According to my hunting diary, we killed several deer on our first morning hunt last year. The notes I made about them indicate that they were just mediocre animals; an early hunt and itchy trigger fingers lay behind most of their deaths.

The real headliner on that first morning was the tom turkey that was brought in. We all gathered around the bird and its lucky assassin, watching carefully as the gobbler was dressed out. A nice, fat, long-bearded fellow, the turkey turned out to have breakfasted mostly on very common Hill Country stuff: acorns, corn, some milo, a few blades of grass or weeds, and something disgusting that might have been a lizard. But, we also learned, its stomach contents gave evidence of an early-morning visit to at least one deer feeder -- the only place from which it could have eaten milo and corn.

"Big deal!" you might say. "All toms eat milo and corn when they can get it."

"Well � yeah," I'd reply. But since the bird had been on the move for only about 30 minutes when it bought its ticket to that great turkey roost in the sky -- the hunter shot it at 7 a.m. -- we figured that its route took it pretty much in a turkey's version of a straight line from roost to feeder. Which meant that it and its buddies knew where the deer feeders were. Gillespie County had been pretty dry in August, September and October of last year, and it looked as if the birds' normal diet of seeds, small bugs and acorns had already begun to fail.

In a way, this was good news. On our lease, we shoot deer, but we hunt turkeys. It's pretty much a given that if you sit still in the woods in the Hill Country, you'll see deer wandering around -- but if you have bad intentions toward Tom Turkey, you need to know where to sit. We like to call it "ambushing."

Once you're in a deer blind, it doesn't matter much what you wear or how much you wiggle around -- you're in a big box, and the deer can't see you! But to situate yourself where the turkeys will give you a shot calls for different measures indeed. That's why it's more fun to hunt the big bird: You get to (heck -- you have to) wear camouflage, and you have to put your best Rambo don't-move-or-you-die mentality in gear.

All our lease hunters believe four basic Tom Turkey "facts" -- and all would-be turkey ambushers need to fix them firmly in their minds.

Fact No. 1: The gobbler is the classic overachiever. A bird with a body the size of a large beach ball and a brain roughly the size of a lima bean: How smart can it be? Not very. Nevertheless, in the battle of wits between turkey and hunter, the feathered contestant comes out ahead of the big-brained human in most encounters. How does it manage that, given its brain power, or lack thereof?

Well, as my wife says frequently, "All the dumb ain't on his side." And she may have a point. It can't take too much smarts to outmaneuver a man who'll spend $75 a pound for red meat when he can buy it at the local HEB store for $2.98.