Speaker 1: M you see that glass deal right there? Yes, Mr
Speaker 1: Will is pointing out a big glass milk jug, probably
Speaker 1: two foot tall. It's full of turkey feats jog of
Speaker 1: some sort, and they're tag every once a while, I'd
Speaker 1: go and I just remember hunts, you know, because forget
Speaker 1: a lot of I'll jog your memory. On this episode
Speaker 1: of the Bear Grease Podcast, we're doing something we've never done.
Speaker 1: We've assembled an eccentric flock of turkey hunters to tell
Speaker 1: their single favorite turkey hunting story. We'll hear from the
Speaker 1: likes of Steve and Ronella Janice could tell us and
Speaker 1: Will Primos, but we'll also hear from some backwoodsman who
Speaker 1: you ain't seen on the TV, who've influenced me in
Speaker 1: a significant way. Stories are an important part of the
Speaker 1: human experience. The oral stories of those we respect shape
Speaker 1: our lives. On this episode, we're going to let stories
Speaker 1: do what's stories do. And you're not gonna want to
Speaker 1: miss this one. And he said, I called this old
Speaker 1: big gobbler. And he said, but when that dude come in,
Speaker 1: he said, he come in on the other side of
Speaker 1: the log. He said, well, I just richerd that log.
Speaker 1: He should I grabbed him and he said the log
Speaker 1: was something I couldn't reach over to get him on
Speaker 1: the other side. And guy said, my god, Doc, what
Speaker 1: you do He said, Well, I did the only thing
Speaker 1: I could do. He said, I turned him loose and
Speaker 1: called him around the other side. My name is Clay
Speaker 1: Nukelem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll
Speaker 1: explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places,
Speaker 1: and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived
Speaker 1: their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF Gear,
Speaker 1: American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed
Speaker 1: to be as rugged as the places we explore. Oral
Speaker 1: stories have always been important for humans. They operate using
Speaker 1: the supernatural technology that replays a moment that's been overran
Speaker 1: by time. The telling of the story a lots of
Speaker 1: a second life, resuscitating it to transcend time and geography
Speaker 1: in the mind of another human. You can't tell a
Speaker 1: story to a dog or a horse and expect them
Speaker 1: to get much out of it. But that's what makes
Speaker 1: us special. The words of others shape imagery in our minds,
Speaker 1: and in many ways it's better than actually being there.
Speaker 1: The storyteller has rendered out the impurities and the valuable details.
Speaker 1: Information and the takeaway of the experience is delivered to
Speaker 1: the listener in a neat, tidy package. That is, if
Speaker 1: the person an efficient storyteller, and stories always indicate the
Speaker 1: values of the teller. I'm always looking for where someone
Speaker 1: puts emphasis and shows what's important to them, because it
Speaker 1: will show you something about their insides. Well, that was
Speaker 1: a fancy way to say that. If you like a
Speaker 1: good turkey hunting story, you're gonna love this podcast. Turkey
Speaker 1: stories are different than any other kind of story because
Speaker 1: there's always lots of action, hand gestures, ups and downs,
Speaker 1: and turkey sounds being replicated. Told by the right person
Speaker 1: at the right time and the right company of people.
Speaker 1: They're hard to beat. I don't recall a better lineup
Speaker 1: of turkey hunters and storytellers than in this year podcast.
Speaker 1: We got them stacked like turkey beards and the cigar box.
Speaker 1: I'd like to invite you to sit back and enjoy
Speaker 1: a campfire with some people from my world. Every one
Speaker 1: of them I respect in a unique way, but they've
Speaker 1: all got one thing in common. They live for hunting
Speaker 1: wild turkeys. This first story is told by none other
Speaker 1: than Janice, who tell us of meat Eater. Since time immemorial,
Speaker 1: the South has been the cultural epicenter of turkey hunting,
Speaker 1: but the burgeoning gobbler populations of the West are spawning
Speaker 1: some great Western turkey hunters, and Janice is one of them.
Speaker 1: The man can flat cover some ground and chases some
Speaker 1: turkeys hard. By my request, here's Jonnice's most memorable turkey hunt,
Speaker 1: and his emphasis might surprise you, Clay. Here's my hunting story.
Speaker 1: My turkey hunting story isn't necessarily a story about me.
Speaker 1: It's it's more about my wife and where I got
Speaker 1: to see her experience through. A turkey hunt takes place
Speaker 1: in Montana about seven years ago, and we're gone out.
Speaker 1: We had just moved to Montana and it was our
Speaker 1: first spring turkey hunting in Montana. I found a spot
Speaker 1: on a map that looked good. We drove in there,
Speaker 1: set up a camp, started hunting. I went out first
Speaker 1: one day, she stayed back with the kids. I might
Speaker 1: even gotten a gobbler the first day. Um, it was good.
Speaker 1: And so when I got back, I said, you should
Speaker 1: go out for an afternoon and just see what you
Speaker 1: can do. And she'd maybe been out a couple of
Speaker 1: days with me, but very very early in her turkey
Speaker 1: hunting career, little to no experience. I sent her out
Speaker 1: with a slate pot call in a peg, some basic camouflage,
Speaker 1: and she was looking at it more like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go out and get away from kids in life and
Speaker 1: the craziness and just go out and enjoy the forest
Speaker 1: and the outdoors for a few hours. This is maybe
Speaker 1: two o'clock in the afternoon. She walks out of camp.
Speaker 1: So the girls and I we go and hike a
Speaker 1: little mountain nearby with glass. We go pick flower hours,
Speaker 1: come back to camp. Maybe it's four now Mom's not
Speaker 1: back yet. We go to leave camp as a pond nearby.
Speaker 1: We go to the pond, try to catch some frogs,
Speaker 1: look at turtles, throw rocks in the water. Come back
Speaker 1: to camp. No Mom. Make dinner, kind of postpony eating dinner, waiting,
Speaker 1: no Mom. We eat dinner, still no Mom. Starting to
Speaker 1: get dark now this is probably May in Montana, so
Speaker 1: the days are long. It doesn't actually get dark until
Speaker 1: probably close to nine pm. So she's been gone six
Speaker 1: seven hours now, and soon enough the kids are tired.
Speaker 1: So I put them to bed. Eventually, it's like getting dusky.
Speaker 1: I have a beer. Still no mom, no wife. Eventually,
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, I'm gonna go to bed. She must
Speaker 1: have gone out for a really long hike and she's
Speaker 1: just really enjoying herself, so I'm not too worried about it.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna lay down next to the kids in
Speaker 1: the tent, close my eyes. It gets really dusky, and
Speaker 1: I'm just fading into some sleep. When all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: that TenTen door zips open and I hear, like, oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, they was there. I was, and I was
Speaker 1: calling and he was calling back. Was that you calling?
Speaker 1: I was calling? And then he was calling, and then
Speaker 1: I think I spooked him. But then I went around
Speaker 1: the hill and then I called some more and he
Speaker 1: called back, and I was making these sounds and I
Speaker 1: was doing this and he was calling in. I'm like
Speaker 1: just waking up, and I'm like, ohoa, whoa what? Who?
Speaker 1: Who are you? What have you done with my wife?
Speaker 1: What is going on here right now? And she experienced
Speaker 1: not only one, but gotten to work two different gobblers
Speaker 1: in her whatever seven eight hours that she had spent
Speaker 1: out there roaming the hills of Montana looking for Merriam's turkeys,
Speaker 1: and twice had gotten to experience like the joy that
Speaker 1: we all find in turkey hunting that I especially love,
Speaker 1: and that's like the communication with that gobbler, with that bird,
Speaker 1: and it just bit her so hard, like I hadn't
Speaker 1: seen my wife so excited about a certain thing in
Speaker 1: who knows how long, probably since the kids were born.
Speaker 1: But she was so fired up, just like what, asking
Speaker 1: all the questions, what did I do wrong? I should
Speaker 1: have done this? And then she's hyper analyzing it and
Speaker 1: just the excitement of it all, and um, of course
Speaker 1: I'm just like kind of coming out of just almost
Speaker 1: being asleep, and it was all hard to comprehend for
Speaker 1: me at the moment. But in the end we saw
Speaker 1: stout that she had been working a bird that had
Speaker 1: actually roosted and it was on a nearby rich from camp.
Speaker 1: It was only maybe three or four yards away, and
Speaker 1: she said, well, I thought he was there. I think
Speaker 1: he had roosted, and I figured I should just back
Speaker 1: out and then come back to camp, which is the
Speaker 1: right thing to do. But when she came out to
Speaker 1: the road that we used to access the hunting zone,
Speaker 1: so she says, I backed out of there, but I
Speaker 1: left a pile of flowers in the road, and if
Speaker 1: you take a left at that pile of flowers, you
Speaker 1: go down the ridge, you'll run into this gobbler. So
Speaker 1: next morning, I get up nice and early, walk down
Speaker 1: the road. I see a pile of fresh but wilted
Speaker 1: from being sitting out there overnight air leaf, balsam root,
Speaker 1: bright yellow. You could, even in the dark, you could
Speaker 1: see him from fifty six yards away the pile of flowers.
Speaker 1: I take a left, don't go too far, sit down,
Speaker 1: and as it cracks flight, I can hear the gobbler
Speaker 1: start to gobble in the tree, and uh, there was
Speaker 1: a classic hunt that morning. I worked him for probably
Speaker 1: whatever in the tree for twenty minutes, and then on
Speaker 1: the ground for another minutes until he finally committed and
Speaker 1: came over the hill and I shot him. That's a
Speaker 1: story and how my wife got hooked on turkey hunting
Speaker 1: and hooked on communicating with turkeys. Will never forget being
Speaker 1: woken up by a excited, energized, near forty year old
Speaker 1: woman after communicating with a couple of gobblers in Montana.
Speaker 1: Good one, and you'll have to wait till the end
Speaker 1: of the podcast to hear the story of his main sidekicks.
Speaker 1: Steve Runella, the next storyteller, is one of the best
Speaker 1: Ozark turkey hunters I know. His name is Mo Shepherd,
Speaker 1: and his family homesteaded in the Ozarks in the mid
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. There's even a mountain named after him. Some
Speaker 1: people are just turkey hunters, and Mo is one of them.
