Uncle Gene’s one good eye always glistened when he told me stories about his outdoor exploits. His adventures seemed rare to me when compared with what we enjoy today because I envisioned him working long hours at the sawmill where he lost one of his tiny dark brown eyes to an errant splinter. So I, around the age of puberty, listened wide-eyed when he spoke, which was not often enough.
The story that impressed me most was about the day when he stroked an old cedar box caller and enticed a stately turkey gobbler to come within range of his 16 gauge single shot Iver Johnson. In reality, I only recall less that two dozen of his words about that day in Clarke County near Bucatunna Creek. But it only took a few words for a youngster with an active imagination and enamored with the outdoors to fill in his story with the details that set the scene.
I still see the east side of a leafy ridge, the brown colors of winter not yet splashed with the budding foliage of spring. The great bird’s approach is oddly from slightly above Uncle Gene and its footfalls are loud in the dry leaves. There are low bushes, huckleberry mainly, on most of the hillside and Uncle Gene is peering under them where their limbs are few and he can see more clearly. This part I recall the old man verifying.
He wore tan brogans and a light gray fedora. Yes, I never saw him in any other kind of hat so he must have been wearing a fedora, probably one soiled and shapeless. The creators of camouflage clothing for hunters had not yet been born.
In my mind, his weathered hands, speckled with the brown spots of aging, gripped the old shotgun and the gray-white hair sifted softly below the band of the old fedora, belying the browned but bald top of his head beneath the hat. Here is where my visualization erred. My young mind could not subtract 40 years from the life of Uncle Gene and picture a young man on that ridge with the monarch of the Mississippi hills before the Great Depression. Besides, the story is better for me with the aging version of the man dueling the old gobbler.
“I could see his pink legs coming down the ridge straight to me,” I remember him saying. I too can see this very clearly and the scene is permanently etched in my memory.
I don’t recall a thing about the shot. Maybe he didn’t even tell me about it. Or if he did, maybe there wasn’t enough room in my mental recorder at that moment when I was taking it all in. It doesn’t matter anyway. He called the old bird to gun and that was enough. He had bagged a giant gobbler back when there were few around and just seeing a track was enough to make a hunter’s day.
The years went by and my addiction to life in the woods grew. Uncle Gene’s story stayed entrenched in my memory. One day I found myself in speech class at Meridian Junior College (dated name) taught by Mr. James Durham. Speech was an elective I could later transfer to Mississippi State. Mr. Durham had notified us that we must write and deliver a speech.
Being quite an underachiever in school at the time, I couldn’t think of anything profound to write and speak about. So luckily, as it turned out, I decided to write about my conceptualization of Uncle Gene’s gobbler story and, needing more words, I added my images of Uncle Gene’s afterlife.
I am sure my speech was not memorable. But Mr. Durham, with a few strokes of his pen on my paper, praised the story, gave me an A and suggested I send the story to Readers’ Digest. I never did, but he was the first teacher to give me hope that a latent dream of mine just might be realized one day. You see, an A grade was only seen around my house on work accomplished by my two brothers and sister. I was the oldest and the “slowest” of the four of us. My mother saved the paper and I still have it with Mr. Durham’s note intact.
It wasn’t much of a speech I am certain, but what James Durham did for me was to give me a forum to express what I loved – writing stories about things in the outdoors, like turkey hunting. With this start, I found my way to an endeavor that challenges me and brings much satisfaction to this day. My two most cherished writing awards were for gobbler stories.
(Note: Otha Barham’s book of turkey hunting stories is available by contacting him. His contact information is found on this page.)