By Lawrence Taylor

"Crunk is dead!" the voice screamed at me from my voice mail, and I was awash in conflicting emotions. The fall of a valiant foe can be bittersweet.

The story begins during the 2006 turkey season. I was co-hosting an outdoor writer turkey camp with Eddie Stevenson of Remington at famed Alabama hunting lodge White Oak Plantation. As co-hosts, Stevenson and I hunted together with Knight & Hale pro staffer Al Mattox, who guides at White Oak.

As we drove to our hunting grounds we passed a popular juke joint with a sign out front that the proprietors changed daily. Today it read "Get Crunk and Get Funky," and three middle aged white guys looked at each other. "What's 'Crunk?'" I asked.

None of us knew (I've since learned that it's an abbreviation for "crazy drunk"), but the word stuck with us as we entered the beautiful Alabama woods.

After several hours of running and gunning, we finally got a gobble from a distant bird. With raised eyebrows I looked to Mattox, whose face showed the look of a man who wasn't sure how deep the water was, but he was going to dive in headfirst anyway.

"That bird's tough," he whispered. "I hunted him last year and never could get on him." Mattox explained that the gobbler used a small bench as a strut zone, and that it was a smart old bird.

With no other good options, we headed toward the distant gobble.

To make a long and fruitless story shorter, we spent the next two-and-a-half days trying to outwit this fine gobbler. As we exited the woods on the second day, Stevenson suggested that the bird had earned a name. Mattox, who had already chased the gobbler for the better part of two seasons, agreed, and said, simply, "Crunk."

Crunk followed Mattox's thoughts and strutted through his dreams throughout the offseason. Turkey hunters are prone to obsession. Mattox wasn't accustomed to being so soundly whipped, and it stuck in his craw. He determined that 2007 would be the season when Crunk got his comeuppance.

It turned out that this season would, indeed, be Crunk's last stand.

"I called Crunk up for a guy from Fort Carson, Colorado," Mattox said. "And the sad part of it is he has no idea of the legendary bird that Crunk was. I've called up more than 200 turkeys, and this is the biggest Alabama turkey ever for me."

Mattox and his client set up in the woods about 200 yards from a 5-year-old cutover. Almost two hours before dark, the owls started hooting and shocked a gobble out of Crunk.

"He was about 200 yards out," Mattox said. "I answered him with a cluck from my Henny Penny glass call and he gobbled back."

Mattox continued to quietly cluck and purr on his Henny penny and purring and making soft yelps on his Turkey Tech diaphragm call. Crunk gobbled four more times as he approached.

"I could here him drumming from 75 yards out, and he drummed all the way to his death," Mattox said. At 20 steps Mattox's client made one final adjustment on his aim and Crunk saw him move, and raised his head to get a better look.

"With that move Crunk was dead."

Crunk weighed 21 pounds, sported a 10 3/4-inch beard, and had 1 9/16-inch spurs. Rest in peace old foe.