For the past few months, I have been working 13-hour night shifts at Grand Gulf due to an outage and let me tell you a fact: working nights and hunting turkey’s is rough! I like making a living, but I love chasing turkey birds. This years season opened up slow, but this particular morning didn’t feel like the others because I had a feeling deep down in my gut. I was hunting the spot I killed my last bird last year. Every hunter knows the confident feeling of revisiting a previous successful spot, most times it does not work and sometimes it does!
I was running a couple of minutes late this morning (6:20), so slamming the truck in park and opening the door was one smooth motion. I stepped out into the cool 42-degree morning and let out a simple owl hoot. I heard two birds rattle off gobbles off in the distant woods and immediately started devising a plan to get in position while racing against the morning light. I hopped back into my truck, drove around the hill and park at another spot about a half a mile away, grabbed my gear and started the trek across the smaller ridges and crossed small tributaries of a big creek in between the ridges.
I eased very gently through the woods trying to minimize noise because it was getting light so I eased up on top of about the third ridge and decided to try another hoot. I hoot with my mouth and I am usually pretty good, but this particular hoot sounded like an owl going through puberty and choking on spit at the same time. It was so bad I busted out laughing, but then the woods erupted with other owl’s hooting and one of the turkeys I was trying to locate went crazy just over the high ridge. He was at eleven o’clock and 200 yards away, but I knew that there was a huge creek between us that I could not cross in my turkey gear. I decided to ease down the ridge and sit down 50 yards from where the ridge dropped off into the bottoms. Just as my butt hit the ground, a hen flew down 50 yards away…..between me and the gobbler. I sat there and thought, “OH well! I am screwed!” Every turkey hunter knows that feeling when a hen lands between you and the gobbler 99.999% of the time, the tom is going to choose the live hen.
I put in a new mouth call (birthday present from my niece) and let out a few soft yelps. He cut me off! He was still in the tree, and I could hear this hen responding to his gobble. I decided I needed to be more irresistible than the live hen, so I reached into my bag and brought out my Madhatter 4 Track Player pot call. It’s magical! As I rubbed the striker across the slate of the call, he cut me off again. I wait a few minutes and he cuts me off two more times, so I knew he was hot to my call. I mean so hot I had his freaking turkey jerky standing straight up! After waiting a few minutes, I sound off one more time and he gobbles again. Immediately after the gobble, I hear him fly down and I immediately think…”Crap! He just flew down to that hen!” then out of the corner of my eye, I see what looks like a turkey. No way it is that gobbler because he would have:
- Flown over a ridge
- Flown over a live hen
- Flown over a giant creek
I was wrong, it was him and he was in a 3/4 strut before his legs hit the ground. When he landed at 50 yards from me, the ground shook and I had to decide: Shoot him where he stands or see how close I could get him? If it wasn’t enough that I defied mother nature multiple times with this massive gobbler, I wanted to see how close he could get to me before I pulled the trigger. I let out a soft yelp, he walked straight up the crest of the ridge, and at 20 yards my “Itchy Turkey Trigger Finger” flinched causing the always popular turkey roll!
Walking down to him, I was thinking how I decided to leave the video camera because it had been a curse on my turkey hunts. If I would have had it that morning, it would have been perfect for a video camera. As I get to him and heel crush, realize that the ol’ tom had a two finger wide 9″ beard and 1″ spurs. He felt like he weighed a hundred pounds on the walk out. Sometimes turkey’s go against mother nature, do what we coax them to do, and those are the stories from the turkey woods that are always welcome around the fire boys!
