Black barring dominates the wing feather of the Osceola and the white veining doesn't touch the wing's edge, giving this subspecies a dark overall appearance.

In my experience they are the quietest of all the turkeys, but I believe this is because of their uniformly warm climate. Their habitat is also difficult. Sound carries poorly in the dense palmetto and cypress.

Turkeys aren't much for crossing water obstacles, even to investigate a hen turkey that sounds like their version of Marilyn Monroe, and good Osceola country tends to have a lot of water obstacles. And unless you've trod every inch of the ground you're hunting, you might not even be aware of hidden expanses of swamp just a few yards from your calling site.

Put pure-strain Osceola turkeys along a riverbottom in western Kansas and I suspect they would act much like the turkeys that were born and bred there. But that's not where they live. Amid the cypress swamps and palmetto islands they call home, I think they're the very devil to hunt.

The first time I hunted them, I had really high hopes. I was on the vast Deseret Ranch in southern Florida, not far from the inland sea called Lake Okechobee. It was a very long hunt, darn near 10 days, and I figured in that amount of time I'd have plenty of opportunity.

Not quite. In all that time, I heard one bird gobble. I never saw him. Driving back and forth at midday, I did see a couple of gobblers hot-footing it across the rare open area at a couple hundred yards, and at that point I understood fully why, at least at that time, rifles were legal for turkey hunting. But they weren't legal according to the rules of our hunt, and I never saw a turkey within shotgun range. (I did win a belt buckle for bulldogging in the amateur rodeo held at the end, but you must understand that, after 10 days of not seeing a turkey, I wasn't in my right mind at the time.)

Years passed, and with time came the realization that I really could die happy without an Osceola turkey, which was reinforced by at least one more unsuccessful attempt. Then, in the spring of 1999, I found myself in Tampa on assignment with the Marine Corps. I'd be there the whole turkey season; surely I could put something together. A local attorney and former Marine I knew from Safari Club, Jack Bierley, took me under his wing.

I didn't have near as much time as I'd hoped, and by the last weekend of the season I hadn't made it happen. That weekend, hunting some really good country with Jack and Fred Fanisi, we had at least two gobblers going nuts in some thick palmettos just before daylight.

The setup was perfect. I was on the edge of a small clearing, and the birds, still on the roost, were close. Fred was doing a fine job of talking to them, and a bird came in and strutted right in front me. But it was a jake. By this time I was a decade into the Osceola project, and I didn't need turkey breast that bad. There was a big gobbler there, too, but his gobbles receded into the palmetto.

Then, in the spring of 2003, my friend Rob Barton asked me to speak at a function in Fort Lauderdale. The event was in late March, and if I would do this, he promised he'd show me a good gobbler. After my presentation we packed up our gear and headed north toward Rob's hunting lease--once again not far from Lake Okechobee, the heart of Osceola turkey country.

The season was several weeks along, but so far the gobblers had been quiet--no surprise there, as far as I was concerned. There was this one really huge gobbler that Rob and his buddy John Coan had been watching. They knew exactly where he was roosting and feeding.