Dr. Bob Nelson of Sioux Falls is an octagenarian plus three, a man who once bought a fancy side-by-side 28 gauge shotgun for a high five figures because he thought hepatitis was going to kill him. That gun "kept me alive," said the crusty retired surgeon, who has been accused by more than one hunting companion as leaning toward the skinflint side of things, and it also tells you something about him.
Truth be known, everything about Dr.Bob is addictive, especially his love for “anything with feathers.” Come September, he'll climb hills no senior citizen should tackle, but that’s where the prairie grouse are at, so it goes with the territory. And when late October rolls around, he spends his days on an Eastern South Dakota farm in which he is part-owner, to hunt pheasants until the final day of the season.
And then he starts to whine.
The retired surgeon always whines when the pheasant season closes, saying he always goes into a depression during the winter, but those of us who know him realize he is merely experiencing withdrawal. And no one I know, no one, whines like my friend, Dr. Bob.
Like last fall when he was recovering from shoulder surgery and couldn't tote his side-by-side.
That caused the whine, something Dr. Bob does in entire paragraphs devoid of periods, commas or pauses. It went something like this:
"All that crap you write about where it's all about the dogs and watching them and the actual shooting is anti-climactic is just that it's crap and I don't want to ever go through another hunting season like that even if it means shooting with one arm."
Then he pauses for air before starting again.
Dr. Bob has three dogs, a pair of female Brits; Katie and Kranzy and a big, lovable male called Spud. The dogs do well, largely because they have learned to ignore their Doctor owner and go about the business of finding birds. I remember one hunt several years ago when, had it not been for Spud, we'd have not bagged a single bird. He ran off a couple miles to a sunflower field that was on private land bordering the Fort Pierre National Grasslands, and it wasn't hard to follow his progress because wherever he went in that field, grouse flushed well ahead of him. Fortunately they landed in tall grass ahead of us where they were fairly easy pickings.
And we thought Spud was out of control. Fact is, he knew what he was doing all the time. And though some might say that the fact things worked out well was a coincidence, to them I say, “You don’t know Spud.”
But it is now May and Dr. Bob has already had his turkey fix and is now busily engaged in finding secret caches of the succulent and elusive morel mushroom. Though we've become good friends, the friendship is not strong enough for him to reveal any specific locations for either turkeys or morels. "The Black Hills" or "down by the river" is about as close as he gets.
In the National Football League, players are penalized for taunting, a practice I think should be extended to mushroom hunting. Dr. Bob will either send me a totally obnoxious photo of himself kneeling among obscene numbers of mushrooms, or he'll say something like, "The Judge and I found four coolers full down by the river today."
The "Judge" is the Honorable Larry Piersol, a US Federal Judge in Sioux Falls who also shares a passion for birds and Brits. But the Judge can restrain himself. The doctor can't, and I think that's why he hates the winter so much. You see, during the winter, there are no bird hunting seasons in South Dakota.
By late April, he'd have made his 39th spring turkey pilgrimage to South Dakota's Black Hills. At the time I tell this tale, I’ve not heard from him regarding his success or lack of, but I can assure all readers that he might be even more passionate about turkey hunting than he is about hunting of any kind. He's already outlived several of his original turkey hunting pals, including the legendary Frankie Heidelbauer. And by his own admission, Dr. Bob has managed to develop dozens of ways to screw up an incoming Tom, and some of his methods are guaranteed to mess up your hunt, no matter where you go. Along the way, he's also managed to figure what makes Black Hills Merriams gobble, and admits he is not the first to have been captivated by the approach of a lovesick Tom in search of a willing hen.
To understand what drives Dr. Bob to climb pine-covered hills and hoot like an owl at an age when some are trying to remember where the bathroom is, you have to have hunted wild turkeys. Having one season under my belt, I now qualify, even though I am nearly 20 years his junior. “Just a kid,” in his eyes, I have nonetheless realized the thrill of yelping on a slate call, and the near-instant response of a booming gobble. I think about that. You wait a couple minutes and yelp again and when you hear it this time, it's much closer. Then you finally see the bird and it seems to take forever for him to strut in within shotgun range. At this point, the pulse quickens. The wattles turn crimson, his tail fans, feathers puff and he struts in a most seductive manner, or at least what he hopes a hen will perceive as seductive. And as I have written in the past, I’ve seen cowboys do much the same thing near closing time at the Silver Spur bar in Fort Pierre. Meanwhile, your blood pressure rises to dangerous levels. If you are to pick the perfect moment to meet your maker, this snapshot in time qualifies. When the bird finally moves within 20 yards or so, the show ends with the pull of a trigger, and you realize what a small part of the hunt the final act actually is.
To say I've been afflicted with the fever is understatement, because since February, I have pricing specially made turkey guns, loads, a vest with a padded seat that drops down where you need it most, and have planned trips to a ranch in Nebraska's Sandhills and the Black Hills. I missed the deadline for an application for a South Dakota prairie turkey because I was out teaching walleye fishing at the time, and when I realized what I'd done, wrist-slitting seemed appropriate. Among turkey hunters, that's considered normal behavior.
But consider this true tale about our friend. Dr. Bob once considered performing an emergency tracheotomy with a jackknife on a friend who was so taken by the approach of a gobbler, he swallowed his diaphragm call. When Dr. Bob realized that he had completely swallowed it, he advised his patient to take a few swigs of Exlax and look for it in the morning.
