Usually this happens sometime during the NFL Playoffs for me. Somebody gets caught in a ridiculous blow-out and I get bored watching the slaughter and go to turn off the set. An unplayed DVD catches my eye, or I go outside to catch some air and instead of looking at all the dead leaves, I focus on the tight little buds on the empty branches. Any way it goes, it does not take long for the calls to come out. I start catching up on the turkey websites I’ve been ducking for months. I go trolling through the stack of unread magazines. It may be January. There may be snow on the ground, but I’m now looking at the 10-day forecast to see when I can angle a trip back down to camp. That may be 2 months away, but I’m looking.

It happened differently this year. For one thing, I’m still out of work, and I have a lot less of other stuff on my mind. Once I had the deer rifles put away, I had a lot more time to dream, and a lot less to keep me from watching sunrises. For another thing, there were a lot more bargains out there after Christmas, and I just could not keep myself out of Bass-Pro– even if it was just to window shop. I held up long enough to get out of the store, but later I found a rain jacket on the website in the Closeout Section and that and a Dead Coyote choke tube are on their way to me. Heirloom’s Brian Warner tells me it’s awesome with the #4 Federals we both shoot, and I haven’t tried a new choke tube in over 12 years.

But that isn’t what really drives it all. It wasn’t even the article in the KY Afield Magazine that says the poults got their bellies filled on cicadas this year and more have survived than ever before, and it could be Jake City come Spring if the Winter isn’t too bad.

No, it wasn’t that. I think what got me was the picture that KYHillChick had me get her blown up. We went really easy on Christmas this year– figuring we could snag some cheap stuff after it all went on sale. She got me some T-Shirts and some jeans. I got her some books, a CD and a photo poster of some turkeys in the mist. That was the day Angus and I were all set to go out scouting a couple of years ago, and I looked out the back window just as the fog was lifting and there were 50 turkeys– turkeys as far as the eye could see. Every pasture was crawling with gobblers. Even the neighbors ridges had flocks. We had turkey Nirvana. We had 360-degree gobbling and hens scratching in the yard. We were trapped for over an hour, and for all the frames I snapped, only a few really came out. This one was the best. Something about that picture set me off. It took a few days of looking at it, but there was something about the sunrise this morning– something about the way the smoke came off the neighbor’s chimney and the way the ice hung in the air– it just did it. I tipped over from being a long-faced deer hunter to a gobbler assassin.