The air in the cove at five in the morning is heavy with the scent of damp earth and decomposing hemlock logs. Sitting against the fluted base of a mature white oak, the bark presses through a wool jacket, a cold reminder of the ridge's mass behind it. Overhead, the canopy of the southern Appalachians has not yet closed for the year. The tulip poplars and maples are pushing out their first thin leaves, a pale green translucent screen that catches the stars before they dissolve into the graying sky.
It is mid-April in East Tennessee, the front edge of the green-up. In the early twilight, the white flags of flowering dogwoods stand out like scattered napkins across the dark hillside. Near the left boot, the tip of a yellow morel has broken through the mat of compressed oak leaves, its honeycombed cap still wet with dew. The woods are motionless but completely awake, an absolute stillness that precedes the first voice.
That voice belongs to *Meleagris gallopavo silvestris*, the eastern wild turkey. When the first gobble rips through the timber from a ridgetop pine three hundred yards away, it is a sound that shatters the dawn and resets the mountain. It is a coarse, rattling boom that vibrates in the chest of anyone sitting below it. A century ago, a hunter could have spent a lifetime in these same mountains without ever hearing it. Overhunting and logging had cleared the hollows of both timber and birds. He is here because, across several decades, wildlife crews trapped wild turkeys in the few places they still held and carried them back into emptied country—one of the genuine American conservation successes. The tom booming from the pine limb is a restored animal, present because someone put him back.
The season runs into late May, allowing only for gobblers and bearded birds, leaving the hens to tend their nests in the thickets. From the pocket of the jacket comes a small piece of slate set in a walnut cup. A striker made of hickory scrapes across the surface, producing a sequence of three sharp, raspy notes—the yelp of a hen waking up on her own limb. The sound is dry and loud in the damp air.
The response from the ridge is immediate. The tom cuts off the final note with a double-gobble that sounds closer now, the bird already turned on the limb to face the source.
Then comes the fly-down: the heavy, rhythmic slapping of broad wings against pine boughs, a clumsy, breaking sound that carries across the ravine, and a solid thud as twenty pounds of bone and muscle meets the leaf litter on the upper bench.
On the ground, the terms of the encounter shift. For fifteen minutes, the mountain settles back into its ordinary register—the steady rush of the creek in the bottom, the first whistle of a cardinal, the dry rustle of a white-footed mouse working through the briars. The slate sits motionless on the hunter's thigh. To work it again now would sound like a hen too eager, and a tom that has gobbled twice will cool on a hen that begs. The bird is listening, parsing the timber for any note that rings mechanical.
When he gobbles again, he has moved fifty yards to the west, tracing the lip of an old logging road. The sound has more weight now, muffled slightly by a stand of young hemlocks. He is holding the high ground, waiting for the hen to reveal herself, expecting her to make the climb to him.
The hickory striker touches the slate again, lighter this time. Just two soft, clean clucks—a brief confirmation. Still here. Still waiting.
Another ten minutes dissolve. The light has shifted from slate gray to a cold, luminous blue that picks out the ridges of the oak bark. A small swarm of gnats begins to hover near the hunter's face, drawn to the warmth of his breath, but a hand cannot be raised to swat them. Absolute immobility is the entry fee. A single shifted boot against a root or the flash of an uncovered knuckle will telegraph across the open understory like a flare.
The tom answers the clucks with a fierce, interrupting double-gobble. He has dropped off the logging road and is working down a spine of sandstone toward the cove. He is coming, but on a zig-zag, testing the slope, stopping to listen after every few steps. The hunter tracks him entirely by ear, mapping his descent through the thickets. He gobbles from behind a fallen chestnut log; five minutes later, he sounds off from the edge of a blackberry patch twenty yards lower.
The tension in the middle ground is all containment. It is the strain in the small of the back against the oak, the slow burn in the quadriceps from holding a knee at one angle too long, the work of keeping the lungs moving evenly when everything wants to seize. The dialogue has slowed to a crawl. The bird stalls on a flat bench sixty yards above, his gobbles turning sharp and brief—an irritated cadence that asks why the hen has not yet appeared on the path.
The hunter remains a part of the tree. No slate, no movement. The silence between the bird's demands grows heavy, filling with the rising hum of the spring woods. The bird must choose to bridge the remaining distance on his own, or the morning will go on without him.
After a long interval of nothing, the drumming starts—the heavy thrum of his air sacs inflating, a vibration carried through the ground that reaches the boots before it reaches the ear. He is in strut. Even hidden behind the screen of wild hydrangea, the dry scrape of his stiff wing feathers dragging the dead oak leaves marks his approach.
Through the gaps in the greening brush, the white crown of his head appears, glowing like wet porcelain against the dark understory. He turns, his tail fan opening into a perfect, iridescent semi-circle of bronze and black. He is magnificent, immense, and entirely stubborn. He steps forward, his chest ballooning, and lets go a gobble that rattles the leaves at his feet. He stands at forty-five yards, separated by a tangle of fallen limbs and emerging briar, demanding that the landscape yield the hen he was promised.
The hunter does not move. The slate is cold. There is nothing left to say that would not sound like begging. For ten minutes, the tom stands his ground, drumming in the shadows, refusing to take the final twenty steps into the open lane. The white head works back and forth through the brush as the morning light turns from blue to gold.
Slowly, the fan closes. The tom lowers his head, his feathers smoothing flat against his body until he slims down into a long, gray-brown spear. He walks away, resuming his morning on his own terms, moving past the dogwoods and up toward the higher ridges where the real hens are waiting. His tracks remain in the damp silt by the creek, the deep three-toed impressions already filling with slow-seeping water.
The sun clears the eastern ridge now, sending long shafts of yellow light through the cove hardwoods, striking the white oak trunk and warming the bark. The air begins to lose its bite. The yellow morel by the boot glows in the new light.