Speaker 1: I hope you've got some rain gear because we're about
Speaker 1: to get wet. Well, it's been a rough spring. I
Speaker 1: hunted hard every day I was able to, and it
Speaker 1: come down to the last two days of season. I
Speaker 1: hadn't hunted in four or five days, and I decided
Speaker 1: to go back up to my mom and dad's old
Speaker 1: place in the mountains. Anyway, I got up there that
Speaker 1: night before spent the night with him. It started storming
Speaker 1: during the night, bad storms, just lighting and thundering, pouring
Speaker 1: down rain. I had my alarms set. I got up,
Speaker 1: and when I woke up it was still this thunder
Speaker 1: and lightning and pouring down rain. I just shut my
Speaker 1: alarm off. I thought, I'm gonna go back to sleep
Speaker 1: a while, no worry that. I thought that, and the
Speaker 1: door opened on the bedroom. By sleeping in, my dad
Speaker 1: walks in. He says, what you're doing still in bed?
Speaker 1: I said, well, it's stormy. He said, you can't kill
Speaker 1: a turkey lander in bed. He said, you've hunted all
Speaker 1: the season. Said you just well get up and go.
Speaker 1: So I got up, got my stuff together and headed out.
Speaker 1: Got to the place I was gonna go, and it
Speaker 1: was still raining and thundering. I sent in the truck
Speaker 1: for a little bit. I thought, well, I'm already out here.
Speaker 1: I just well get out and get wet. Turkey's gonna
Speaker 1: make a living too. And I started rounding old logging
Speaker 1: road and it was just breaking light, and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know if anything gon goble this morning or
Speaker 1: not in this storm and like this, and it was thundering.
Speaker 1: Usually they're goblet thunder and stuff, and I hadn't heard
Speaker 1: a goble or anything. But I got the spot where
Speaker 1: I liked the hunt. Right there there was a little
Speaker 1: spot where two three ridges broke down off the big ridge.
Speaker 1: Thought I'm gonna get right here and I'm on al
Speaker 1: who al hoo did and the turkey answered me. I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's cool. There's the least one god were left in
Speaker 1: here right at the end of the season. So I uh.
Speaker 1: I got up there and got up on the hillside
Speaker 1: and got set up and made a few soft calls.
Speaker 1: The turkey answered me, and I just waited and I
Speaker 1: waited and I waited, and I never did hear him
Speaker 1: fly down. A lot of times, you don't. I was
Speaker 1: pretty close to him. I don't noticed how close, but
Speaker 1: I was closing, and I thought I could him fly down.
Speaker 1: I never heard him fly down, and it was getting
Speaker 1: pretty good light, and I thought, well, i'll call again.
Speaker 1: I made a few soft calls. I didn't hear anything,
Speaker 1: but I looked, and I can see a tail fan
Speaker 1: up on the hill by me. I was in some
Speaker 1: pine country, they're up here in those arcs. And I
Speaker 1: got my gun up and ready, and he finally gobbled
Speaker 1: at me a time or two, and then I seemed
Speaker 1: making his way around towards me. And it was still
Speaker 1: this whole time, it was just raining down, pouring down,
Speaker 1: rain and thunder and lightning, and then he kind of vanished,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, he's probably had enough of this rain,
Speaker 1: you know. And I sat there a little bit. I thought, well,
Speaker 1: I wanna I'm gonna give you a few more calls. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I made a few more calls. Somewhere or another, he
Speaker 1: had circled around and he was back on the other
Speaker 1: side of I mean, I caught movement and seen him
Speaker 1: and he was in range of me then and my gun,
Speaker 1: My Shotgod, and he started strutting in that rain, and
Speaker 1: he come right in. And when he got in good
Speaker 1: range of me, I just clucked at him real out,
Speaker 1: and he stuck his head up and I pulled the trigger.
Speaker 1: And I had a down turkey on the next last
Speaker 1: day of season, and I hadn't had no luck all season. Well,
Speaker 1: I got the turkey and I headed out and I
Speaker 1: went home, or back to my mom and dad's. And uh,
Speaker 1: that's a that's good, said, that's a good deal you
Speaker 1: went this morning. I said, well, Dad, I wouldn't win
Speaker 1: if you hadn't got me up, because I sure didn't
Speaker 1: want to get in this weather. He said, well, it's
Speaker 1: one more day. Are you gonna go to mar And
Speaker 1: I said, well, I probably will. He said where you
Speaker 1: gonna go? I said, I don't know. I said, I
Speaker 1: thought I heard one another one goblin there this morning
Speaker 1: while I was working this one. But I said, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure because it was so noisy from the rain
Speaker 1: and everything. Well, I went to bed that night, woke
Speaker 1: up next morning to the same scenario. It was storming
Speaker 1: and raining, thunder and lightening again, and I thought, man,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I want to do this two
Speaker 1: days in a row. About the time the door swung
Speaker 1: open my dad. He said, better get up, he said,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna get after another turkey, And so I
Speaker 1: got up. He said where you gonna go? And I said,
Speaker 1: I don't know. He said, why don't you go back
Speaker 1: in there where you killed that when heristy? He said,
Speaker 1: you said you thought you heard nothing. I saill, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I heard one or not. He said,
Speaker 1: well you said you thought you did. That's better than
Speaker 1: the other place you've been listening to him. So I
Speaker 1: drove back over the same spot, and believe us or not,
Speaker 1: I walked around that old road. Hadn't heard a bird gobble.
Speaker 1: It was raining hard, thundering. In I got the exact
Speaker 1: same spot where I heard that one the morning before.
Speaker 1: I alhoo did and another one gobble. He couldn't have
Speaker 1: been fifty yards where the one was the morning before.
Speaker 1: On that same little ridge up above the old road
Speaker 1: I'd walked in on and nearly identical scenario. He didn't
Speaker 1: go well, but a couple of times I got set up.
Speaker 1: I didn't hear him fly down. One thing was when
Speaker 1: he finally got fired up, he started gobbling. He gobbled
Speaker 1: quite a bit, and thirty minutes of working maybe less
Speaker 1: than that, he didn't come strutting, and he just comes
Speaker 1: slipping in like they do sometime, just to ease and
Speaker 1: a long and I finally seen him, and he got
Speaker 1: within about twenty five yards and before I could even
Speaker 1: get a shot at him, And when he got in
Speaker 1: the open, I pulled down my shot and took that
Speaker 1: turkey got him, and that was too big, and they
Speaker 1: were both big tims. I still got one of the
Speaker 1: the last night kill. I still got his tail fan
Speaker 1: and beard mounted in my house that I fixed myself.
Speaker 1: That was probably twenty five or thirty years ago. I
Speaker 1: guess it's been thirty year ago because my dad passed
Speaker 1: away the next year after that. Most stories shows the
Speaker 1: wisdom of age held by his father, encouraging a young
Speaker 1: man to stay persistent, and you can take the values
Speaker 1: of that story to the bank. Most of the time.
Speaker 1: What makes a great hunter great is simply that he
Speaker 1: showed up more than others. If you don't recognize the
Speaker 1: voice of this next storyteller, you've been living under a
Speaker 1: buzzard roost. This is Wilber Primost telling about his favorite
Speaker 1: gobbler hunt. So something that's interesting. You see that glass
Speaker 1: deal right there. Yes, I don't know what year I
Speaker 1: quit putting them in there, but those are feating beers
Speaker 1: and there is an aluminum tag. It's actually a tag
Speaker 1: for a rose bush where you could imprint on the
Speaker 1: metal and will never fade away. And their tag. Mr
Speaker 1: will is pointing that a big glass looks like a
Speaker 1: big glass milk jug, probably two foot Talllet's full of
Speaker 1: turkey feet jug of some sort. So I would every
Speaker 1: watch while I go, and I just remember hunts, you know,
Speaker 1: because you forget a lot of they'll jog your memory. Oh,
Speaker 1: I was down in Capai County, Mississippi, and I got there.
Speaker 1: This is a man who's got eighteen thousand acres, got
Speaker 1: very successful industrialists, was one of my mentors in life.
Speaker 1: And I pull up to his big house. He's there
Speaker 1: having a little bit of coffee. He goes, where are
Speaker 1: you gonna go hunting this morning? Will that sad? Mr Hood,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go wherever you tell me, he goes, I
Speaker 1: know that, but I wanted to know where you think
Speaker 1: you might want to go as a kno, I want
Speaker 1: to go where you And let me tell you what.
Speaker 1: There's a turkey up on the top of Moss Hill
Speaker 1: and we can't kill him and you can have him.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, anytime you give somebody a turkey, you're
Speaker 1: the name. His name was Mr Moss because he lived
Speaker 1: on Mass Hill. Here we go, so I said, well,
Speaker 1: tell me about it. He said, well, you know that hill.
Speaker 1: I got gravel on that hill because you can't hardly
Speaker 1: get up it without some traction. It's real, real steep,
Speaker 1: he said. We're driving up are the top of that hill.
Speaker 1: We get up on the top and we wait to
Speaker 1: leave gobbles and usually gobbles two ridges over right below you. Okay,
Speaker 1: he said, but he won't come. I said, okay. If
Speaker 1: I'm driving over that spot, and I'm thinking, how am
Speaker 1: I gonna hunt this turkey? And by myself. This is
Speaker 1: before the days of strict video truth series, before the
Speaker 1: Truth series, And I went, I'm on park a hundred
Speaker 1: yards from the foot of that hill where the gravel starts,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna walk up at hill. I started walking
Speaker 1: and the gravel was loud under my feet, so I
Speaker 1: moved over to the edge and there was so much
Speaker 1: but oak trees, and there's all hardwood, and they were louds.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to go real slow and trying to be careful.
Speaker 1: I get up to the top of the hill and
Speaker 1: I wait, and that turkey gobbles right where Mr. Hood
Speaker 1: said he was gonna be. And I ain't no way.
Speaker 1: I can't get that turkey. All him leaves are dry.
