Back in the bad old days, when the wild turkey had all but disappeared from North Carolina, there was a handful of places where a dedicated hunter could go and have a real hope of hearing an old gobbler sound off at daybreak at the intrusion of a passing crow or the inquisition of an old owl.

Caswell County was one such place. Some remote areas in the mountains -- in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests -- were others.

And then, there was the river.

For sportsmen in North Carolina, there is really only "one" river. From the spot where it passes through the last hydroelectric dam that interrupts its path, it flows lazily downstream, winding through some of the state's most fertile land, before it pours its waters into the waiting arms of the Albemarle Sound.

The Roanoke River is full of striped bass in the spring making their spawning run from the saltwater upstream to Weldon. It's also filled with all manner of freshwater game fish from largemouth bass to sunfish to catfish to perch and herring.

The counties along its banks are among the best in North Carolina for wild game. Halifax, Northampton and Bertie rank among the leaders in the state in total deer harvest on an annual basis. The quail hunting is still fairly good, there's fair to above-average waterfowling, and a few black bears have been known to live in the area.

And, oh yes, there are some turkeys.

That fantastic river bottom habitat, those rich soils that grow all those peanuts and soybeans and corn and cotton also grow many gobblers -- at least they have since the state's flock exploded in the late 1980s and through the 1990s.

But birds along the river at least had a starting point. Forty years ago, when turkeys were very rare in North Carolina, there were always gobblers strutting on both sides of the Roanoke, in the fertile lands that remain some of the best habitat in the Old North State.

Last year, Halifax and Northampton counties ranked among the top 10 in the state in the numbers of turkeys harvested. Halifax was sixth with 264 birds taken; Northampton was 10th with 227. Those numbers reflected increases of between 15 and 20 percent over 2004, and they reflect an upward trend that has continued since restocking efforts filled those counties in the mid-1990s. In addition, hunters in Bertie County have been taking between 150 and 200 birds a year for several seasons. And to the east, tucked in between the Roanoke and two other rivers -- the Meherrin and Chowan -- Hertford County showed a 20 percent increase last year, with 128 birds taken.

Those kinds of results aren't lost on Mike Seamster, the biologist who is in charge of the upland game project for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

"We've always had turkeys on the Roanoke River; it's one of our most high-quality habitat areas in the Coastal Plain," Seamster said. "When there were very few birds anywhere, they persisted along the river because much of the area is inaccessible, and a good deal of the land is controlled by hunt clubs.

"They were never eliminated from that area. They seemed to have an affinity for both the floodplain and the high-quality habitat."