The first night I was in the shack out behind the shack in which the rancher and his family lived was kind of strange.
The little house sprawled out in many different directions and its design and features were such that I couldn’t put an age to the dwelling. It stood in a grove of apricot trees and with a pretty rose bush outside the door, eaten nearly to pieces as high as the goats could reach.
The floor seemed sturdy enough and there was running water, but then it dared to be different and featured such oddities like no screens or curtains on the windows, of all things—pocket doors—and full cable TV. The holes in the walls left me wondering if the animals crept in at night or if they had once held someone as a prisoner out there and they had tried to dig their way out with their bare hands.
A decorative plate of
U.S.
presidents on the wall made some kind of statement. It stopped at Lyndon Johnson.
The rancher and his ten-year-old son came and sat a spell. Like, about an hour and a half too long.
Turkey
hunters, we get up EARLY you see. In my best Southern belle fashion, I was mentally running down a checklist for the next morning’s hunt while smiling and nodding as the rancher talked and talked and talked some more. LOL.
The list grew and grew as the rancher talked and talked: Set alarm clock for 4:30 am, load coffee maker, wash blasted windshield, pack turkey vest, camera, cell phone, insect repellant, shotgun shells, extra mask and gloves, chalk for box call, mouth calls, owl call, granola bars and bottled water.
At last, the rancher and his little boy excused themselves for the night. Or did they? As I was changing into my pajamas, maybe it was Lyndon Johnson’s eyes following me around the room or maybe someone was watching me.
There were no locks on any of the doors. Of course the man had boasted, “We never have to lock our doors out here.” I began to get the creeps. I went into the bedroom I’d selected, shut the pocket door and propped my shotgun up in the corner.
The next morning found me scrubbing the windshield with water from a tea pitcher at
5:00 am
. Thankfully, I found my way back to the tract I was to be hunting, negotiated the gates without letting any sheep escape and found the place I wanted to park.
I ended up positively surrounded by turkeys. It seemed the closest gobbling bird was no more than 60 yards away and that there was maybe 15 or so birds gobbling spread around me over roughly 100 acres of scrub.
That morning I chased turkeys around and around and around two little hills and never saw the first bird. He’d gobble and gobble and gobble on the west side of the knob. I’d creep around there only to have him gobble back at the east side. When the gobbling activity got as hot and heavy as it was going to get, a huge flock of sheep came streaming down the fence line, making so much noise I could barely hear myself think.
And that was my best hunt. Things seriously went downhill from there. Occasionally I’d have a turkey give a drive-by gobble or a couple of courtesy gobbles.
In feeding the turkeys to keep them in the area, the rancher had created Pavlov’s turkeys. They went from one feed pile to another without much thought to my quality turkey calling.
All ranches in
Texas
feed game. Yet true to my word, I refused to hunt over the baited areas. I’d killed turkeys in
Texas
before with skilled woodsman ship and good calling. I thought I could do it again, but things were beginning to look seriously bleak.
In desperation, I’d asked the rancher to suit up and go out with me to maybe help me double-team a bird. Fortunately, my friend Patsy arrived and at least added levity to the sorry hunting.
She came with a camera and a sketchpad and I put her in the hunting blind over piles of birdseed that the rancher put out. At first, she was terrified of cows. The kept sticking their heads into the blind with her, trying to sniff her and lick her. They were also rubbing themselves up against an already worn and flimsy blind and she was (rightly) concerned that they might turn it over.
The last afternoon we were at the ranch, we walked together to her blind. She was to my left and was chattering away about something.
I heard the snake rattle before I saw it right under her left foot. I jumped about three feet off the ground and hollered, “SNAKE!”
Simultaneously I threw my shotgun on the ground and started digging into my turkey vest for my camera. Patsy stood there uncharacteristically silent while I went racing into the cactus and scrub after the small
Western Diamondback
, calling, “Hold still, I want to take your picture!”
Alas, it disappeared into the underbrush before I could take a photo, and I became the second Holmes in history to have saved Patsy from a venomous reptile.
I feel compelled to say a few words about Patsy. Though she is not from Laurens, she has visited here often. A native Louisianan, she lives in the
Midwest
. A non-hunter, Patsy is nonetheless open to new and tremendously varied experiences. A student of life, she has a sneaky-quick wit and is so easy to talk to that no one is a stranger to her past the first couple of sentences.
We had somewhat of an agenda besides going on sorry turkey hunts. We both adore music and had a map in our heads of the places we wanted to go and the things we wanted to see. It was wildflower season. We were near the Hill Country and planned a trip to see a
Stonehenge
replica in Hunt,
Texas
. Near places like
Austin
and
San Antonio
, we wanted to branch out and see a few things from contemporary country and rock music.
I’m a Robert Earl Keen fan and wanted to drive the “hard
Amarillo
highway” and see places like Bandera. We wanted to go to a “shack outside LaGrange” and last but surely not least,
Luchenbach
,
Texas
was calling our names...