Speaker 1: He ain't gonna come over here. I came up with
Speaker 1: a little planning, so I'm gonna get light. I let
Speaker 1: it get light enough that I could see the walk.
Speaker 1: He's gobbling steady, and so I started walking to him.
Speaker 1: I scratching the leaves. He started gobbling non stop. He
Speaker 1: was hearing it. And I back up and scratch a
Speaker 1: little bit. Oh, and I'd go. So I got to
Speaker 1: that second reage. He's right over that second one, and
Speaker 1: I'm on the side, and I put my gun right there,
Speaker 1: thinking he's gonna flat in and walk up if he
Speaker 1: does come. And I sat down and I'd reached my
Speaker 1: hand out scratching and leave. Ain't said a word, ain't yet.
Speaker 1: One time I had my guns in there. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden I heard big, huge wings. He lit in
Speaker 1: a hickory tree about fifteen feet off the ground on
Speaker 1: my left side, on the side of the hill that
Speaker 1: I'm sitting on, and hammered it. And you're looking right
Speaker 1: down at me. And I got my gun pointed right here,
Speaker 1: so he's to my left, you know. And I got
Speaker 1: my eyes cocked like that, you know, so I'm gonna
Speaker 1: buy it. I cannot move. He gobbles again. He jumps
Speaker 1: off that limb and lands right below that tree. He's
Speaker 1: thirty yards from when he did that. I got it boom,
Speaker 1: and that was in the Mr Ball. It was incredible.
Speaker 1: I felt like I was in a gun match on
Speaker 1: the tree, you know. I had to draw fast and
Speaker 1: I had yeah to shoot before he did. That was
Speaker 1: a wonderful, rewarding hunt. Yeah, and you talk about your
Speaker 1: chest puffed up. Walk back to Mr Hood's house him
Speaker 1: and wait on Mr Hood to show up and go
Speaker 1: I got him. Oh my god. I was riding that,
Speaker 1: Oh man, you could ride that was putting on a
Speaker 1: clinic for hunting the pressure turkey, wasn't it. I guess
Speaker 1: doing doing things have worked another day, But it worked that.
Speaker 1: I'll be done. Didn't call him one time, And I
Speaker 1: learned the scratching in the leaves because one day I
Speaker 1: was walking in the leaves and I stepped in a
Speaker 1: really loud spot talk and a turkey gobble, and immediately
Speaker 1: hit me. He ain't just gobble, he's gobbling at me
Speaker 1: walking to the league, Yeah, he thinks. And I stood
Speaker 1: there in that one position, standing up, scratching with my foot,
Speaker 1: and I almost killed that trick. I'll be done. I
Speaker 1: can probably find Mr Moss's beard and feet in that
Speaker 1: old right there. Will's voice, accent and passion just draw
Speaker 1: you in. His story was chocked full of insight and
Speaker 1: tactics that a young Wilbur learned long before he became
Speaker 1: a legend in the turkey hunting world. But one thing
Speaker 1: you can always count on from him is that he
Speaker 1: delivers the excitement. You won't have heard of this next
Speaker 1: storyteller unless you're from the same town I'm from. Andy
Speaker 1: Brown is a name that has bounced around stories in
Speaker 1: my county my whole life. He's as good a turkey
Speaker 1: hunter as has ever walked these hills. Most people that
Speaker 1: are involved in outdoor media, if they're being honest, will
Speaker 1: admit that the vast majority of the best hunters have
Speaker 1: never been anywhere near a camera. And those are the
Speaker 1: kind of guys I like. Andy's son, Scott is about
Speaker 1: my age and we've been longtime close friends. We'll hear
Speaker 1: from Scott later, but not before Andy tells about his
Speaker 1: first hunt in nineteen seventy one and then Scott's first
Speaker 1: hunt in the early nineteen nineties. Here's Andy, So, growing up,
Speaker 1: my father, he liked to hunt, he liked he was
Speaker 1: he liked to run dogs, and and uh, he wasn't
Speaker 1: a still hunter, and he wasn't a turkey hunter. And
Speaker 1: he wasn't he wasn't a coon hunter when when I
Speaker 1: was growing up. But I was fortunate and I had
Speaker 1: a I had a uncle and uncle Laurie that took
Speaker 1: a interest in me. And uh, anyway, he was all
Speaker 1: of the above. He'd be trapped. He he coon hunted,
Speaker 1: and and he was one of the first turkey hunters
Speaker 1: to kill a turkey in Pocunty. I think in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six. He was one on the list. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time with him, and and uh listened to
Speaker 1: his stories. Of course as a kid, your bug eyed,
Speaker 1: and uh he could tell a big story. He could
Speaker 1: get a big chaw red man and a in a
Speaker 1: peach cannon and he'd ran back and he'd tell a story.
Speaker 1: And uh, he took me on my first turkey hunt,
Speaker 1: and I think Clay was the spring of nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: Up until that time, all I had heard was stories
Speaker 1: how about how smart they were. And you know, Uncle
Speaker 1: Auris still back in those days, was u uh the
Speaker 1: best thing you could do once you call a turkey
Speaker 1: is just get up and sit around on the back
Speaker 1: side of the tree, because he's gonna come in behind you,
Speaker 1: you know, and you can't move, you know, you don't,
Speaker 1: you know, you've got to be still. And but anyway,
Speaker 1: the first turkey hunt we went on was what we
Speaker 1: called two mile Motorway. And we got over there, I
Speaker 1: mean it was double early and and dark dark, and
Speaker 1: had a little litle flashlight and and we got out
Speaker 1: and we walked we walked back east or south there
Speaker 1: to be south up the high line and we got
Speaker 1: in there, and we put a little mountain there and
Speaker 1: we got out on top of it, and I'll never
Speaker 1: forget him saying to me, he said, when it starts
Speaker 1: getting daylight, there's gonna be one gobble right here. And
Speaker 1: I've never heard a turkey gobble in my life. And
Speaker 1: so the anticipation was just unbelievable. And sure enough, when
Speaker 1: it started getting just a little bit light back in
Speaker 1: the east, just right straight across the horror, there's an old,
Speaker 1: bigger gobble right out on top. And of course I
Speaker 1: didn't know what to do. He said, well, we're just
Speaker 1: gonna sit here till he flies down and see what
Speaker 1: he does. And so he taught me a little bit
Speaker 1: there about turkey. And he didn't like to call a
Speaker 1: turkey on the roost until he pitched down. And that's
Speaker 1: the way I hunted all my life. I mean not
Speaker 1: to say that I never called one on the roost,
Speaker 1: but I wanted him to fly down before I really
Speaker 1: got excited with him. But anyway, the turkey flies down,
Speaker 1: and and uh, we go down there, and he gets
Speaker 1: some y'all set up, and and at that time I
Speaker 1: had a eleven hundred Rimington automatic modified barrel shotgun shooting
Speaker 1: super X shells. Number six is and I'll never forget
Speaker 1: sitting there. And he says, now, I'm gonna get right
Speaker 1: up behind you on the ridge here, and I'm gonna call.
Speaker 1: And he made his own calls. He had a little
Speaker 1: old uh he hollowed it out. He was a carpenter
Speaker 1: and had a little bridge on it and a little
Speaker 1: striker that he struck. He yipped with and I saw
Speaker 1: he did. He was a three up guy and shut up.
Speaker 1: But Turkey gobbled he calls a turkey. And he'd always
Speaker 1: told me he sitting Now when they quit goblin, you
Speaker 1: need to get the looking for him. I sat there.
Speaker 1: I was afraid to even breathe. I'm mean, the anticipation was.
Speaker 1: I can't even describe how the excitement was for me
Speaker 1: to just sit there. And I sat there, and I
Speaker 1: sat there, and I must have sat there for twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: Of course, Uncle Aurie never said another word on the call.
Speaker 1: And in a little bit about a hundred fifty yards
Speaker 1: west of us, Turkey gobblers, he says, come on, we
Speaker 1: get up and we leave, and so we go down
Speaker 1: and we set up on this one. He calls him
Speaker 1: turkey shuts up. Anyway, we sat there and sat there,
Speaker 1: and sat there and sat there. In about that time,
Speaker 1: the turkey that we've been we've been after start with gobbles.
Speaker 1: Right back where we're at, there was two gobblers. And
Speaker 1: but I said, I said all that to say this,
Speaker 1: which I'm gonna get into my story about Scott's first
Speaker 1: turkey hunting. That did something to me as a thirteen
Speaker 1: year old boy. That obsessed me with turkey hunting, and
Speaker 1: I spent I neglected, uh well, in the springtime, I
Speaker 1: neglected my family because I spent thirty days before season
Speaker 1: of scouting. I mean I was after him. I mean
Speaker 1: I that I lived and breathe. That's everything I wanted
Speaker 1: to do in life. And so with Scott growing up,
Speaker 1: I was a little concerned because, like I said, I
Speaker 1: didn't make it. I didn't make it fun for him
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. But his first turkey hunt,
Speaker 1: we took off and it was probably I don't know,
Speaker 1: half three quarters of miles to the top of the mountain.
Speaker 1: So we pulled it on the top and what we
Speaker 1: call the low gap, and there was a fine, fine morning,
Speaker 1: nothing I mean got daylight. No turkey's goblin. And so
Speaker 1: we fell off the north side and went down through
Speaker 1: a divide into a little low with I don't know you,
Speaker 1: just a little high ridge that lays uh north in there,
Speaker 1: and and all of a sudden, a turkey gobbles behind us,
Speaker 1: back up on the mountain the way we come off,
Speaker 1: and I said, look here, I said, we're gonna get
Speaker 1: that dude, you know, so we we uh anyway, I
Speaker 1: got Scott set up, and of course, you know, looking
Speaker 1: back on the way I did it, I did it wrong.
Speaker 1: I didn't put him. You know, I should have had
Speaker 1: him between my legs where I could talk to him.
