By Mike Fitzgerald, Contributor at Wild Nexus

At first there was a huffing, then silence while I sat alone on opening day with my back against a hemlock in the dark, having situated myself about three hundred yards from where I knew a couple of Toms to be roosting from the evening before, when I had watched as they both flew into the oak without making so much as a sound. 

The morning was as still as you can figure a morning to be, and though the birds were right there across the pasture, the odds were about 50/50 that they would come toward my direction. But then again, legal light was still a half hour away, and as far as I knew, I wasn’t the only one within the vicinity of these birds. 

Listening intently and slowly moving my shotgun so that it could be pointed toward where the sound had come from, I knew from past experience that if it was a bear, the chances of it making any other noise than it already had were slim. Bears don’t get old by being loud and dumb, and there had been plenty of signs to indicate that at least one had been around the area very recently, but despite it all, I never figured on running into the critter that may or may not have made it. 

Then, right in front of me, less than fifteen yards away, is a black bear. Facing the west and the impenetrable darkness, there’s enough moonlight left to allow the outline of the animal to be visible. A black mass with its head down, sniffing and swaying slowly, picking at the cow patties from the year prior, slurping up the bugs hidden on the underside. 

It must know that I’m here as it passes downwind of me, but acts, or is, completely oblivious. In no time at all, the bear has passed by and continues toward the cedar rail fence, heading in the direction of the roosting tree and my intended targets for the morning before vanishing into what is left of the night. 

You might have guessed about all the things that may have, or may not have, gone through my head. For a couple of moments, I stopped breathing in the hopes that maybe it would silence any extra noise that my body was making, since habitually being that close to a black bear isn’t a normal act for the everyday Joe. 

It wasn’t long after that when the sky behind me started to get some semblance of daylight around the lower fringes, and those turkeys began to go nuts from their roost. Though the space between them and me was wide open, with no hope of concealment if a hunter tried to get a little closer, I wasn’t able to see them as they left the roost and landed on the ground not too far from where I’d picked wild leeks the afternoon prior. 

In a moment like that, when you’re just about to really try to get the attention of a horned-up turkey with some love squeaks from the old pot call, there’s an innate anticipation that I equate to being the poor hunter’s elk hunt for those who can’t hunt elk. The game, in a sense, is very similar because there’s a lot of call and response in a romantic game of cat and mouse, and believe me, there’s no need to church up the romance in this relationship between hunter and game. It all falls into place naturally, like the changing of the seasons, where there’s nothing more to be wanted because everything that we need will come in due course. 

Those turkeys were going nuts with the customary shock gobbling. Both of them are somewhere back inside the far tree line that I can’t get to for a couple of different reasons. As mentioned before, it’s wide open between where they are and where I am, and the possibility of losing them if I try to backtrack through the woods to circle back on them. 

The other problem is that from where I was sitting, I could see the bear. It was working up along the tractor trail between where those Toms are heading and where I need to be, chomping on grass, oblivious and much smaller than I had made it out to be originally. 

So, with nothing else to do, I hang there for a bit and watch how the whole thing unfolds. After all, I wasn’t in any particular hurry to get up anyway.