When hunting turkeys with Clark, you “Keep Going ’Til You Get It”

This could be my friend Arthur Clark’s epitaph: Keep going until you get what you’re after.

In more than 60 years hunting mushrooms and pheasants together, Arthur’s credo has often led us to pay dirt at the end of seemingly failed outings.

And it still serves us well now, even as old men who, breaking crust on 18-inch-deep snowdrifts, have to pause every 12 steps to breathe and re-energize.

We’ve hunted turkeys together since 2005 when the state first authorized fall hunting with dogs. They used to come so easily when we were younger and turkeys were more plentiful. In most of those years we’d fill our tags while pheasant hunting without ever having to specifically target turkeys.

Last year, despite repeated targeted turkey hunts, Arthur and I had to eat (metaphorically speaking) our $28.50 turkey tags. This year seemed on a similar trajectory when, with three days left in the season and several fruitless hunts behind us, we plunged into the foot-deep snow along a wooded creek, hoping to fill our tags.

Encouraged by a mosaic of poultry tracks in the snow, a few large enough to have been made by a turkey, we flanked the creek with Willow, Arthur’s German shorthaired pointer, in the heavy cover between us. Soon a lone turkey took flight safely ahead of us and flew along the creek until we lost sight of it.

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When we reached the end of the heavy cover, where the creek passed beneath a bridge on a gravel road, Willow slammed on point, and Arthur flushed and dispatched his Christmas turkey.

When Arthur bagged his bird, I was content to call our turkey season good. I told him I’d had enough of deep snow trudging and that one of two tags filled was good enough for me in this era of hard-to-find turkeys. But Arthur “Keep Going ’Til You Get It” Clark was not content as long as there was still some open season left, and he convinced me to join him and Willow for a “last chance” outing on Dec. 5.

We targeted a large, never-tilled peat bog with the thickest cover imaginable. Among standing and downed trees it bristled with raspberry canes and dense, towering horse weeds. Anyone with a philosophy less rigorous than Arthur’s would have considered it unhuntable.

Arthur and I soon got separated, and I hitched my star to Willow, who was acting increasingly intoxicated with bird scent. Before long I became immersed in the classic drama of hunting in deep snow and heavy cover with a pointing bird dog. Willow was frozen in place, a furry statue. A game bird was close by, but where? Willow’s eyes glazed with euphoria. How long can the bird stay still and hidden? How long can the hypnotized dog maintain her poise? How long before hot pee soaks my long johns?

Something had to give and finally did. The bird rose from the snow, silent as an owl. My numb right index finger depressed the safety on my 12-gauge. The gun rose involuntarily to my right shoulder. A blur of brown feathers — three times as large as a pheasant and half as fast — snapped into sharp focus.

Turkey down, I hollered. Turkey season over, two hours before it officially ended at sundown on Dec. 5.

Fall 2025 turkey season recap: 6 hunts, enjoyable; 10 miles of gnarly cover, impenetrable; 2 shotgun shells, expendable; 2 tags, fillable; 1 German shorthaired pointer, infallible; and 1 hunting buddy, indomitable.