Speaker 1: But I had always tooke up Scott. I said, Scott,
Speaker 1: trying not to shoot one walk And I said, but
Speaker 1: I was. When they're walking. I said, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of air around those dudes. And I said, you know,
Speaker 1: wait till they stop. Anyway, I got Scott set up,
Speaker 1: and I told, turkey's right there, gobbling one gobbles out
Speaker 1: west of us out there. I called him. He gobbles
Speaker 1: right back, and then this all of a sudden, here
Speaker 1: he kept, you know, just drumming every every crunch, snap crunch,
Speaker 1: snap crunch, And I look up and here that dude
Speaker 1: comes right down. He's gunning barrel. I mean just right.
Speaker 1: Scott's got is g gonn up and he's coming right down.
Speaker 1: He's gunning barrel right. He just kept coming and I'm
Speaker 1: going shoot, he's got shoot him. And he just kept
Speaker 1: coming and kept coming, and finally he gets out there
Speaker 1: about fifteen steps and he just turns and he just
Speaker 1: walks off in the r get up and I go
Speaker 1: out there and I said, wine, world one you shooting
Speaker 1: that turkey? You know? I mean, I'm I'm double being
Speaker 1: out of shape about that, you though, And he says, well, Dad,
Speaker 1: you told me not one walking walking right to you,
Speaker 1: you know. And I said, that's okay. This one gobbles
Speaker 1: over here. And so we just immediately I said, come on,
Speaker 1: we'll go kill that. When we just went and we
Speaker 1: went west of him, pull the top of the mountain,
Speaker 1: got in above him, and there was a big old
Speaker 1: log laid down on right up on top where it
Speaker 1: topped out there, and there was a limb kind of
Speaker 1: went out like this, and I put Scott right between
Speaker 1: the log and the limb and the big Steve Holler
Speaker 1: and I just got over behind the log. I called
Speaker 1: it old gobbler man. He just he just broke me
Speaker 1: off down there. And here he comes to scrunch snap
Speaker 1: of that ridge. Well, Scott's got his gun like this
Speaker 1: right here. Well when he comes up, he comes up
Speaker 1: out of the holler right here. Well Scott just throws
Speaker 1: that gun up over that hill. Anyway, that one flies off,
Speaker 1: And so I ripped him pretty good like that, and
Speaker 1: he's got his lip pooched out pretty good. And you know,
Speaker 1: I've doubled bent out of shape because he, you know, moved.
Speaker 1: You can't do the two big gobblers. You know. To
Speaker 1: make a long story short, we never fired a shot
Speaker 1: that morning. So so we go back to camp. And anyway,
Speaker 1: so we get up the next morning and we go
Speaker 1: south to camp down in the ridges, and we get
Speaker 1: down there and we get on some gobbers down there,
Speaker 1: and and he's got that eight seventy and I've got
Speaker 1: him on a leg just kind of out from me there,
Speaker 1: and I called him a old turkeys in here. They
Speaker 1: come right up that ridge and about the time I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say get it, let him get a little closer,
Speaker 1: cur wam, and he kills the first one. Anyway, he
Speaker 1: killed his first turkey and I've got a I've got
Speaker 1: a picture of that, and he was proud of it.
Speaker 1: And he was certainly not even more proud than I was.
Speaker 1: But it's kind of neat to have kids that, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they've turned out. Scott's the next on turkey
Speaker 1: in and I think he's one of the best there
Speaker 1: is in this country. He's he's he's very good at
Speaker 1: what he does. And I would like to think I
Speaker 1: have a little bit of that. But I was not
Speaker 1: easy on him as a father. And he has one
Speaker 1: more story to tell. And I bet you're gonna like
Speaker 1: this one. Does the frequency of this one sound familiar?
Speaker 1: And and just one more little story. I had God
Speaker 1: tell me one time. And he talked about a renowned
Speaker 1: turkey hunter down to South Louisiana called Doc Robern. He
Speaker 1: said he was he was well known, He's supposed to
Speaker 1: be the best turkey hunter there was in that country.
Speaker 1: And he said, I sat in the coffee shop one
Speaker 1: morning and says, old Doc walks in there in turkey
Speaker 1: said he said, Doc, He said, how did you do this? More?
Speaker 1: He's a man I killed the big in this morning,
Speaker 1: he said, he said, Well, tell me the story. He said,
Speaker 1: that's what I live for, He said, tell me what
Speaker 1: happened this morning? He said, well, he said, you ain't
Speaker 1: gonna believe this, But he said, as I was out there,
Speaker 1: he said, laying by a log, he said, and he said,
Speaker 1: I called this old big gobbler and he said he
Speaker 1: dis answered me right back, and he said, he said,
Speaker 1: but when that dude come in, he said, he come
Speaker 1: in on the other side of the log. He said,
Speaker 1: my god, Doc, what happened? He said, Well, he just
Speaker 1: walked right on the other side of the log, and
Speaker 1: he said I could look under that log and I
Speaker 1: could see him standing there by me. He said, Doc,
Speaker 1: what you do? He said, well, like this ritcher that log,
Speaker 1: and he said, I grabbed him and he said he
Speaker 1: was too big. He said, I was trying to him
Speaker 1: under the log. He said, I couldn't get him under there.
Speaker 1: He's too big. And he said the log was some big.
Speaker 1: I couldn't reach over to get him on the other side.
Speaker 1: And guy said, my god, Doc, what you do? He said,
Speaker 1: will I did the only thing I could do. He said,
Speaker 1: I turned him loose and called him around the other side.
Speaker 1: That's a turkey huttter right there. That's a turkey gettor
Speaker 1: right there. This is my good buddy, Brent Reeves. He's
Speaker 1: a lifelong turkey hunter, and a good one at that.
Speaker 1: This story involves some family, the Saline River bottoms, a
Speaker 1: tough turkey, and some mosquitoes. Now this story happened over
Speaker 1: twenty five years ago, but it was turkey season, was
Speaker 1: going into the second week of turkey season. I'd already
Speaker 1: killed one, but my brother hadn't. And we always did
Speaker 1: everything together. We were goose hunted, we squirrel hunted, we
Speaker 1: duck hunted, any kind of hunting, fishing, whatever we always
Speaker 1: did together, except turkey hunting. Turkey hunting was it was
Speaker 1: understood that every man was on his own. But we're
Speaker 1: getting into two weeks in the season and he calls
Speaker 1: one night and asked me what I'm doing. The next
Speaker 1: morning and said, what, it's still turkey season, naming I'm
Speaker 1: turkey hunting. He said, look, I need you to help
Speaker 1: me do something. And I thought, oh my gosh, he
Speaker 1: wants me to help him work on something. It's turkey season.
Speaker 1: I guess apparently he's given up. But whatever it is,
Speaker 1: he's my brother, so I'm gonna help him. I said, well,
Speaker 1: what is it? And he says, I want you to
Speaker 1: come help me kill this turkey. I'm like, what turkey?
Speaker 1: He said. Look, I'm gonna be honest. I've been hunting
Speaker 1: this turkey every day for eleven days in a row.
Speaker 1: In eleven days in the row, I have zigged when
Speaker 1: I should have zagged. He's done everything in the world
Speaker 1: opposite of what he did the day before. If I
Speaker 1: set up on the north side of him, he flies
Speaker 1: down to the south. For two days in a row,
Speaker 1: he'll do that. On the third day I set up
Speaker 1: on the south side, He'll fly down to the north.
Speaker 1: He's doing everything. He's reading my mind. And the only
Speaker 1: way I think I can kill him as if we
Speaker 1: tag team him. Will you help me? Well, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: I will help you. And all the time and in
Speaker 1: my mind I'm thinking I'm gonna kill that turkey. So
Speaker 1: the next morning I get to his house well before daylight.
Speaker 1: He's got breakfast ready, and we sat and we have
Speaker 1: breakfast and we drink coffee, and we discussed on how
Speaker 1: we're gonna attack this turkey. And he tells me then
Speaker 1: where he's at down the river bottoms. So with breakfast
Speaker 1: at we uh we load up in his truck and
Speaker 1: down the road we go. Now where this is at
Speaker 1: is in the Sleen River bottoms in Cleveland County. There's
Speaker 1: a boat ramp there that's named after my father. My
Speaker 1: family's connection with that area and that hunting ground is
Speaker 1: go dates back to when our family helped settle that
Speaker 1: part of Arkansas before the Civil War. So it's we
Speaker 1: to say that we've got a connection to that place
Speaker 1: down there is is a very huge understatement. But anyway,
Speaker 1: we get down there, we park on the side of
Speaker 1: the road, the gravel road, and there's an old dim
Speaker 1: logging road that goes up into the woods. And that's
Speaker 1: where he's been here in this turkey gobblin every morning
Speaker 1: two or three days before the season it started, so
Speaker 1: actually about fifteen days in a row this turkey has gobbled,
Speaker 1: Tim said, from the same tree, almost on the same
Speaker 1: couple of acres. Anyway, so morning number twelve, we're sitting there,
Speaker 1: birds start chirping a little bit. It gets goblin time. Nothing,
Speaker 1: it gets on past first goblin time, nothing, nothing, no
Speaker 1: turkeys anywhere. It gets past fly down time. Nothing, not
Speaker 1: a peat. So he said, well, let's go down the
Speaker 1: road to another spot. Let's make a big loop up
Speaker 1: through the woods. Let's see if we can strike up
Speaker 1: a gobbler. So that's what we do. We drive about
Speaker 1: half mile down the road, we get out of the
Speaker 1: truck and we start walking. We make a huge loop
Speaker 1: up through the bottoms, up through the river bottoms, and
Speaker 1: we never find or here a turkey. We find lots
Speaker 1: of fresh sign but we don't do any good. So
Speaker 1: it's now it's after ten when we get back to
Speaker 1: the truck and we're we're just defeated. I just knew
Speaker 1: I was gonna be the good luck charm for that,
Speaker 1: but also I was kind of aggravated that I had
Speaker 1: wasted my morning to kill my second turkey down there
Speaker 1: helping my brother in his feudal attempt with this turkey
Speaker 1: that was obviously smarter than both of us. So on
Speaker 1: the way out, he says, you know, I'm gonna pull
Speaker 1: back in and see if I can uh make this
Speaker 1: turkey gobblin old hickory nut, old tough one. So he
Speaker 1: pulls over on the side of the road there. I
Speaker 1: just cracked my window to listen because it's it's dinner time.
