Hunting the Legendary Cohutta Gobbler, From the Archives

When I first met the Cohutta gobbler, I had no suspicion we were embarking on one of the greatest outdoor adventures of my life.

It was early spring. The woods were speckled with chalky clumps of dogwood in pastel shades of green and gold, which made them seem unreal. This was spring gobbling season in the mountains, and I was hunting alone in the Cohutta Range, on the Georgia-Tennessee line.

To me, this is one of the most stimulating hunt seasons of the year. The forest floor is bright with flowers, tree buds burst with new life, and the vitality of the forest and its creatures seems ready to erupt into a phantasmagoria of sound and color.

At dawn I walked out to an isolated ridge and paused to listen for the sonorous notes of a big buck turkey. For an hour I stood there against an oak tree as the dawn woods came to life and the sun touched a distant mountain. I yelped my cedar box. When the call went unanswered, I walked another quarter of a mile to yelp the box again and listen for a reply.

That was when I first heard the gobbler, somewhere beyond the jumble of ridges and valleys. His notes denoted a large gobbler.

The closer I could get to that gobbler without spooking him, the better my chance of putting him in the bag. So I struck out in a beeline, across the series of ridges, pausing on each ridge to call again and get an answer.

On the fourth ridge, I sensed that he was nearby. When I clucked my yelper and didn’t get an answer, I considered that the bird was close. So I stood still, straining my ears, and after a few minutes heard some creature working in the dry leaves that blanketed the shallow cove just beyond the hilltop. In a half crouch, I circled to a point directly above where I heard the parched leaves rattling.

After listening for a minute, I concluded that the sound was definitely turkeys scratching for food in the brown carpet. They hadn’t made a sound to verify their presence.

I stood perfectly still, trying to determine my next move.

I would have concocted a scheme to see those birds if a gray squirrel hadn’t interrupted at that moment. When I heard the squirrel rattle bark on a tree above me, I instinctively glanced up. He was so close over my head that I could have touched him with my gun barrel. I had on my camouflage suit, but my face was uncovered. When he saw me, the squirrel seemed to go berserk.

He made a long leap to the next tree, another flying arc, and on his third jump he either misjudged or broke a limb in his headlong flight. I got a glimpse of him in the air and then heard him hit the leaves below.

If those startled turkeys had taken to the air, I could have killed one. They were scratching within 40 feet of where I stood. When I heard them running in the leaves, I charged into the laurel, hoping for a shot, but by the time I spotted them, they were sprinting up the far slope, out of shotgun range. One was the tallest gobbler I’d ever seen. A couple of young bucks were with him, and the old tom dwarfed them.

Charlie’s wife, Kayte, examines the Cohutta gobbler. At right, gunner Elliott shows off his trophy bird. Outdoor Life

The season was running out, but I put in my last eight days on the trail of that big buck turkey. I climbed a total of 100 miles, covering a large portion of the 20 square miles where turkeys were known to range. I hunted through the open seasons in Georgia and Tennessee and on the Ocoee Wildlife Management Area. On five occasions, I had opportunities to kill a young gobbler, but I passed them up. One gobbler had a raspy voice that I thought belonged to the old bird, but when he walked around the end of a log, 50 feet away, I saw that his beard was no longer than my index finger.

I was obsessed with finding that big gobbler. He had my tag on him and I wanted him more than any trophy I’d ever brought home.

This grizzled mountaineer had come down the trail as softly as a forest cat. After the usual greetings, he showed me his call and I clucked my own. He listened to the notes of my box, then nodded.

“These gobblers around here sure like that Southern accent,” he said.

During my hunt for the long-bearded one, I learned that killing a large wild gobbler is the greatest challenge in hunting. It doesn’t take the courage needed to face a charging grizzly or the stamina necessary to climb for a mountain goat or trophy ram. But nothing requires more woodsmanship, patience, and know-how than gobbler hunting.

On only one other occasion that spring did I think I was near the grandpa gobbler. It was a couple of miles from where I’d first seen him. He was on the Georgia side, in the last day of the Georgia open season. I was traveling a long “lead” (local word for a main ridge) just after daylight. When I paused on the slope to call, he answered. I made a detour of more than a mile to the ridge above him, but before I could get into position, crows spotted the tom. They were really working him over.

I crept downhill as close as I dared get to the melee and set up my business. For more than an hour we maneuvered around on that point of ridge. Finally, the crows, or something I said with my cedar box, spooked him. The gobbler turned away, crossed a shallow cove to the thick laurel on the next ridge. He was traveling too fast for me to get above him. But where he had paused to scratch in the soft earth, I found his tracks, and they were enormous. I’m sure it was the big bird.

During the winter, I learned that this gobbler had quite a reputation in both the Cohutta Mountains and around Ocoee. Several local sportsmen had their eye on him, and one or two had devoted most of their spring gunning hours to the bird. So I approached another April season with the growing apprehension that one of those mountain men might get to the gobbler before I did.

This foreboding grew acute when I had to miss the first three days of the open season. My only consolation was that spring came later than usual, and those first legal days were rainy and cold, which might somewhat dampen the ardor between toms and hens, normally in full blossom at this time of year.

On the morning of the fourth day, I was in the woods half an hour before daylight. The brown carpet of leaves was white with frost and a cold blanket of air lay across the hills.

