MAY-C-9
AN UNUSUAL
COLD WET MAY MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND LEADS TO A VISIT TO THE SCHAEFER’S NEW HOME
IN TRAPPE MARYLAND,
AND PRE-DAWN “COLD TURKEY” HUNTS
May 22—26,
2003
I drive
through the DC traffic to get to Trappe, MD which is in Talbot County of which
Easton is the “seat.” To be precise,
their home is at TRAP = 38* 42.00N, and 076* 01.15W. This is oriented to their rented townhouse in Market Square in
Cambridge, only a block in each direction from the Dorchester County Hospital
and the office as CRAI +9.46 miles on bearing 208*.
In the
snows of early March, I had driven by their Wellington Drive house on 3 ˝ acres
when I had come out to see the SCI pre-fundraiser dinner. Now they have been moved in two weeks, and
are getting to some of the details which they are trying to modify, such as
extra storage space. The house is very
high ceilinged and spacious, but has less space than the larger house they had
in South Carolina. They have many of
the fixtures and appliances I have just been selecting from catalogs for the
renovation of Derwood, a project about the same size and cost of their new
house on a 3 ˝ acre tract with two ponds and a lot of grass. Craig just got a new fancy riding lawn
mower, while the neighbors have the standard lawn mowers and take about three
days to mow their similar size lawns, this new $5 K machine can do it all in an
hour and a half.
I liked the
house, particularly the large windows overlooking the green space and
ponds. They have finally got their
stuff out of storage after over a year, and I may have to start understanding
what that process is like. It looks
very much like it is a showcase house and is only six months old so it has all
the newest technology like an internal vacuum system for cleaning the
house. I told them about some of the
interior design features of the newly modified renovation plans for Derwood,
and also told Craig about the new truck.
It seems that now that I know the name and brand, I see a lot of these
Ram 2500 trucks out here on the Eastern Shore with a Dodge dealer on Route 50
who has mostly trucks.
We had a
dinner at home to be savored for our early turn in to get out even
earlier. Craig had a working day on
Friday but we could start out at least in the cold wet dawn and see what we
could see along the 1,000 acres of Sage Baker’s “Woodlands Sporting Clays” farm
in Vienna of Dorchester County. Sage
had gone with us to Cumberland and had reported turkeys on there very large
farm which is carefully manicured green wheat fields to be recropped in
soybeans later next month. It looks
like Eastern Shore marshy habitat that has been drained as much as it is
possible to produce a sterile monoculture of one kind of food grass—a
high-yield hybrid wheat now graining.
It was cold
and drizzling as we arrived before dawn and woke up David Schaefer visiting
from Towson where he says he is going to go about getting a job, now having as
many credits at Towson State to be called a sophomore. Sage had tried Community College but it was
not for him, as he works the big farm machinery and keeps it repaired to
harvest huge yields of grain and beans on his father’s very large
operations. We marched off after driving
the repair van out into the sodden fields where it got stuck. I was placed in a deer stand from which I could
see a large sweep of wheat, which must be better in deer season after cutover
bean fields are in the place of this green tall grass-looking lawn of no
variability except where “set asides” are flooded with deep puddles. I crossed a deeply flooded drainage ditch to
get into the stand, and saw that this has been a very unusual late May rainy
season. I sat in the cold dawn with mosquitoes
buzzing around my ears with the turkey camouflage face net saving me from
multiple bites. I saw---nothing.
The others
had seen deer, and Sage saw a hen turkey on a nest of nine eggs. He was worried about the hatch of the poults
saying that if we saw a fox to shoot it on sight. We came back home to clean up and dry out our gear. As I stood by the kitchen window overlooking
the pond in the perpetual drizzle, I was scrubbing a melted candy sticky spot
in my bowhunting camouflage pants, since it had been in my attic through the
hottest parts of summer. I looked up
when a flash of wings came past the window.