Speaker 1: And for those of you that don't know, down here
Speaker 1: we eat breakfast, and then we eat dinner at noon,
Speaker 1: and then we eat supper. So now you know the
Speaker 1: time of the day I'm talking about. So he walks
Speaker 1: in front of this truck. He's got an old box
Speaker 1: call in his hand, and and he doesn't get to
Speaker 1: the third yelp on that box when that turkey gobbled
Speaker 1: out there, and he couldn't have been more than a
Speaker 1: hundred yards. It was so loud in the truck that
Speaker 1: I thought he could see it. So we were so close.
Speaker 1: And the look of astonishment and amazement and surprise and
Speaker 1: fear on my brother's face when he turned and looked
Speaker 1: at me sitting in the cabin of the truck was
Speaker 1: a look I'll never forget. So I eased the door open,
Speaker 1: grabbed my call, and up the road. I mean, we
Speaker 1: are tiptoeing up this road. It's a little dim road
Speaker 1: to get away from the truck, just far enough and
Speaker 1: at an angle that you can't see the truck that
Speaker 1: that's parked there on the gravel. So we get just
Speaker 1: out of side of that truck and we sat down.
Speaker 1: And our plan had been for him to sit close
Speaker 1: and me to sit behind him, or at a different angle,
Speaker 1: and maybe I could we could get the turkey working
Speaker 1: and then I could take over the calling and he
Speaker 1: would come on end to investigating, and Tim would be
Speaker 1: close to him, and he had dropped the hammer on.
Speaker 1: But this morning, since we had no time to prep
Speaker 1: no no time to get where we initially plan to do.
Speaker 1: When we sat down, we sat down beside each other.
Speaker 1: He is his shoulders touching my show older. Now we're
Speaker 1: staring out and through this the bottom, and it's it's
Speaker 1: a hardwood bottom, but there's there's some undergrowth in there,
Speaker 1: and there's some briar bushes, and there's a few small
Speaker 1: trees and the leaves have put out pretty good. So
Speaker 1: it's while it's open, there still is places where you
Speaker 1: could actually move. A turkey could walk through there and
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be able to see him. So my brother
Speaker 1: sticks his mouth, calling his mouth, he makes lot up
Speaker 1: in the turkey gobbles. I mean, he's just wow. I
Speaker 1: mean it's right there. And I look and my brother says,
Speaker 1: he whispers to me, can you see him? I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see his fan. He said, don't shoot him.
Speaker 1: I said, okay, I want I need to mention that.
Speaker 1: When we sat down there, the mosquitoes were so thick
Speaker 1: and in the grass on the edge of that road,
Speaker 1: and it sounds like a covered quail. When we sat down,
Speaker 1: it was just a constant buzzing until that turkey gobbled.
Speaker 1: And when he did that, all our attention was directed
Speaker 1: towards him, and I forgot about the mosquito. So I'm
Speaker 1: looking at him and I said, can you see him? No,
Speaker 1: I can't see him. I said, what I can see him?
Speaker 1: Tim said, don't shoot him. I said, okay, I won't shoot.
Speaker 1: Where's he? I said, he's straight down my gun barrel.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it. Can you see him? He says, no, No,
Speaker 1: I can't see him. Please don't shoot him. I said,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna shoot. Turkey goes behind some bushes, said
Speaker 1: I can't see him, and here my brother go make
Speaker 1: a soft moment. He just went m I thought that
Speaker 1: he's scared. This turkey's gonna get away. About the time
Speaker 1: the turkey walks out behind that bush and he's coming
Speaker 1: towards us. Now, this turkey is fifty yards and he's
Speaker 1: getting close to the gun range for sure, but he's
Speaker 1: walking towards us, and he's not scared. And the goal
Speaker 1: for this mission is for my brother to kill this turkey.
Speaker 1: I said, I can see him. He said, please don't
Speaker 1: kill him. I'm like, okay, I won't kill him. I
Speaker 1: thought he was fixing a cry. But the turkey makes
Speaker 1: two or three more steps, goes into full stred. I said,
Speaker 1: can you see him? He said no, please don't kill him.
Speaker 1: I said, I'm not going to kill him. Then my
Speaker 1: brother went and I and here he's grunting, he's straining,
Speaker 1: and I don't have any idea what what the problem is.
Speaker 1: But I can't look over at him to see him,
Speaker 1: because the turkey is within forty yards now, and there's
Speaker 1: no way that he wouldn't see either one of us moved.
Speaker 1: My brother keeps making that sound. I thought maybe he
Speaker 1: was having a stroke. I didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 1: But finally he says, I see him. I said, you
Speaker 1: can you kill him? And boom, his shotgun goes off.
Speaker 1: Old turkey rolls over and commences the flopping. We get
Speaker 1: up and run out there and we're he's got his
Speaker 1: foot on his neck and we're high fiving and hugging
Speaker 1: and talking about all the things that culminated in that
Speaker 1: hard morning to hunting that finally we're we're victorious and
Speaker 1: standing there looking at that turkey on the ground, A
Speaker 1: big turkey too, And I said, hey, that racket that
Speaker 1: you was making, What in the world was that? He said, huh,
Speaker 1: I said, while we were sitting there beside one another,
Speaker 1: you kept talking and then he was grunting or straining
Speaker 1: or something. They just I didn't what was going on.
Speaker 1: He said, Oh, man, remember moskeeters back there. I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do, I sure do. It was at this point
Speaker 1: my brother described how multitude of mosquitoes had taken roost
Speaker 1: in his nether regions and proceeded to give him a
Speaker 1: very painful one way blood transfusion. He said it was
Speaker 1: almost to the point where he couldn't keep the wagonhage.
Speaker 1: Anyway he did, We prevailed, and we got the turkey.
Speaker 1: Ha another regions. For a cornbread connoisseur, this was pretty diplomatic.
Speaker 1: You ever considered working for the United Nations? Pretty boy
Speaker 1: reeves switching gears. This next story is one of my
Speaker 1: personal favorites. It involves a tough public gland gobbler and
Speaker 1: some lightning. I'll be telling this story. It was late
Speaker 1: April and I've been hearing a couple of birds roosting
Speaker 1: on a big pine ridge across a big holler from
Speaker 1: where I was hunt. I decided that I would look
Speaker 1: on a map, which I didn't have on x back
Speaker 1: in those days, looked out a map, figured out how
Speaker 1: to drive around there closer than I went in the
Speaker 1: next afternoon, and I took my son Bear John nucom
Speaker 1: with me and it was gonna be one of his
Speaker 1: first kind of real turkey hunts where we had a gun,
Speaker 1: we're actually on birds. I took him out of school
Speaker 1: and we went over there. My plan was to just
Speaker 1: get within you know, a hundred yards where I felt
Speaker 1: like they were roosting, set up and just call lightly
Speaker 1: all afternoon and just see if we call on him. Well,
Speaker 1: we get over there, set up the blind. I yelled
Speaker 1: Tira to cackle a little bit, and I go to
Speaker 1: sleep and Bears sitting there and I kind of had
Speaker 1: him scratching on a slate, call and he's having a
Speaker 1: good time. Got him some snacks and drinks and stuff,
Speaker 1: and I'm dead asleep after probably thirty minutes, and we've
Speaker 1: got probably two and a half three hours before dark,
Speaker 1: and directly I Bear starts poking, and he says, Daddy,
Speaker 1: I heard a turkey gobble. And I didn't really know
Speaker 1: how much he knew what a turkey sounded like. And
Speaker 1: so I said, did you really which direction? He pointed
Speaker 1: right the direction you know, he thought it came from,
Speaker 1: and directly, sure enough, our turkey gobbles is just probably
Speaker 1: within a hundred fifty yards. I call a little bit
Speaker 1: of answers. I call a little bit of answers. And basically,
Speaker 1: we spend the whole afternoon working this bird from the blind,
Speaker 1: and it came in just almost within gun range. We
Speaker 1: never did fully see it while it was on the ground,
Speaker 1: and it gets dark on us, and this birds probably
Speaker 1: gobbled fifty times. But Bear sees the turkey fly up
Speaker 1: into a big old pine tree and he says, Daddy,
Speaker 1: I just saw that turkey flying to that tree, and
Speaker 1: I didn't see it. And then I said, which tree?
Speaker 1: And he points out the tree and describes to me
Speaker 1: where the tree is, and you know, I believe him,
Speaker 1: and I know the tree this turkey is in, which
Speaker 1: is a pretty rare thing in turkey hunting. So we
Speaker 1: go home that night and the next morning I decide
Speaker 1: that I'm gonna go in and it's late in the season,
Speaker 1: and these birds are tough, man, they just don't respond
Speaker 1: to calls. They've been highly pressured. And I knew that
Speaker 1: to kill this turkey number one, I wasn't gonna call
Speaker 1: much at all, if any, And I knew I had
Speaker 1: to be very close to that tree, and so I
Speaker 1: had a game plan. I was gonna get in there
Speaker 1: a minimum of two, probably three hours before the crack
Speaker 1: of dawn. The woods were dry, man, it was crunchy,
Speaker 1: crackly dry, and there was no way that I was
Speaker 1: gonna slip up real close to this roost tree without
Speaker 1: spooking this turkey. So my idea was to get in
Speaker 1: there super early, and I was gonna get within about
Speaker 1: two yards of the tree. I was gonna take my
Speaker 1: boots off, and I had some little booty inserts, like
Speaker 1: in an insulated boot, and I was gonna put those
Speaker 1: over my sock feet so that I could walk essentially barefoot.
Speaker 1: And I was gonna take two hours and get basically
Speaker 1: within shotgun range of that roost tree. And I was
Speaker 1: just gonna walk because a turkey, you know, they're they're
Speaker 1: up in a tree at night and they're hearing deer walk.