With me in the woods were my wife Kayte and Phil Stone, a Georgia businessman and one of my regular hunting partners. Since turkey hunting isn’t a task for three people, Phil Stone decided to hunt alone down a logging road that skirted the valley. Kayte stayed with me.

As the first light of dawn turned the woods from black to gray, a ruffed grouse darted across the road in front of us. Farther down the valley, we flushed two more of the colorful birds out of a branch bottom. The dawn was bright and cold when we climbed the point of a long ridge overlooking the valley. From this spot, we could hear if a turkey called from any of half a dozen ridges sloping away from the massive range around Big Frog. We settled down and waited until the forest creatures began to move again.

I gave the low, plaintive notes of a hen on my box. After a few minutes with no answer, I called louder. A quarter of an hour later, I rattled the box with the throaty call of a gobbler. All this produced no results, except for the raucous crow and a woodpecker’s drumming on a hollow stub.

Kayte and I climbed over the ridge and repeated our performance. The sun illuminated the tops of the hills around us, warming our half-numbed hands and cheeks.

We moved from one ridge to another but didn’t hear anything that sounded like a turkey. At 8:30 a.m., we returned to where we met Phil Stone, who also had an unproductive morning.

We decided that with the delayed season, the birds were not yet vocal. I felt relieved since it meant that my big gobbler was safe and that I might have another chance at him.

“Just so we can say we gave this hunt a last-gasp effort,” I suggested, “let’s try one more call before we go back to the cabin.”

I walked out to the edge of the road, clucked a couple of times, gave the low, wailing notes of a hen, and listened. To complete the routine, I rattled my box. I immediately heard an answer from the next ridge, the sonorous gobble of a turkey. Phil and I looked at each other, seeking confirmation that we weren’t imagining it.

“Stand here a few minutes,” I whispered. “Let’s see which direction he’s headed.”

When the gobbler gobbled again, he was further down the ridge. That was enough for me. My partners agreed that I could move faster and get ahead of the gobbler if I went alone, and that I might have a better chance of seeing him to verify if he was the one we wanted.

I climbed the slope quickly. At the spot where I hoped to intercept the gobbler, I zipped up my camouflage suit and sat down at the base of a large tree.

I wasn’t sure whether it was my call that the tom answered, but he gobbled again shortly after I gave him soft, gentle notes of a hen on my slate-type call. Minutes later, a younger gobbler gobbled off to my left.

The smaller tom was definitely coming to me, but the larger turkey walked off his ridge, crossed a branch in the hollow, and climbed a cove. He wasn’t coming directly to me, but at an angle, as if he wanted to completely circle the area where he had heard the last note of a hen. He wasn’t more than 20 yards away.

He took two steps and I could see more of his head, but not his beard or size. He put down his head to peck at something on the forest floor. I raised my gun quickly. Unfortunately, a twig that had flipped onto my gun barrel obstructed my line of sight. The bird continued to walk, growing taller under the shoulder of the hill, and I moved the barrel slowly to keep it in line with his head.

By luck, the twig dislodged when the gobbler walked behind a tree. When he stepped out, the sights were on his head.

My 12-gauge Winchester pump gun was loaded with No. 6 shot. Some hunters prefer larger shot, like No. 2’s, but I find that No. 6 allows me to hit the vital parts of the bird’s head and neck more accurately. Most shots in this type of hunting are at the bird’s head and neck while he’s on the ground. I often back up the first load of No. 6 with No. 4 and then No. 2 loads to increase the chances of hitting a turkey that flies or runs after the first shot.

In a patch of sunlight, he stood for five seconds with his head up, as huge as I remembered him from the previous spring. The sunlight on his feathers made them ripple in a display of copper, green, and gold. I caught my breath at the spectacle. Then I saw his long, heavy beard and knew without a doubt that he was the old patriarch I had dreamed about all winter.

It was almost sacrilegious to shatter that magnificent moment with a shot, but the instincts developed from a lifetime of hunting compelled me to fire the gun. It was a clean, one-shot kill.

Then all the excitement of the past two hours hit me, and my hands shook as I tried to unstrap the camera from my shoulder. When I lifted the bird and saw how far I had to lift his feet for his head to clear the ground, I got the shakes again.

The bird weighed 25½ pounds on the rusty old camp scales. It was the largest mountain gobbler I had seen and one of the biggest turkeys I had ever killed. Phil examined the scales and said, “There just ain’t no telling what this critter would have weighed if those scales weren’t so rusty.”

The actual weight of the gobbler didn’t matter much at that moment. He had given me my finest hour in the turkey woods.

TURKEY CALLS

Of all the devices used to call turkeys, I have the most faith in the two shown here. First is the box type, made of cedar. The lid of the box has a pivot screw at one end. Calls are made by scraping the cedar lid across the top of one side or the other of the box. Chalk or rosin improves the tone. When the turkey is close, I switch to the second caller, a thin piece of slate with a pencil-thick piece of charred cedar protruding. Friction between the charred cedar and slate produces the call of a hen turkey.

This story, “A Bearded Legend,” originally ran in the March 1962 issue of Outdoor Life.

This story, “A Bearded Legend,” originally ran in the March 1962 issue of Outdoor Life.