Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/496918
d i t o r ' s J o u r n a l Russ Lumpkin E S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 9 members farmed or forested or in some other way worked the land. The Good News Man (my dad's CB handle at the time) got invited to a lot of dove shoots. He had open invitations all around to hunt quail and deer and bring his boys. In addition, our circuit of farm ponds extended to neighboring counties. Growing up though, I never hunted turkeys. There just weren't any around. Eventually, college and graduate school kept me busy, and by the time I began making trips to the woods again, my parents had moved and bobwhite quail had all but disappeared from Jefferson County and most everywhere else in the Southeast. Dove shoots had grown harder to come by, and my family members killed enough deer to provide me protein. I either had nowhere to hunt or little reason to go. What I didn't know is that wild turkeys had returned to the coastal plain of Georgia—including my home county and most everywhere else. Then one morning I heard a turkey gobble and actually felt it— the sound waves hit my face. That's the sound, the feeling that got me back into hunting. G obbling toms filled my early turkey-hunting days. The first tom I killed gobbled incessantly from the roost as I set up jake and hen decoys along the Savannah River. Three soft yelps quieted him just before he leapt from a tree and landed right next to the decoys and within ten yards of me and a couple friends who had tagged along. His beard stretched more than 13 inches. The following year I hunted the far southwestern corner of Virginia with friends. We heard some gobbling but had no close calls for two days. As my time wound down, Curtis and I hiked to the top of a tall hill and issued wild cackling on our slates. A tom responded, and we moved toward it—it moved toward us. We stopped on a steep ridge, called again, and it gobbled a lot closer than expected. I put a stand of bushes between the bird and me and bellycrawled downhill—the gobbler kept gobbling and moving uphill. Curtis helped mask the sound of my movements by cutting on the slate. When I raised the gun, I saw no part of the bird except its red-and-white head. He had spurs longer than 1½ inches. And one cold week in the Black I n 2014 The New York Times published an article, "Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the US?" The piece applied six criteria— "education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor's degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy, and obesity"—to the nation's counties in an effort to find the answer. The ten counties that earned the dubious distinction of being the hardest places to live included Jefferson County, Georgia. That's where I grew up. That's where I shot doves and quail for the first time. My brothers did too. My brothers killed their first deer there. I did too. My father served as pastor at a small church in Jefferson County in the mid- to late 1970s. Most of the Mike Gaddis The subtleties often mean the most. Wild turkeys have returned to the Coastal Plain of Georgia. The kind goodness never went away.