Speaker 1: They're here, and possums walked by there, hearing skunks walked by,
Speaker 1: so they're used to stuff walking, but not the cadence
Speaker 1: of a man. So I was just gonna creep in there,
Speaker 1: and I was gonna be within shotgun range of that
Speaker 1: tree at daylight. Well, I wake up that morning that
Speaker 1: it is a fine April morning for killing a turkey.
Speaker 1: No wind, you can see the stars, everything's beautiful. There's
Speaker 1: no forecasted rain whatsoever. I drive out there is about
Speaker 1: an hour from my house. I pull up, I walk
Speaker 1: all the way back in their long ways back in there,
Speaker 1: and I pull over the mountain to where I'm kind
Speaker 1: of in this turkey's domain, and I hear him gobble.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's probably two and a half hours before daylight,
Speaker 1: and I hear that sucker gobble in the dark, and
Speaker 1: it just kind of shocked me. But that you know,
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, well good, I'm gonna know just where
Speaker 1: this tree yet. I'm just gonna walk right to him.
Speaker 1: And I go to taking my boots off, and I
Speaker 1: see just kind of like a flash of light from
Speaker 1: a long ways off that just kind of makes me
Speaker 1: jerk my head up and I look again, and I
Speaker 1: see another flash, and I go, Man, that's lightning. But
Speaker 1: it was so far away that I couldn't hear the thunder. Well,
Speaker 1: I pull up my phone and I was able to
Speaker 1: get self coverage, and I pulled up weather dot Com,
Speaker 1: and man on the Arkansas radar map, there was not
Speaker 1: a single cloud in the entire state of Arkansas except four.
Speaker 1: A few miles west of where I was at, there
Speaker 1: was a thunderhead, bright red thunder head about as big
Speaker 1: as the end of a pen, showing up on that
Speaker 1: radar and you kind of zoom in and it's just
Speaker 1: a single thunder head and it is a couple of
Speaker 1: miles from me, and man by the time I pulled
Speaker 1: it up, I saw more lightning, and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden I heard the thunder and Turkey gobbles at the thunder.
Speaker 1: He was here in the thunder and I couldn't even
Speaker 1: hear it. Well, it's closer, and I just go, I'll
Speaker 1: be darn, here comes up. Here comes a thunderhead. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't sit there very long, and I started seeing
Speaker 1: the trees sway, and I start hearing the wind blow
Speaker 1: a little bit, and directly I see lightning and thunder
Speaker 1: real quick. I'm up on a high knob. Man, it
Speaker 1: was no time before that thunderstorm was on top of me.
Speaker 1: And the way I described it is that it engulfed
Speaker 1: that mountain. Wind started to blow, trees started to shake,
Speaker 1: rain started to pound the ground, Lightning started to crack.
Speaker 1: And what did I do? Man? I put my boots
Speaker 1: back on and I took off and almost a run
Speaker 1: straight for that turkey. I thought, holy cow, what an
Speaker 1: incredible cover to get close to this turkey. And as
Speaker 1: I moving through the woods, I'm carrying my shotgun on
Speaker 1: my right hand, and a bolt of lightning strike so close.
Speaker 1: I literally threw the shotgun and laid face first on
Speaker 1: the ground and was just praying that I didn't get
Speaker 1: struck by lightning. I laid on the ground, and I
Speaker 1: promise you I threw that shotgun and laid there and
Speaker 1: tell the bulk of that storm passed by me. And
Speaker 1: you know how a thunderstorm is. You know that the
Speaker 1: peak of it passes and then it's still raining behind it,
Speaker 1: and it's a little bit less. Well, as soon as
Speaker 1: the peak passed and the thunder the lightning was kind
Speaker 1: of away from me, I went and found my shotgun,
Speaker 1: and man, I just walked right up. It's still black dark,
Speaker 1: it's still two hours before daylight. And I just walked
Speaker 1: right up to where I believe that turkey is and
Speaker 1: get set up. And I am soaking wet, my gut
Speaker 1: is wet, but man, I am in the game. Well,
Speaker 1: daylight comes, birds start chirping, crows start crowing, and that
Speaker 1: turkey is there. I know it. I heard him gobling
Speaker 1: before the thunderstorm. That he does not say a word.
Speaker 1: He doesn't say a word. Fly down time comes and
Speaker 1: I'm not I don't dare yelp at this urkey very
Speaker 1: much at all. But I put my diaphragm call in
Speaker 1: and I did a a cluck and probably a three
Speaker 1: note yelp, and I put the call up. I was
Speaker 1: done in directly. Man I just I knew I was
Speaker 1: so close to I would see this turkey fly down.
Speaker 1: I never saw the turkey fly down. Just right at
Speaker 1: about fly down time, I see that sucker as wet
Speaker 1: as a Labrador retriever that just jumped out of a
Speaker 1: river from retrieving a Mallard duck. He comes walking up
Speaker 1: the hill, big old beard, just swinging, and he was
Speaker 1: kind of skirting around me going up the mountain, and
Speaker 1: I kind of wheeled to my right just a little bit,
Speaker 1: never gobbled, and man, he raised up his old neck
Speaker 1: and boom, killed that turkey. Man, I've rarely been so
Speaker 1: proud of a turkey. And I went and got him,
Speaker 1: and it was just a big gobbler, and I hiped
Speaker 1: him out of there, put him in the truck, and
Speaker 1: I took him to Bear John's school and I got
Speaker 1: him out of school, and a bunch of the kids
Speaker 1: from class came out. And I killed what I called
Speaker 1: the lightning bird. But I never would have done it
Speaker 1: without Bear's help of telling me right where that sucker
Speaker 1: was roosted. I'll never forget the old lightning bird. This
Speaker 1: next story, though, it is from my dad, Gary Newcom.
Speaker 1: It's important to know going into this that when he
Speaker 1: killed this bird, very few people were using bows to
Speaker 1: kill spring turkeys, and if they were, they were using blinds,
Speaker 1: which is something that he didn't want to do. Here's
Speaker 1: old Gary Believer Newcomb. Well, you know, years ago what
Speaker 1: I don't know what ten fifteen, I had that black
Speaker 1: Max Matthews bow. I'm pretty sure you had your old
Speaker 1: green truck. You were in high school, and uh, back
Speaker 1: then we had quite a few turkeys, and I killed.
Speaker 1: I'd usually kill a turkey just about every year, and
Speaker 1: then i'd bow hunt, bow hunt for turkeys, bow hunt
Speaker 1: for turkey. So I went out and UH had my
Speaker 1: bowl in that morning. Nothing was gobbling. It just looked
Speaker 1: like a dead morning. And so I went in an
Speaker 1: area that I knew how it was quite a few turkeys,
Speaker 1: and UH started climbing a mountain. Got kind of tired,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, this looks pretty good right here.
Speaker 1: I think I'll just sit down, take a break, and
Speaker 1: uh actually set up, you know, I mean not blinds
Speaker 1: or anything, but just set on the ground in a
Speaker 1: place where I could actually shoot. And so I'm sitting
Speaker 1: there on the side of this mountain, up against a
Speaker 1: good tree, which gave me a little camo, had some
Speaker 1: brush out around me, and so I just I'd call,
Speaker 1: just normal calling, I'd call, and UH sit there, and
Speaker 1: you know, fifteen minutes later, it was real dry, and
Speaker 1: I heard what sounded to me like two turkeys, and
Speaker 1: one of them sounded like a big turkey. So in
Speaker 1: my mind, I had a I had a I had
Speaker 1: a gobbler, big gobbler of Jake coming in. They came
Speaker 1: in about twenty yards above me, and they just kept walking,
Speaker 1: you know. They they walked to the west. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of looking to the north, and uh, they
Speaker 1: did it just by the textbook. That was what was
Speaker 1: so interesting to me. I mean, it's like I figured
Speaker 1: this old gobberl was probably a professor. He was teaching
Speaker 1: these young guys what to do. Don't come downhill to
Speaker 1: a call, You'll get shot. So they they go down,
Speaker 1: you know, out of sight. I never did see them.
Speaker 1: I could just hear them, and and they dropped down
Speaker 1: to my level. And then the big gobbler just came in.
Speaker 1: The other bird didn't come. I don't know what the
Speaker 1: deal was. So I had my bowl ready, had everything
Speaker 1: ready to shoot, but the birds coming straight at me,
Speaker 1: so I don't get a shot. Well, there's a log
Speaker 1: on the ground, you know, eighteen inches tall or so foot,
Speaker 1: and it ran about ten fifteen feet running down the mountain,
Speaker 1: and there was a brush at one end, but there
Speaker 1: was an opening at the at the top side up here.
Speaker 1: So I'm sitting there and I mean, this bird put
Speaker 1: on a show like I've seen very few times, and
Speaker 1: he came in and he got the strutton, but when
Speaker 1: he got to that log, he wouldn't cross it, just
Speaker 1: like the textbooks. So he started going up and down
Speaker 1: that log, and I noticed as he on the log. No, no,
Speaker 1: he's not on the log. When you repeated it to
Speaker 1: me the other day, you said on the log, he
Speaker 1: wouldn't on the log. He he he wouldn't come over the log.
Speaker 1: He was on the other side of the log, and
Speaker 1: he and he would he would strut up, which I
Speaker 1: didn't have a shot because he's looking at me. Then
Speaker 1: he had turned and he had strut down. And so
Speaker 1: when he when he made his turn and started down,
Speaker 1: I had a shot. And so I watched him do
Speaker 1: this two or three times, and I mean he's close.
Speaker 1: I mean he's ten fifteen feet away. So once I
Speaker 1: saw his pattern, then then as soon as he came
Speaker 1: up and he made his turn and I'm like this,
Speaker 1: I'm full draw. And then once he started down that log,
Speaker 1: I just shot his head off almost, you know, I
Speaker 1: mean it was pretty simple. And so once I shot him,
Speaker 1: I shot him right at the base of the neck.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, when you're when you're shooting with
Speaker 1: a bow, it's pretty hard to kill them unless you
Speaker 1: hit him just in the right spot on the wings
Speaker 1: or take the head off or something. And I was
Speaker 1: shooting the big jackhammers. One reason the hunt was special.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've got like all hunters, and I had
Speaker 1: a lot of turkey kills that were really special. But
Speaker 1: and the only reason this was so special was that
Speaker 1: the bird put on a big show. He was real close.