The mallard drake and duck pair I had seen before had flown off, but a
swoop of wings that had startled me showed an osprey plummeting down to the
pond, and, right on the bank closest to me, about three yards from my eyes, the
raptor hit a catfish about six inches long and was trying to untangle it from
the weeds in the shallows. It finally
freed the wriggling fish and took off with the fish in its talons—to perch in a
tree with its catch. Remember that our
farewell sendoff from Mfuwe Lodge at Buffalo Chalet was the sight of an African
Fish Eagle swooping down and catching a barbell, and carrying it off to a tree
adjacent to the deck of our Buffalo Chalet.
Magnificent vignettes from both very separate worlds, but using exactly
the same strategies to stay alive in each ecosystem!
I started
my principle project for the time of the weekend when Craig was busy seeing patients
or operating and I sorted all the photo albums I had taken along and began
labeling all of the Album IV I finished out here through the long runs of the
Spring and just before the start of the African trips, which are organized into
two succeeding albums, Malawi in Album V and Zambia in Album VI. We went out to dinner at the Washington Pub
in Easton on Friday night and came home to turn in early for another attempt at
an early morning start on the last day of the Maryland spring turkey season.
SURPRISE!
AFTER A DULL
MORNING START, I WAS STARTLED TO SPOT
THE ONLY
TURKEYOF MY EASTERN SHORE VISIT—
AND IN A
MILLISECOND REFLEX MOVE,
I HAVE SCORED!
This morning may have started off even less promising than the previous
day, since Sage elected not to go with us (he was in mourning for the death of
his cat the previous night.) Craig and
I rode out on the Honda 4WD all-terrain vehicle until we came to the dense wet wheat
field ahead of us, and we got out and walked through the dark to get to the
edge of a marsh. I tried to sit down
under an overhanging set of branches, and looked up under the leaves to see a
huge biomass of mosquitoes hiding under the leaves, most of which tried to come
to visit me around my ears. Were it not
for the rain cape and the headnet, they might have carried me off. But, I moved for another reason. I looked as the light became clearer in the
still overcast grey day, and realized I was sitting in a patch of poison ivy
which had crawled up the tree I was using for cover. The rain cape helped that as well as I tried sitting on the clay
and mud of an overturned trees roots, but the clay kept collapsing beneath me. Craig was somewhere to my left, and I had
seen a large fallen tree on the dawn earlier arrival, so I walked over to it
and climbed up on the large log of this trunk which was over a boggy pond. I had a small “window” through the overgrown
roots to my left and a large sweep of—just more endless green wheat field ahead
of me, a rather sterile looking habitat.
I thought of just lying down on the log and catching a nap, but, I considered that this was hunting, and even
if things looked bleak and there was no evidence of or promise to be seeing the
single game animal that can be hunted at this season, I should at least go through
the motions of the hunt.
I pulled out the Quaker Boy Little Single Sider Box Call, (proud product
of New Orchard, NY) and made the most beseeching lusty hen turkey calls I could
muster, without alarming any birds with the “Cut Cut “ that is their alarm
call. A beautiful bluebird landed on
the log next to me, so I thought I was somewhat successful even if not with the
right species. To get a bit ahead of my
story, I should add that I later saw a very pretty male Baltimore Oriole
flitting in to perch above me while sitting watching for what I had come to
see—much bigger birds. I put my shotgun
down on the log, equipped with it Improved Cylinder barrel rather than its
better for this purpose long full choke barrel, which I called my “goose gun”
although it would do equally well with turkey.
I had put in Number 4 size lead shot, and I know that for turkeys a bit
smaller size shot should be used with a hold on the head to get the densest
pattern one can on a head shot. All
this I knew, but I was not that serious about seeing a turkey, since there was
no evidence of one around and I was mainly going through the motions of doing
the best I could for the sake of celebrating the last day of Maryland’s hunting
season.
I clucked a few more times, and looked left. There was a movement in the green tall wheat, which I could
hardly see through, but I put down the caller and picked up the shotgun. That is how it happened as I was standing on
the log with shotgun at the ready when the briefest glimpse of a turkey, mostly
his head alone showing above the wheat, popped up as he was running toward the
thick marsh to my left and 45 yards out.
Purely by reflex, I swung up and looked through the “window” I had
through the upturned roots, and snapped a shot just as his head had appeared
before ducking down out of sight in the thick cover.
