"A Hard Act to Follow" -- Traveling Turkey Hunter Brings Home Her Sports' Ultimate Prize
(from April 7, 2000 The Morning News)
by Flip Putthoff

Zoe Caywood shows the colorful Ocellated wild turkey she killed in the Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.  The tom was the final bird in her effort to complete a world slam -- taking all six species of wild turkey that inhabit the planet.

"The whole point was to get it with a flintlock," the hunter said.  At 1 a.m. on the morning of the trip's first hunt, her flintlock was delivered to the primitive hunting camp in the middle of the Yucatan Peninsula.  At 4 a.m., Caywood and her guide, Alrailyo, were hunting turkeys.

They walked along the edge of a harvested corn field where Alrailyo hoped an Ocellated turkey would appear.  The guide hacked an opening out of the tropical vegetation just big enough for the two of them.

"The jungle is so thick you can't walk through it.  If you have to go into it you have to use a machete," Caywood said, thinking the clearing was part of her guide's hunting tactic.  She found out later the opening was to keep the scorpions and snakes at bay.

Caywood and Alrailyo were out before first light each morning.  They'd hunt until 10 or so, when the heat would become unbearable.  Afternoons were spent trying to grab a few winks in the beds at camp.  "You'd just lay there and sweat," she said.  Hunting would resume about mid-afternoon.

On the evening of her second day, Caywood and her guide sppoked a turkey about 70 yards out.  It flew into the jungle to roost for the night.  The next morning, Caywood and Alrailyo were back in the area.  They hoped the turkey would fly down from the roost and come within gun range.

Caywood was sitting on ground, her back against a tree in the clearing her guide had made at the edge of the corn field.  Brush laid waste by his machete was piled up for a make-shift blind.

Hundreds of singing tropical birds welcomed the dawn, but no turkeys came down from the roost.   They lounged in their trees until 6:30 a.m., when two turkeys flew down.

"Pavo," Alrailyo whispered in Spanish.  Translation:  turkey.

Caywood picked one bird and watched down the barrel of her gun as the bird came closer.  Smoke from her flintlock billowed with the pull of its trigger:  A step or two beyond 30 yards lay the turkey that completed her world slam, the sport's ultimate feat.
 

She could see the turquoise, blue and golden feathers of the Oscellated species of wild turkey just 30 yards from the end of her gun.  If she could put the exotic bird on the ground, it would complete her goal of taking every species of wild turkey that inhabits planet Earth.

Turkey hunters call it a world slam.

But it wasn't the first slam for Caywood, who owns the War Eagle Mill and lives near the east Benton County landmark.

She scored a grand slam in 1998, killing all four species of wild turkey that roam the United States.  In the span of a few weeks during spring that year, she bagged Eastern, Merriam, Rio Grande and Osceola gobblers.

In 1999 Caywood went for a royal slam, travelling to northern Mexico to hunt the Gould's species.  One shot put her prize on the dusty ground of the Sonoran desert.

Just last week she was back in Mexico, but much farher south in the country's tropical jungle.  Caywood's dead-on shot at the Oscelallated turkey was the last sound the bird heard.  She had her world slam.

If that wasn't enough, Caywood killed all her turkeys with a flintlock shotgun, the most primitive of muzzle-loaders.  Caywood may be the first to score a grand slam with a flintlock.  National Wild Turkey Federation official Rob Keck told Caywood he'd never heard of a hunter doing it.