Speaker 1: But also nobody was killing birds with a boat. Now.
Speaker 1: When I was off at a big bow shop, I
Speaker 1: ran into one guy that killed him pretty regularly. And
Speaker 1: one thing he told me, and that's I used that
Speaker 1: a lot. He told me that that if you'll cackle
Speaker 1: real hard, they can be looking right at you and
Speaker 1: you can kill them. So I didn't want to blind.
Speaker 1: I knew the blind would work better, but if I
Speaker 1: couldn't kill them just looking at him straight in the eyes,
Speaker 1: I didn't want. I didn't want to kill one day
Speaker 1: an so I never took anything. There were times when
Speaker 1: I might throw some camo cover out around if it
Speaker 1: was really out in the open, but almost never, I just,
Speaker 1: you know, I just like to sit in the woods
Speaker 1: and see if I could get them in close. So
Speaker 1: there were guys doing it, but not around here. Scott
Speaker 1: Brown is just a few years older than me. We
Speaker 1: grew up in the same town and I've always looked
Speaker 1: up to him as a deer and turkey hunter. When
Speaker 1: I was in my early twenties, I'd spend hours listening
Speaker 1: to Scott tell turkey and deer stories and describe in
Speaker 1: detail how game used mountain terrain. I've never forgot what
Speaker 1: he taught me. Here is one of Scott's favorite stories.
Speaker 1: My friend of mine, Randy Steph, had called me and
Speaker 1: some man we ought to tell what we ought to
Speaker 1: do on Wednesday, and we're off, I said, turkey in
Speaker 1: I well, I guess we could do that. I said,
Speaker 1: I don't know where we go. I hadn't been out,
Speaker 1: and you know, i'd I'd be going in the blind,
Speaker 1: but go to a place that's pretty familiar with and
Speaker 1: we probably find a bird. He says. Man, I'm game
Speaker 1: for whatever. So drove in here west of town kind
Speaker 1: of access this mountain that I like to hunt from
Speaker 1: the south side. You know, we got in here extra
Speaker 1: early because it's a it's a good thirty minute pull
Speaker 1: from the time you get out of the truck to
Speaker 1: the top of the mountain probably, So we pulled it
Speaker 1: on on on top and there was kind of a
Speaker 1: big gap in there, and we sat around in there
Speaker 1: till daylight, and there was a turkey that started gobbling
Speaker 1: on the south side of the mountain across a big
Speaker 1: holla out there. Within the first couple of hours of daylight,
Speaker 1: Scott and Randy moving on a bird that was a
Speaker 1: long ways away. He was gobbling every breath, but by
Speaker 1: the time they made it to him, so did someone else,
Speaker 1: and the bird got spooked. The boys were pretty down.
Speaker 1: I think we're both a little bit disappointed that that
Speaker 1: didn't work out. So decided we're gonn to work our
Speaker 1: way back. So we pulled back up kind of headed
Speaker 1: east and I told Brandy, we said, let's walk up
Speaker 1: this ridge and we'll get out in this divide up
Speaker 1: hair is a really good place and we'll spend some time.
Speaker 1: So he pulled this big ridge just one of those
Speaker 1: places when you walk into it you just know, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just a beautiful place. Everything ties together right there.
Speaker 1: I walked in there. I said, Randy, you might not
Speaker 1: know what you're looking at right here, but I said,
Speaker 1: I know of half a dozen big gobblers have been
Speaker 1: killed right here in this divide in my lifetime. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is the spot. We sit around there about five
Speaker 1: minutes probably, and I decided I was gonna call. And
Speaker 1: when I called, a turkey dis gobbled above us on
Speaker 1: the mountain, just just like like it's supposed to happen.
Speaker 1: And when he gobbled, Randy looked at me and I said, Randy,
Speaker 1: we're about to kill this turkey. And he said, all right,
Speaker 1: where do you What do we need to do? And
Speaker 1: I said, just get right out there, but that big
Speaker 1: pine tree face your gun towards the mountain, right there
Speaker 1: in those open woods, and I said, were we are
Speaker 1: where that turkey wants to be? Anyway, in a minute,
Speaker 1: the turkey hadn't seen anything, so I'm gonna call him
Speaker 1: one more time. See where he's at. When I called
Speaker 1: that time, that turkey gobbled, and I mean we should
Speaker 1: have been looking at him, you know, he's just right there.
Speaker 1: And about that time I looked past Randy looking towards
Speaker 1: the foot of the mountain, and I see the bird
Speaker 1: fan out. And when I saw the fan come up,
Speaker 1: I saw Randy kind of get down on his shotgun.
Speaker 1: And it's a pretty good ways it's fifty sixty yards
Speaker 1: through the woods to where this turkey's fanned out. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at a bird over fifty yards away probably,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, I hear I mean bad close.
Speaker 1: I don't even have my shotgun up. I gota laid
Speaker 1: across my lap, you know, just kind of kick back
Speaker 1: to watch the show. Anyway. I said, Randy, did you
Speaker 1: hear that? And Randy never said a word. He just
Speaker 1: because the whole time he's looking at what he believes
Speaker 1: as the turkey that we're trying to kill here, and
Speaker 1: so am I. And about that time, just again just
Speaker 1: just close, really close, and I can't I can't find
Speaker 1: this turkey. And I'm thinking, there's no way that turkey.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at the one I'm here. There's a big
Speaker 1: old bull pine tree. I'm when I'm talking, one of
Speaker 1: them huge pines, about ten steps in front of Randy.
Speaker 1: So this big gobbler just steps out behind this bullpine
Speaker 1: tree in about ten yards from Randy's gunn barrel. What
Speaker 1: had happened? He came in to us right behind that
Speaker 1: pine tree the whole time, and we just just never
Speaker 1: saw him. And he steps out front this pine tree
Speaker 1: he's just right on top of us. Of course, I panic.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting there with my shotgun laid across my lap,
Speaker 1: wishing I had it on my knee because Randy's out
Speaker 1: of position. He's aiming at these other turkeys. The turkey
Speaker 1: comes up hard to his right. Anyway, the turkey just
Speaker 1: kind of just kind of walks out behind that pine,
Speaker 1: and the walks behind another big pine. And when he does,
Speaker 1: Randy's able to He did, he did perfect. He just
Speaker 1: stayed still until the turkey got behind the next pine
Speaker 1: and he just swung the barrel over, got it up
Speaker 1: on his knee. Turkey walks out from behind the pine,
Speaker 1: hasn't seen any of that go down, and Randy just bam,
Speaker 1: he shoots, and when he shoots, he just kills the
Speaker 1: turkey stone dead, which rarely ever happens. Right, So you
Speaker 1: shoot probably nine of turkeys. You shoot flop for a
Speaker 1: little bit after you shoot him. He pulled the cord
Speaker 1: on this thing. Look when he shoots, the thing just
Speaker 1: falls over stone dead. Of course, there's a big commotion,
Speaker 1: and these other turkeys blow up and fly off and
Speaker 1: all this other stuff, and so Raine's kind of standing there.
Speaker 1: He goes tell you just had to look on his face.
Speaker 1: He said, I don't know how I missed that turkey. Randy,
Speaker 1: you didn't miss that turkey. He's like, I didn't. I
Speaker 1: was like, no, that thing. He's laying stone dead right there.
Speaker 1: He's like, oh, man, He's like, because I thought i'd missed.
Speaker 1: When I shot, he was nowhere to be found. I
Speaker 1: thought he was just gone, you know. I'm like, no, man,
Speaker 1: he's laying right there. You killed him, you know. So anyway,
Speaker 1: we jump up and go out there, and I mean,
Speaker 1: he's killed a dandy. I mean it's a you know,
Speaker 1: close to a twenty pound turkey, had good beard and
Speaker 1: spurs and all that. And he's like, what do you
Speaker 1: wanna do down? I said, let's pull back up on
Speaker 1: the mountain where we started out this morning. So we
Speaker 1: pulled back up and on the main mountain, walked out
Speaker 1: across what we called a big gap. It kind of
Speaker 1: got back around in there. We got in there and
Speaker 1: I said, Randy, that turkey this morning, it was about
Speaker 1: halfway down this leg. I want to call right here
Speaker 1: and let's just see what happens. And man, I put
Speaker 1: my calm my mouth. I called one time that turkey
Speaker 1: just gobbled big right below us. This is about eleven
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning, and I really wanting to gobble
Speaker 1: again without me calling him, so I'm just kind of
Speaker 1: sitting there waiting on the gobble. Well, he gobbled, but
Speaker 1: when he did he was half the distance. In fact,
Speaker 1: he wasn't much out of sight from us, and so
Speaker 1: we just had to take what we had right there. Randy,
Speaker 1: sit down right there. I sat down, I got my
Speaker 1: gun up, and by the time I got my gun up,
Speaker 1: I reached down and grabbed my face mask, which was
Speaker 1: down around my neck, and I pulled it up over
Speaker 1: my face. And when I pulled that face mask over
Speaker 1: my face and put my hand back down on my gun,
Speaker 1: I looked and can see that turkey coming the whole time.
Speaker 1: He's instruct Randy immediate is like I seen him, and
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, I've caught him right here. He's
Speaker 1: coming round with the leg to us. He just keeps
Speaker 1: coming up. The leg to us, just keeps coming, just
Speaker 1: keeps coming. Anyway. It kind of starts around to my left,
Speaker 1: which is be kind of the east of me there,
Speaker 1: starts around to my left a little bit. The whole
Speaker 1: time his turkeys and struck like he has not dropped
Speaker 1: out of strut even to take a step. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's just coming the whole time strut. He's drumming good.
Speaker 1: I mean the whole he's doing everything you want a
Speaker 1: turkey to do. You know. He finally gets down here below.
