Please click HERE to enlarge image

Two dudes were standing in the field listening at the base of "my hill," following their pre-dawn march into the inky woods. I had worked a gobbler on the hill -- and come within a shade of killing him -- on my two previous hunts. So it was mighty disappointing to have to turn around and trek back out. I got in the truck and drove another mile down the road to a hollow I hadn't seen since the end of deer season two months before.

It was a half-hearted effort at best. The turkeys were all on the other end of the farm, it seemed. But I was there, so why not give it a shot?

It was getting gray in the east and I hadn't gotten to where I wanted to be, when a tom sounded off high on the ridge across the hollow. I covered part of the distance and stopped to listen once again. The gobbler thundered once more. Just getting to him would be a feat. He was at the top of a "heart-attack" hill.

It was still the first week of the season and the woods hadn't leafed out yet. There was the very real possibility that the turkey might spy me on the approach. But he was the only gobbler going in my neck of the woods, so what else could I do?

I eased up the ridge as stealthily as I could, stepping from rock to rock when possible to cut down on any noise in the dry leaves. The gobbler sounded off a few more times as I eased into position. He was just on the other side of a little point.

The perspiration was flowing by the time I got to the top, but I'd made it without keeling over from a coronary, so the first part of my mission was accomplished. Now I just had to ease into a little better shooting position.

I called once to get a bearing on the tom's whereabouts, and he cut me off with a gobble. I slipped forward to gain a position by a big oak and called once more. Nothing but silence answered the effort.

A second call also failed to elicit a response. It appeared I'd been seen and gotten busted on that last move.

But I'd made it to the point and I wasn't about to turn around and head elsewhere. I slipped about 60 yards around a corner of an ancient and dim logging road and went to the lip of the ridge.

I was now on the other side of the craggy point. After settling in against a tree, I threw a call down into the ravine. It got an instant response. Then a pair of jet-black bodies came into view. It was two toms, not one!

They looked like twin brothers, identical in every way. They came up the hill a few yards, then split apart. I had to wait a minute for them to come out from behind a small tree. The one to the right crumpled and flopped at the shot.

That hunt last spring was over by 6:30 in the morning, and I made it to the office on time for work. It was my first-ever gobbler in my home county of Marshall.

More importantly, it bears out what biologists across the state are saying. Turkey numbers are up to a modern high statewide, and gobblers are now showing up in places that never had them just a few years before. A mere decade or so earlier, there were no turkeys on the farm where that one fell for me last spring.

"The turkey expansion is continuing, especially in the northern part of the state," said Keith McCutcheon, the district biologist for northeastern Alabama. "That hunt you had last spring in a place that didn't have turkeys before is the kind of thing a lot of people are experiencing now."