This is a tale of things gone bad. It’s also a tale of redemption. Two years ago, my wife Jill Easton and I booked two back-to-back South Texas turkey hunts with different outfitters. Our thinking was multi-faceted: 

We’ve been growing increasingly disenchanted with public-land hunting in recent years, due partly to the downturn in turkey populations, but mostly to the astronomical increase in hunting pressure on public areas. So, we’ve gradually switched from only hunting public land to mixing in a few self-guided outfitter hunts each season. 

Also, since we’d already booked one hunt in Texas, we decided to schedule another Texas hunt close behind the first. Being a turkey hunter yourself, you’re no doubt familiar with our self-serving reasoning – we’d already be down there, after all, and by booking two hunts on the same road trip, we’d save a lot of money on travel time and fuel costs.

Don’t you see.

Good thing we did, too.

Hunt #1

It was your typical South Texas hunting ranch: hot, powderhouse dry, gray-brown mesquite brush everywhere. Near Encino, Texas, the place had 1,100 acres under high fence. Their primary hunting business was the usual mix of African imports – oryx, zebra, blackbuck, other stuff. There were also the native whitetails and javelina.

And turkeys. Jill and I had booked this hunt on a friend’s recommendation, but between his 2021 winter hunt and ours in March 2022, the longtime owner/outfitter had suddenly died, leaving the business to his son, a twenty-something with the interpersonal skills of a fence post and a cell phone almost constantly gripped in his left hand.

The place had turkeys, I’ll give ’em that, but nothing else went right. First, when we met Junior at the designated spot, he wore a frown and treated us like we were a real bother to his lifestyle. “Follow me,” was pretty much his entire greeting. At the camp, when I tried to hand him a credit card to pay the rest of our hunt fee, he looked at it like a cat being offered a bowl of sauerkraut. “We don’t do that,” he said. I pulled out my checkbook. “We don’t do that, either.” We hadn’t been told it was cash only at the ranch, but we dug around and managed to scrape together the remaining $1,500.

Later, when Jill asked when and what we would be having for supper, Junior informed us that our hunt included lodging, but not food. This, too, hadn’t been mentioned when we booked the hunt. When Junior gave us this bit of rather important news, it was sundown on a Sunday, and we were 25 miles and three locked gates from the nearest store.

Okay, no problem, we had a box of typical turkey vest lunch stuff in the truck – Viennas, sardines, potted meat, pork and beans, string cheese, energy bars, crackers – and we could make do. But it didn’t sit well.

The next morning, after a 10-minute ride during which Junior said not a single word, he dropped us off in the pre-dawn blackness at a four-way sendero intersection. Here, in its entirety, is the intelligence he imparted before driving away: “Turkeys have been roosting back that way. (Ambiguous wave of the arm that covered about 90 degrees of the compass.) You ought to hear something from here. Call me when you want to be picked up.” And he drove away back to camp – it was a very nice camp, by the way – presumably to commune with his cell phone.

Understand something here. Jill and I are experienced public-land hunters, and neither of us needs to have our hand held on a turkey hunt. We are perfectly capable of finding turkeys and screwing them up without outside help. But when you are paying $3,000 for a two-person hunt, part of what you’re paying for is intelligence. This was an unguided hunt, and we weren’t expecting anybody to parade a string of longbeards in front of us until we found a couple we liked. But something beyond “You ought to hear something from here” would have been nice. 

When daylight came, we did indeed hear gobbling “back that way.” But it was a long “back that way,” and the turkeys were on the ground long before we could pick our way through the thick brush and get to them. They were in a big field/food plot, the yellowish ground almost bare of vegetation.

Still, it was the best-looking turkey location we’d seen, so we found a spot in the brush at the edge of the opening and started calling. Things looked promising at first. Within minutes we could tell at least some of them were headed our way. There were at least three gobblers in the group, maybe four. They were making lots of noise, and they were now less than a hundred yards away but still out of sight.

I’ll spare you the details, but it didn’t work out. When they left, we followed, and stayed in contact with the gobblers most of the morning. It lasted until a group of illegal immigrants came through the brush, arguing loudly in Spanish, and boogered the gobblers. We roamed around until 2 p.m., when the temperature hit 95. No action. We called Junior and took the rest of the blistering afternoon off. Junior didn’t say 20 words to us the entire time.

The next morning, Junior wanted to drop us at the same place. We vetoed that, telling him to drop us on the road much closer to the field we’d found the first morning. For some reason Junior didn’t like that idea, but by then we didn’t give a damn what he didn’t like. He dropped us without a word and drove off stony-faced. Thus began Day Two at Encino, on another sour note. 

It didn’t improve. I mentioned the ranch has zebras, but I didn’t say how many. The answer: a bunch. For some reason they didn’t bother us at all the first day, but on Day Two they sure made up for it.

What zebras will do, we learned that morning, is bark at you when they smell you. It doesn’t really sound like a dog’s bark, but I don’t know how else to describe it. And a zebra’s bark is every bit as detrimental to a turkey hunt as the blowing of a white-tailed deer. (Which also chimed in a few times that second morning.)

While traveling around the property that day, we found numerous places where illegals had discarded things on their way north – water bottles and jugs, mostly, but also empty junk food containers, worn-out T-shirts, dirty diapers, blown-out flip-flops and used toilet paper. It was obvious the place was a regularly used travel corridor – yet another factoid Junior hadn’t bothered to mention. 