I knew that Craig would have heard the shot at 8:25 AM and wondering what
I was doing without so much as a feather of any kind to be seen in this agricultural
monoculture in front of us and this impenetrable marsh thicket behind us. I had felt good about this entirely
reflexive instantaneous action which had followed, at least, my best efforts at
hen calling, if not caused by it. So, I
waited five minutes, and then climbed don from the log, picking up the spent
shell casing as I went, and walked over to the area of the tall wheat through
which I could not see from where I had been sitting. I walked quite a ways before I saw what I had expected to
find. A big bronze bird was weakly
flapping its wings in a post-mortem flutter, with the pattern of the number
four bird shot having caught it right in the head.
I picked up
the surprisingly heavy bird and carried it back to the log where it fanned out
over the tree trunk and I took a self-timer photo. I then sat back with my box caller and clucked a few more times,
just to see if this was a fluke—which it seemed to have been, but I am glad I
was not nodding off or doing something else, and had full camo and face mask in
place—largely for protection from the mosquitoes and occasional rain. Soon I saw Craig coming through he wheat, looking
from one end of the log where I stood to the other, where the big turkey was
fanned out over the trunk—and he gave a thumbs up.
We loaded
the turkey and us on the Honda 4-wheeler, and drove back to show Sage the first
turkey he had ever seen close up. A
couple of other folk came over from the sporting clay range and announced that
this was the first time they had ever seen or been close to a wild turkey. It had the bronze coloration and broad tail
with a notch on either side of a Jake—a young male bird, the kind that old
gobblers give a threatening chase to when they try to come around like
teenagers hanging out around fertile hens to see or be a part of the
action. We packaged the bird up and
will share the feast with Bill Bair, Craig’s partner who has never had the
treat of 1) a wild turkey “America’s Bird; 2) a FRESH turkey, one that had
never seen the inside of a freezer or a refrigerator; and 3) a turkey to be
injected and then prepared intact in the turkey fryer—all of which we will
share in this treat tomorrow at a dinner together by the two partner surgeons
(and the only surgeons in Dorchester County or its hospital) and their visiting professor of surgery cum
turkey hunter.
I have
worked further on the photo albums and have also packed away some hunting
equipment and pulled out others for the Alaska Moose Hunt in September for
which Craig and I are trying to work out plans now to DRIVE there. It would be a good idea to take either his
Sierra GMC all-wheel drive pickup truck (about which Tim Cahill wrote in the
book I had been reading to Africa and back “Road Fever” about the hilarious
adventures of two guys who drove this same vehicle on its introductory year
from Tierra Del Fuego at the tip of South America to the North Slope of Alaska
of the North American continent to set the Guinness Book of Records on a 28 day
transit of both American continents) or we can fly to Iowa to save a driving
day and will have now another pickup truck—a Dodge Ram 2500 Diesel to drive up
to Alaska and back to MD. However we
start, we should surely have a truck to drive, since we will be coming back
with essentially four sides of beef—two moose worth of venison—so that we
should have the capacity to carry a lot.
The time consideration is important since Craig will have to take as
little time off work as possible, and we will need to see if this precludes my
attending the Halsted Meeting in Boston for which I had already submitted an
abstract for the September 3—6, the very same meeting at the same hotel and
with the same host institution –Andy Warshaw of Harvard—to which I was headed
on the September 11 attack on America, which canceled the meeting.
Craig and Carol are at her high school graduation reunion tonight for
which she has got herself all gussied up to show off her “trophy husband.” I can use that term for Craig and apply it
to myself with the same humor, since I can hardly believe anyone would think I
am serious about this no-bargain pair of camo-clad turkey hunters on their way
to a moose hunt in their comparison of their pickup trucks.
I will continue to do the little fussy bookwork I would probably not get
done at home where serious packing has got to be done with a lot of sorting in
the next month—until we have a fresh turkey dinner at the new manse of Chez Schaefer
of Trappe, MD hosted by two active members of the Chesapeake Chapter of the
Safari Club International.