Investitures
The trouble with turkey hunting successes is that it is necessary to accept the unsupported word of the winner of the match as to what the newly departed turkey was doing when it was shot.
Turkeys that have been shot while busily scratching in chufa patches, or just happened to be the wrong place at the right time, all have one identical characteristic. They all look exactly the same when they are deposited on the camp house steps or are lying in the back of pickup trucks for the post-hunt inspection. You can look at the turkey, but you have to listen to the narration.
A great many of the success stories told at such receptions feature turkeys that were gobbling at the extreme edge of audibility. Turkeys to whom the approach march took on most of the difficulties and many of the characteristics of Stanley finding Livingstone in the jungles of darkest Africa. Turkeys that were enticed to cross impassible swamps, swim raging torrents thick with rapids and encouraged to ignore entire troops of girl turkeys recently red shirted from The Miss America Pageant.
The process of investiture, among turkey hunters, comes only after a lengthy apprenticeship has been served and then after sufficient time has passed for those who will invest the candidate in the robes of the order to be satisfied as to his probity. No claim to be considered complete and exclusive, a state of creditability exists when it exhibits, among other things, the following attributes:
Turkeys as reported by the candidate should conduct themselves in normal, conventional modes and be governed by the usual rules of turkey behavior. This does not imply that turkeys cannot do strange things or be expected to follow rigid behavior patterns, but their actions have to be within reasonable norms.
The candidate for investiture must admit to being honestly and soundly defeated more times than he came out on top.
The candidate must not be a hearer. A hearer is defined as a man, who, when you and he are in range of each other, hears no more than you do. When he goes alone, a turkey answers every time he owls, or yelps, and only the most infernal bad luck, generally caused by dogs, other hunters, herds of deer, or the presence of panthers, kept him from killing the turkey in question. Nobody since William Bartram in northeast Florida in 1775 hears as many turkeys in a month as the normal hearer listens to on every trip.
Finally, the candidate must exhibit at least a modicum of generosity. He must be observed giving away gobbles. Not the location of turkeys which he has struggled with unsuccessfully for several days, but turkeys that he has just heard gobble for the first time and then offers the location to a less experienced hunter and strikes off into unknown territory himself. He does so deliberately, in order to leave the other man the better chance.
And finally, finally, the story should not change.