Everything changes when turkey season comes around each spring. Turkey hunters’ spouses know what I mean. We hunters pretend to be sane persons for most of the year and then we can make no such claims during certain days of March and all of April. Even WE know we are uncivilized during turkey season. Trust me. There is no addiction like the gobbler addiction. It is the only endeavor I know of that participants brag about losing to the foe. How sane is that?

Turkey hunters’ spouses know what I mean. We hunters pretend to be sane persons for most of the year and then we can make no such claims during certain days of March and all of April. Even WE know we are uncivilized during turkey season. Trust me. There is no addiction like the gobbler addiction. It is the only endeavor I know of that participants brag about losing to the foe. How sane is that?

Every year the elusive birds beat me to a pulp and leave me for dead. They don’t even call 911 for medical and psychological help and I am left with a string of 45 days of defeat and have to wait another 10 months to try to save face. One year my Mississippi combatants had shredded my efforts to bits. But I had a Plan B.

I slipped off to North Carolina where the big birds didn’t know my every call and I fooled a big one on a rainy, stormy day when he didn’t suspect me to be in his woods. I brought his overconfident carcass back to Mississippi is what I did! The birds here are still holding meetings to laugh and joke about me and drink Bud Lite and make merry. But at least I got one of their cousin’s beards and spurs hanging on my wall.

Good turkey hunters are supposed to learn something new every season so they can become master turkey hunters eventually. Then youngsters will sit in a circle around them and ask questions of them and people will point at them and whisper about them in public places. Mediocre turkey addicts will hang on every word the master utters about turkeys. Those who have learned the code are careful to identify the truth as being the precise opposite of what the learned one says.

Yes, for those lucky persons not acquainted with the ways of turkey hunters, a turkey hunter MUST lie. It is a requirement; a very practical one. This is a one man/woman sport. Should you utter the truth about where a gobbler roosts or how to call effectively or where the hens are gathering you invite competition and you can’t gang up on a smart gobbler. And if everyone was an expert caller, your encounters would shrink and they are already scarce.

But this year I have learned one new thing that I can reveal without having to lie about it. You know those Little Debbie Oatmeal Crème Pies, 97 percent of which are sold to spring gobbler hunters to put in their packs to munch on during those long hours when they are being whipped by those big birds with the marble size brains? Well, I learned that they are made in a super size!

All these years I have consumed the regular size ones in the turkey woods and craved more to the point of starvation. Well, I was in the grocery store stocking up for the season and there they were on the shelf; super size Little Debbie Oatmeal Crème Pies! I have always purchased my Little Debbie products from the dollar stores while I was getting my Vienna sausages and sardines and they have always had the regular size pies that every known turkey hunter carries to the woods. Now I can have almost sandwich size Little Debbies! The things are as big as medium size cow chips!

And they have lots of nourishment. Each pie has 330 calories (I usually have two). Check the ingredients, which are located on the bottom of the box in very small print for some reason. Now my doctor has said no sugar, no triglycerides and no flour. And I comply most of the year. But I have calculated that during turkey season I walk approximately nine and a half miles a day and I burn off the Little Debbies at the rate of three bites per mile. So I am sure Doc would approve of my turkey woods diet, so I won’t even bring it up with him.

The main ingredient is corn syrup. (Sure glad that is not sugar). Next is flour, which I am happy to report is enriched. Soon appears dextrose, whatever that is. And yes, there is sugar, but I am sure it’s not much. And then comes molasses and then mono and diglycirides, which Doc once said get together and make triglycerides, but he could be wrong you know. And then there is starch and palm and palm kernel oil and coconut and some more flour.

A friend in the medical field told me that these ingredients could plug my arteries so fast that you could feel them narrowing within 15 minutes after you eat. I have felt a little dizzy but I am certain that is simply the ecstasy of satisfied hunger.

Anyway, when the turkey season is over and I return to a more sedentary lifestyle, I will go off the Little Debbies. Of course, it would be a shame to waste those in a partially empty box.