Each November the family would gather at my great-grandparent's farm in the Ozark Mountains. It was quite a gathering as my grandmother had 13 children who also had large families!
Amid all the hustle and bustle would be talk of the hunting trip. We needed several turkeys to feed the large crew we had gathered.
The men would sit around cleaning their guns and practicing with their turkey callers. That's right. They had little wooden whistles that they had carefully carved and when they blew through it, it sounded like a female turkey squawking.
In my 12th year, I decided that I needed one of those, and I wanted to go hunting with grandpa.
Grandpa spent days carving my turkey caller and the day before Thanksgiving he gave it to me at 3:00 in the morning as we headed out to go turkey hunting.
It was a crisp cold November day and we wandered up and down the side of the mountain all day.
We saw a couple of turkeys, and grandpa even took a couple of shots but missed that day.
We had brunch beside a small creek that ran along the side of the mountain and came home for dinner good and tired.
Thankfully the other men were better shots that day so that we could still have our family dinner the next day.
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