To sit in on a conversation among turkey hunters is to hear talk of slate calls, the box or the diaphragm. Then the talk shifts to tight patterns, whether sixes are better than fours and do you really need a magnum load to hit a turkey in the head and neck? And then come the stories of legendary hunts, ghost gobblers and of hunters giving up on their spot only to stand and flush a Tom that came in silently from the rear.
So after hearing Dr. Bob’s annual tales of his "Custer turkey trot," I finally bagged my first bird along the White River in Lyman County. That day fell during the third week of April, a time my other turkey hunting friend, Wickerbill, says is prime time on the prairie. I couldn't wait to tell Bob, but I might as well have saved my breath.
"You aren't hunting wild turkeys on the prairie," he snarled. "You hunt wild turkeys in the Black Hills, and those birds don't have regular contact with human beings and when they do, it's nearly always a violent encounter. I want to thank all those who keep Hills turkeys wild." Though I'm not sure, I think he is referring to poachers.
Which reminds me of another friend, also a legend in his own mind, Jon Davenport of Valentine, NE, who said he'd never think of violating a game law…except for poaching a wild turkey because they taste so damned good. And then there's my friend, Carl Madsen, the retired waterfowl biologist who candidly admits that if he ever gets the call from a Doctor telling him he has only so many days, he's going duck hunting. Even if it's in July. But forgive each of these gentlemen for they are addicts and cannot help themselves.
But in spite of the fact Dr. Bob does consider himself an expert, he says he learned to turkeys hunt the hard way.
"If there was a way to screw up, I learned how to do it quicker than anyone else," he said. "For years, I shot one of those three barreled guns and so did others in our "Turkey Trot" group. When we added up all of our misses when we shot at birds 25 yards out with the rifle, we finally realized that a shotgun was better. I really learned my lesson when I bumped a gobbler and he ran over the ridge. I crawled over the top and there he was. He flushed, and I missed him clean. Then I realized that I was shooting at a flying bird with a rifle, and I never was very good at that."
So Doctor Bob finally settled on a shotgun for turkeys, a Benelli, which he stuffs with an ounce and-a-half of super pellets in a hot load the folks at Federal have concocted for people with a severe case of turkey fever.
And though I often refer to my friend as "the good doctor," when he dons his camo and face paint each spring, it's apparent to all that he has evil in mind. "Let's put it this way," says a turkey hunting acquaintance, "when Bob goes out into the Black Hills in the spring, saving turkeys isn't on his agenda."
But we concede that though he admits to almost inventing ways to screw up a turkey hunt in his formative years, over 39 of them, he’s also learned a lot, and he’s turned that into his nine rules for turkey hunting.
Rule #1 - Never call from an open area.
Why? "Cuz there's no place to hide and if a turkey shows up, you don't have enough time to dig a hole."
Rule #2 - Never move on a gobbler if you don't know exactly where he's at.
"About the time you give up on a gobbler because he isn't responding to your call the way you think he should be, and you get up to change locations, walk 10 steps and he runs out from behind a juniper bush."
Rule #3 – The turkey can't remember the last five minutes of his life.
"Don't make the mistake of giving that bird human characteristics," offers the good doctor. "And don't give up if you bump him. He probably just ran over the hill and his memory only lasts for about 30 seconds. Sit down and start calling again. He'll forget you were there."
Rule #4 – Always hunt with somebody. Don't go alone.
Why?
"Because it's dangerous, that's why. First, it's too easy to get lost if you're a flatlander, and second, there's lions out there. I've never had contact with one but I'll bet I've been followed a hundred times."
Rule #5 – Never hunt the same area two days in a row. "I remember an area by Nemo where there were so many turkeys that there was at least one for every person in South Dakota," he said. "I went back the second day and there weren't any."
When I suggested Rule #5 conflicted with Rule #3, Dr. Bob merely ignored me.
Rule #6 – Never set up behind cover, always get in front of it. "First, you can't shoot well through the cover, and you hide well against it."
Rule #7 – Gobblers always come best uphill. "I don't know why. That's just how it is."
Rule #8 – Woodsmanship is the most important factor. Calling is second. "I once thought calling was the most important thing, but Frankie Heidelbauer could move through the woods more quietly than anyone else, and he killed more turkeys than anyone I know. The best woodsman is the guy who always gets his turkey."
Rule #9 – Pay attention to the first eight rules.
"When I first started turkey hunting, I didn't know a lot about it," said Bob. "I remember going into the Men's room at the Red Owl in Pierre with B.J. Rose who worked with Game and Fish back then. He was the only guy any of us knew who could call turkeys, and he demonstrated just how to yelp. I might be the only guy who ever learned anything useful in the Men’s room at the Red Owl.”
And with that, Dr. Bob, still a young man, did what young men have always done. He headed west…stopping only when he hit the Black Hills.
"I thought it was heaven on Earth," he recalls. "The first time we set up, four gobblers came to the call. My partner waited for me to shoot, I waited for him. The turkeys finally decided they weren't waiting for either of us. I don't make that mistake any more, which is why my own son thinks I shoot too fast. When that bird is within 35 yards, he's dead."
So, another "turkey trot" has passed, and Dr. Bob will spend the next couple of weeks searching along river bottoms for morels, and then the rest of the summer hunting arrowheads. And before long, it'll be September and the whole thing will start over again.
And by next year at this time, he’ll have turned his annual “turkey trot” into the fortieth.