We covered a lot of ground that day and set up on four groups of gobbling turkeys, and one gobbler we think was by himself. Zebras messed us up on two of the groups, whitetails did it on a third. I have no idea what went wrong on the other two. All I know for sure is no turkeys came in. After the fifth encounter fizzled at 3 p.m., we gave it up for the day and called our BFF Junior.

The third morning, blessedly our last day at this ranch, we decided to go to the field and just stay there. Moving and calling hadn’t worked, and we figured our chance of encountering illegals was lowest if we sat and didn’t roam.

Again, I’ll spare the details, but it was a slow morning, turkeys gobbling near and far but none coming to our field. As mentioned, we had another Texas hunt booked 200 miles away, and by 10 a.m. we were ready to cut our losses and put Junior in the rearview mirror. We decided to give it another hour.

At 10:47, eight longbeards came boiling into the field. Jill killed one, but I didn’t have a good opportunity for a mop-up shot and the seven survivors ran out of our lives forever. When the dust settled, I called Junior. When Jill put her big 2-year-old in the back of his truck, he never said a word.

What a jerk.

Hunt #2

When we met Jonathan Freeman in Crystal City two days later, the difference was diametric. Jonathan is co-owner of Turkey Hunt Co, an outfitter company operating in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and other states. Jonathan’s smile was as bright as Junior’s frown had been dark, and within minutes Jill and I knew we’d met a new friend.

It was a great three days. The fee covered both lodging and food, like every other outfitter I’ve ever met (except for one, that is), and the food was great. 

Jonathan had thoroughly scouted the turkeys on the property, and we made a hunt the afternoon of our arrival – something Junior had strongly discouraged when we were at his place. We didn’t score the first afternoon, but saw several strutters and heard birds go to roost in several directions. Things looked promising.

Promising, yes. Fruitful, no, but the failure was all on me. The day was a comedy of errors – twice I bumped gobblers by trying to reposition at inopportune times, and three other times I spooked incoming turkeys by committing a variety of greenhorn miscues. Turkeys have beat me many times before, but I can’t remember a day when I beat myself quite so thoroughly and quite so often.

But three’s the charm, and Jill and I both took fine Rio Grande gobblers the next morning. Since we both still had a tag to fill, Jonathan offered us an extra day of hunting at no extra cost (and, I suspect, because he felt sorry for us because of our experience at Encino). But we had other appointments in other places, and we regretfully declined.

It might tell you something though, that we booked not one, but two hunts with Turkey Hunt Co for this coming spring. Check with me post-season and I’ll give you a report; I can’t make any predictions as to our hunting success, but I’ll bet you a new turkey gun against a can of Beanee Weenees we’re gonna have a great time.

*     *     *

Given the two hunts just described, which would you prefer? Yeah, me too. It’s probably impossible to completely eliminate the chances of picking a dud when you book an outfitter hunt, but there are certainly ways to stack the odds in your favor. To avoid a train wreck like the one Jill and I went through, here are a few things to think about when you’re booking a turkey hunt:

• First things first. Check online for the outfitter’s bona fides. If the company doesn’t have an online presence, that’s an automatic red flag, and my advice is to stop right there and start shopping for another outfitter. Reputable outfitters have, at the very least, a Facebook page, and the really serious operators almost invariably maintain active websites.

• The online search is a good first step, but take whatever you find online with a grain of salt. Websites, Facebook pages and other “look-at-me” information sources are designed to show the outfitter in the best possible light. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. (For example, I’m particularly wary of claims of 100% success, or “shot opportunity guaranteed” and other similar claims or guarantees.) Maybe I’m just cynical, but proclamations like that put my antennae up. I begin to wonder: Is this a fair-chase hunt or a sit-and-wait-by-a-feeder operation? If it’s the latter, count me out. I prefer hunting, not assassination. 

• Unless you meet the outfitter at a trade show (such as SHOT or the NWTF convention), it probably won’t be feasible to talk to them in person. But don’t book a hunt with an outfitter unless you can have a personal conversation with the person in charge. By that I mean on the phone, not by email or Facebook or the online chat platform formerly known as Twitter. There’s a very good reason for this: you can learn a lot about a person and how he or she operates in a live, real-time conversation, things you can’t pick up on through email, Messenger or any of the other online communication avenues.

• When you do talk to the boss, ask specific questions. What, exactly, is included in the hunt? Likewise, what is excluded, or available only at extra cost?  What is the size of the property you’ll be hunting? What’s the terrain and vegetation like? Is any special equipment (snake boots, raingear, etc.) necessary? How will the hunts be conducted (i.e., out of a blind, run and gun, what?) If you have special dietary needs, now is the time to mention them.

• Ask for references. Then, before you send a deposit, contact those references, again by phone if at all possible. If references are not willingly provided by the outfitter, DO NOT book the hunt. 

• In addition, it’s not a bad backup idea to ask around on a few Facebook turkey hunting groups about other group members’ experiences with the outfitter you’re researching. There are dozens of these groups, and the members are generally willing to help each other. That’s why they’re in those groups in the first place.

Then, after you’ve done all of the above stuff … trust your gut. If something doesn’t feel right, look elsewhere. Thinking back to the time I was booking the Encino hunt, I remember telling Jill, after I’d talked with Junior on the phone, I didn’t think he sounded very friendly.

I wished I’d listened to myself.