Illustration Ryan Kirby

Inconspicuous consumption

by Tom Kelly

There are two people alive at this time, both known to me, who use diaphragm yelpers exclusively when they hunt turkeys. For nearly 40 years I did the same thing, although I carried a variety of box calls, and here lately, I use the box more than anything else. The two people I am talking about still use mouth calls exclusively, and, in both instances, the metal part of the call is made of pure gold.

No, I will not reveal names.

Both people went from lead to gold when the first rumblings of the deadly effects of lead began to fill the pages of those "sky is falling" articles which held that the use of lead in mouth yelpers was the exact equivalent of making your calls out of radioactive, fibrous asbestos.

There is no doubt that gold is environmentally correct and, I presume, does a fine job as the frame of a mouth yelper. Both these guys kill turkeys regularly and so did I, back when I used lead. And the fact that I used lead for nearly 40 years is probably why I drool, stumble up and down steps, mumble when I speak, and walk into things.

It may be that I would have turned into a decent, contributing member of society if my financial position had allowed me to use gold. But just recently, I found another item of sporting equipment that is even more spectacular than a gold mouth yelper, and it happens to be a piece of fishing tackle.

A friend of mine is a retired game biologist. I suspect that all those years of waiting in a blind behind a cannon trap, or listening to a transmitter while waiting for a hen to return to her nest, tends to develop a man's patience to an unusual degree. But whatever the reason, this man has taken up the art of building split bamboo fly rods. He sent me a book about it.

Never mind the space age materials now available for fly rods. To a real purist they are the equivalent of a fiberglass Stradivarius. Pure class can only be achieved with split bamboo.

You buy the cane and split it yourself. You glue the strips, wrap the guides, fit the nickel silver ferrules and give the thing the six coats of varnish the book says it requires. The book goes on and on with instructions, but I really don't know just how far it goes, because it got over my head at about page 14, and I began to skim chapters. Finally though, there at the last, I stumbled upon the very pinnacle of class.

It seems that when you come to join the three sections of your rod together, even though you bought nickel silver ferrules, there is a degree of wear as you join the rod to begin fishing and there is additional wear when you take the sections apart.

The ends of the male ferrules are polished and can be gently wiped off as you disjoint the rod. You can ensure they are clean and the rod rejoined without undue wear.

But the female ferrules can gather dust, down inside where you cannot get to it, so something must be designed to fill the opening in the female ferrule as you put the rod away.

There is a plug for sale that exactly fits into the end of your female ferrule, a plug that is the piscatorial equivalent of a medieval chastity belt. It is made of genuine, extinct, mastodon ivory and is guaranteed to forbid the entrance of any extraneous material whatsoever.

It is going to be a trifle difficult to work the existence of this plug into a general conversation, let alone the material it is made of, but then, you would have the same degree of difficulty if you tried to bring up the composition of the metal part of your golden mouth yelper.

You are very likely going to have to comfort yourself with the knowledge that discerning people have the proper equipment for the job at hand and that life is entirely too short for you to concern yourself with the tribulations of the unwashed.

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