By Will Primos
One of the greatest, if not the greatest turkey hunting buddy that I ever had was an older gentleman who was the owner of what became known as Rattlesnake Camp. The Camp got the name when Mr. Russell Davis, who was the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi at the time, was cleaning out an old shack that he was going to turn into his hunting cabin. He ran into one of those big, beautiful south Mississippi timber rattlers while preparing the shack for remodeling so he named the place Rattlesnake.

On this particular hunt, I went to Rattlesnake for about four days. For the first couple of days it was just Russell’s son-in-law, Dick Mestayer, and me. One of the neat things about Russell was that he was predictable in many ways. He always wanted to have fun. He didn’t mind being the butt of the joke if it was fun for everyone involved.

Dick and I knew that when Russell got to camp, he would go through his normal routine. He would go to the cabin, change his clothes, get his side-by-side shotgun, get into the truck and ride around checking out certain spots. Russell would always park the truck, walk a few hundred yards, peek into a field to see what was going on and then go to the next field to see if he could find a turkey. Of course, he would always yelp a few times to see if he could get a response. Then the battle was on.

Russell was to arrive in the early afternoon. Somehow or another, the idea was conceived that we should go to the top of a small, sloping ridge which had a food plot on it known as Dick’s Field. From the road approximately 200 yards up to the top of the field you could just barely see the edge of the field where the gate or gap was which was the entrance to the field.

It was there that we placed one of the new hard-bodied turkey decoys that we had made into a strutting gobbler. Dick had killed a nice gobbler that morning. We used black electrical tape and taped the wings of Dick’s gobbler to the side of the decoy. We cut off the tail and taped the base of the tail to the decoy. Then we tied a piece of string to each tail feather going both ways, forward and backwards so the wind wouldn’t blow the tail over. We put the turkey at just the right angle so that as Russell started up the road to peak in Dick’s Field, he would see it and dive for cover.

One key element to our prank was that the decoy had to be in just the right spot so Russell could only catch a glimpse of the old gobbler that roamed those parts, known as “Tricky Dick.” If Russell got a really good look at our handy work, say with binoculars, he would know that the strutting gobbler was not real and certainly was not Tricky Dick.

As it turned out, it was very late that afternoon when Russell and his guest arrived so Russell didn’t have enough time to make a hunt. In planning who was going to go where the next morning, we made sure that no one wanted to go to Dick’s Field. Russell would usually listen from the camp house and chase the first gobbler he heard. After the chase he would venture towards Dick’s Field to see if Tricky Dick was around.

We usually meet back at camp around 9:30 each morning to have breakfast ready by 10:00. That’s when everybody tells their morning stories and talks about how great of a turkey hunter that they were or how they got messed over once again, which is usually the case. At 10:00 we all sat down for breakfast.

Russell was being unusually quiet. We all know that he had to have seen our imitation of Tricky Dick, but nobody was saying a word. Everybody was waiting for Russell to somehow give us some indication that he fell for our prank. He had to admit it, after all, because his guest witnessed it.

No sooner had we all sat down at the table, looked at that big stack of pancakes and said our blessing when Russell broke in. “Well, I saw an interesting sight this morning.” That was all it took. We laughed so hard that we nearly turned the table over. We were so proud of ourselves. It was absolutely the highlight of the season. Russell, of course, tried to look indignant. He tried to act like he was trying to figure out why we were laughing so hard.

Russell silenced our uproar with a little wave of the hand indicating he wanted the floor. Then he started to tell the story. He gave us a play-by-play of how he had gone up the road that leads to Dick’s Field. He saw the strutting turkey, hit the dirt, crawled on his belly (with his guest in tow) for another 20 yards trying to get behind the right tree.

He was trying to call up this turkey for his guest, which made it even better when Russell realized that this turkey wasn’t moving because it wasn’t real. Russell had to admit to his guest that he had been had. I can see him now standing at the gap to Dick’s Field, looking down at our creation.

Our “strutting gobbler” kept Russell pinned down for an hour. For an hour he kept trying to get a better look at the turkey. He kept trying to call the turkey up and kept trying to figure out what he was going to do to get this strutting gobbler to come his way. After an hour of this turkey not moving, Russell finally began to put two and two together.

One of the reasons that the ploy worked so well is because of where we had the turkey positioned. Russell had to rise up from his prone position, lying down behind that tree while trying to look up hill to get a better look. At the same time, he didn’t want to be seen by the turkey so he never got a good, clear view. He only saw bits and pieces of the “strutting turkey.”

My only regret in sharing this story with you is that I no longer have the photos of the “strutting gobbler.” We had taken pictures of our decoy with gobbler wings strapped to the side and a fanned tail barely up by strings. That picture made me laugh every time I saw it. I’m sure you would have enjoyed it as well.