans to hunt turkeys in the fall. But even dedicated spring turkey hunters, for the most part, don't bother with hunting fall turkeys. Statistics show that Arkansas' spring harvest outpaces the fall harvest each year, usually by a ratio of 10 (or more) to 1.

Part of that difference, of course, is something that's already been mentioned: Arkansas' short fall turkey season. Last year, only seven days were allotted for modern gun hunting. Another reason for the much smaller harvest is that the fall turkey season has been open only intermittently in the recent past. Between 1996 and 2001, a few members of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission decided that they knew more than the biologists and, despite a huge mass of research data proving that well-managed fall hunts are biologically sound, made fall turkey hunting illegal. During the hiatus, fall turkey hunters got out of the habit.

But wiser heads on the AGFC made themselves heard, and the fall turkey season is back in the picture, albeit a much shorter one than it could be.

SCATTERING THE FLOCK: THE TRADITIONAL FALL TECHNIQUE
Most fall turkey hunters rely on the scatter-and-call technique I used to take that gobbler last fall. Since I enjoy being in the woods by myself, I prefer to cover ground on foot, walking ridgetops and old forest roads and looking and listening for turkeys.