During spring turkey season, gobbler hunters spend their time between hunts daydreaming about special birds of the future and the past. At this moment I am reliving that cold spring day in the West when I bagged my first Merriams tom. Merriams are similar to our eastern wild turkey of the South and they answer to the same calling we do here.

I camped in my pickup truck camper on state land several miles north of Guernsey, Wyo. There was no campground, no campsite, nothing but a fence that my map showed surrounded a block of public land in the middle of, as we say around here, nowhere. The fine people of Wyoming don’t use that phrase because practically all of Wyoming could be described as such with pride by the few natives and with admiration and envy by outsiders. I am drawn as if by a magnet to the solitude I find in Wyoming and I go there every chance I get.

A friend who traveled the back country told me of seeing a flock of Merriams crossing a ranch road in the area. I applied for and drew a permit for one gobbler in the April season and here I was camping on the roadside hoping I could find turkeys in country I had never seen.

Come daylight of opening day I hiked west into rolling hills dotted with cedar brakes and isolated stands of ponderosa pines. High on the first ridge, I found a spot of bare soil and in it was the biggest wild turkey track I have ever seen. My spirits heightened and I hunted the area all morning. Finding no roosting areas, almost all of the timber having been cut many years earlier, I decided to drive to a nearby ranch house and ask permission to cross the ranch property to another section of state property.

The young lady at the ranch was friendly and quickly granted permission for me to cross onto the state land. She said her husband also did a little turkey hunting and was sure I would be welcome to hunt with him sometime. I later did just that. But today I wanted to see what a real live Merriams gobbler looked like. These birds that lived in the southern remnants of the Black Hills that jutted out of neighboring South Dakota were calling me.

When I climbed the first big ridge on the remote tract, I walked among towering ponderosas. The trees were thick, and in their shade were large patches of snow from a recent storm. In these white blankets I found turkey tracks. Several sets of tracks looked fresh and I followed them from one snow patch to another.

After a quarter mile, I was slipping along with my eyes glued to the ground and the tracks when the flock I was following flushed from just a few yards ahead and scared me speechless. Big birds flew wildly, but mostly straight away from me, their shiny white back feathers gleaming against the otherwise typical browns and blacks of their other plumage. I had found turkeys easier than any eastern flock I had sought in the past.

The birds sailed away through the big pines and when I followed I found a giant canyon. I guessed that the flock had glided to the bottom and would likely gather and feed out into the meadows at the mouth of the canyon.

As I worked my way down the mountain toward several miniature fields, it began to snow. It was a typical western spring snow, often called popcorn snow. It fell as lightweight balls the size of pencil erasers, looking like hail but bouncing like popcorn when it landed.

At the bottom of the mountain I found a small clearing beside a tiny stream that looked like a place where turkeys would be sheltered from the pelting snow. I hid beside the field, several feet inside the woods line.

I sounded an assembly call with my homemade walnut wood scratch box. I was just beginning a series of hen yelps when I spotted a gobbler entering the clearing from where I believed the flushed flock had gone. Soon a dozen turkeys were coming my way.

The two birds closest to me were both gobblers with swinging beards. They came steadily but slowly, looking for the hen they thought they had heard. At close range, I took the closest tom.

I had hunted less than a day in unfamiliar territory and had my gobbler. When I hefted the bird I noticed that his spurs were short, indicative of a 2-year-old. The beard was large and eight and a half inches long and the turkey seemed awfully heavy.

When I drove back through Guernsey that evening on my way home to Colorado, I weighed the bird on electronic scales at the grocery store. It weighed 20.96 pounds, a real whopper for a second-year gobbler.

I would later take this fine species in Colorado and New Mexico, as well as others on this same Wyoming property. One big spring tom there would fall in three inches of snow, the pellet pattern of my shot speckling the snow beyond the bird. But to this day, my first Merriams was my largest; and most memorable.