Speaker 1: It's probably about forty yards, maybe a little bit more gobbles. Look,
Speaker 1: try to add his kind of gobbles. All I'm really
Speaker 1: waiting on at this point is for him to get
Speaker 1: out of strut. Anyway. He swings around there, swings around,
Speaker 1: and he just won't drop out of strut, and he's
Speaker 1: about to get around to my left heart enough that
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not gonna be able to swing around anymore.
Speaker 1: So finally he walked out there and open, and I
Speaker 1: just cut at him a little bit. And when I
Speaker 1: cut out him through his head up big, just like
Speaker 1: you want. I shot him at about thirty yards, you know,
Speaker 1: pulled the double. There can't be a better feeling than
Speaker 1: walking out of the spring hardwoods with two big gobblers.
Speaker 1: Our last story is told by a young author and
Speaker 1: aspiring media personality named Steve ronnella of Meat Eater. He
Speaker 1: just recently published a book called outdoor kids in an
Speaker 1: inside world. You might want to check it out. You
Speaker 1: might be surprised to to know that turkey hunting is
Speaker 1: probably Steve's favorite animal to hunt, and he's chased after
Speaker 1: a lot of them. Steve always has some insight and
Speaker 1: a good story. Here's Steve. Now. I like UH books,
Speaker 1: like films, I like to cook. But when it comes
Speaker 1: to UH, you know, physical disciplines, right, Like I'm only
Speaker 1: interested in one thing. I'm interested in hunting and fishing
Speaker 1: and trapping three things. But I imagine I'm all sort
Speaker 1: of bundled together as a single entity. Anyhow. I have kids,
Speaker 1: and so I put a lot of pressure on my
Speaker 1: kids to do what I like to do. Like I
Speaker 1: want to take them to do what I like to
Speaker 1: do because I am my best as a parent when
Speaker 1: I'm in an arena that that resonates with me and
Speaker 1: brings passion. I want them to see like discipline, passion, drive,
Speaker 1: like manifested to the things we do. I don't care
Speaker 1: if like if someone told me, like in terms of
Speaker 1: my daughter, hung and tell a story about if someone
Speaker 1: told me that when my daughter is twenty, she's gonna
Speaker 1: like move to l a and open a smoothie shop. Right,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be liked. I'd be like, okay, good, I'm
Speaker 1: glad she'll go there and do that. Knowing the stuff
Speaker 1: she knows from the time she spent with her old
Speaker 1: man out hunting and fishing. I'm glad I armed her
Speaker 1: with those experiences. Right. So it's not like a means
Speaker 1: to an end. It's sort of an end in itself.
Speaker 1: In the state where I live, a kid's gotta be
Speaker 1: ten start hunting turkeys. Other than Montana, right, there's other states,
Speaker 1: a bunch of them in fact, But this particular one
Speaker 1: has story has to do with Wisconsin, where they don't
Speaker 1: have that age requirement. As long as they're worth their
Speaker 1: mentor a licensed mentor, right, they hunt whatever age it's.
Speaker 1: It's it's as it should be, and it's up to
Speaker 1: the family to decide when it's appropriate for a kid
Speaker 1: to hunt. So when my daughter got to be eight
Speaker 1: years old, this is last spring, I packed her up
Speaker 1: and took her out to Wisconsin for the youth turkey season.
Speaker 1: In preparation for this, I'm pounding in her head that
Speaker 1: she's gonna shoot a turkey, like we're gonna call in
Speaker 1: a turkey she's gonna shoot the turkey in the head.
Speaker 1: And I get her a little break open four ten shotgun,
Speaker 1: and we loaded with the stuff called federal ts s
Speaker 1: right like Tongusten super shot. Right. It makes it that
Speaker 1: you can shoot it four ten but really deal death
Speaker 1: on turkeys with such a small caliber, if you will, shotgun.
Speaker 1: To make it easier for her to aim, I put
Speaker 1: a red dot site on it, so we start shooting
Speaker 1: at targets to look like turkeys, and I load her
Speaker 1: up with game load, like a load that doesn't kick
Speaker 1: that strong, not that very a very powerful load, right,
Speaker 1: so she doesn't learn to flinch from the re coil
Speaker 1: and the noise. And we just train her up on that,
Speaker 1: aiming this little break open shotgun with a red dot
Speaker 1: site at turkey targets. And I'm like pounding in her head,
Speaker 1: like you know, you gotta aim for the waddles, right,
Speaker 1: aim for the waddles, aimed for the wattles. And I
Speaker 1: make it in her head that the measure of success
Speaker 1: as a turkey hunter is whether or not you aimed
Speaker 1: for the wattles and shot the turkey in the head.
Speaker 1: And I even told her everything else, everything else, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be heavily involved. But when it comes to that,
Speaker 1: that's your job, right. So we go out and youth
Speaker 1: turkey seasons come early in the year, and you know
Speaker 1: it could be like a snow blizzard, right because it's
Speaker 1: in April. But we go out and it's just glorious weather.
Speaker 1: And uh, we go out and has some encounters, and
Speaker 1: then it gets to be late in the afternoon and
Speaker 1: there's a couple of gobblers just ripping up on this
Speaker 1: ridge line at my buddy Dugs place. So imagine you've
Speaker 1: got like a gentle uh Wisconsin driftless area valley floor.
Speaker 1: There's a creek running through the bottom. On either side
Speaker 1: of this brushy creek bed, you've got corn fields and
Speaker 1: then the corn fields kinda at the edge of the
Speaker 1: corn fields, and then you enter mixed forest, hardwoods, pines,
Speaker 1: a lot of briars, grape vine um, multi flora rose. Right,
Speaker 1: we hear these gobblers ripping up on this ridgeline and
Speaker 1: we go greasing up to the edge of the corn
Speaker 1: field to where we can get some cover, leaning on
Speaker 1: this pine tree, and there's one gobbler in particular going
Speaker 1: hammering up there. I put a hen decoy and then
Speaker 1: Rosie and I back up about twenty yards from that
Speaker 1: hen decoy and we lean against this big white pine
Speaker 1: and we're facing the decoy and the birds are goblin.
Speaker 1: What's now to our left? We just had to put
Speaker 1: the decoy the clear like like the only clear kind
Speaker 1: of shooting land we had. And this gobbler strutting up
Speaker 1: and down the ridge top just hammering. And after a
Speaker 1: while it hammers its way down to where it's it's
Speaker 1: not to our left anymore, but it's like way behind us,
Speaker 1: to our left, and then it starts coming. And eventually
Speaker 1: I'm looking out my peripheral vision and I can I
Speaker 1: can like sense and see this gobbler goblin and also drumming,
Speaker 1: and he's like like right off to my side, man.
Speaker 1: And I'm just telling my daughter, who's facing towards the decoy.
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Rosie, do not move. I'm like, Rosie, do
Speaker 1: not say a word, don't talk, don't talk, don't move,
Speaker 1: don't move, do not talk. Right, And I'm just pounding
Speaker 1: us in their head because this birds come and come
Speaker 1: and come and coming, and this thing passes us by,
Speaker 1: like I think I could have reached out and grabbed
Speaker 1: its neck. But then it's got to pass us by,
Speaker 1: but then walk twenty yards before she's going to become
Speaker 1: aware of its presence, right, And you know, I could
Speaker 1: have just swung around and shot it, but I'm trying
Speaker 1: to like get a good shot opportunity for so the
Speaker 1: bird comes to get this too. That Rosemary is like
Speaker 1: shorter than I am, and she's in my lab, so
Speaker 1: my view at my eye line is different than her
Speaker 1: view from her eye line. My eye line is like
Speaker 1: crystal clear out to the decoy. Her eyeline, unbeknownst to me,
Speaker 1: is just a bunch of sticks. But this is her
Speaker 1: first like real close encounter shooting at a gobler, so
Speaker 1: she doesn't even know to mention it to me. Well,
Speaker 1: this gobler passes me by and it gets to the decoy,
Speaker 1: and this thing is like trying to assault the decoy. Right,
Speaker 1: he's fooled. And I'm telling Rosemary, I'm waiting for the
Speaker 1: gobbler to get in like the right position where it's
Speaker 1: holding still. I'm like, shoot, shoot, shoot, and damn she shoots.
Speaker 1: And Norman want alone shoots at a turkey, expect turkey
Speaker 1: just to pile up, right, This turkey doesn't This turkey
Speaker 1: kind of spins and then lifts off, flying and it
Speaker 1: flies across the cornfield we're in, flies over the brushy creek,
Speaker 1: flies across the other corn field on the other side
Speaker 1: of the creek, and burrows into the nastiest briar patch
Speaker 1: you've ever seen, to the point where it burrows into
Speaker 1: that briar patch and basically imprisons itself in the briar patch,
Speaker 1: like it couldn't leave if it wanted to leave out
Speaker 1: of the briar patch. So I grabbed her we go
Speaker 1: running down across the creek up the other side. I
Speaker 1: am shoots the turkey again, and rather than it being
Speaker 1: like a triumphant moment for her, she is just disappointed
Speaker 1: in herself because that first shot, she hid it in
Speaker 1: the leg, and she said, once we got to analyze them,
Speaker 1: what happened. She said, I couldn't see his head and
Speaker 1: you had to shoot, so I had to shoot and
Speaker 1: the only part, that's the only part I could see.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, why didn't you say that you
Speaker 1: couldn't see its head? And she said, you told me
Speaker 1: not to say anything. So I felt pretty bad. And
Speaker 1: then I felt like I was trying to move the
Speaker 1: goal post, so to speak. I had so focused on
Speaker 1: marksmanship and hit in the head. Then, even though she
Speaker 1: got the turkey, which was like the result we were
Speaker 1: actually after, in her head, it was somehow like her
Speaker 1: first hunt was a failure because I hadn't said our
Speaker 1: goal is getting a turkey. I had said, your job
Speaker 1: is shooting that turkey in the head. Advanced ahead of year.
Speaker 1: Next few turkey season, we get a bird comes in
Speaker 1: and bam, head shot. Bird just piles up in her head.
Speaker 1: If you went and asked you, if you went and
Speaker 1: interviewed her right now, she would tell you the that
Speaker 1: was my first turkey anybody, But what about the other turkey?
Speaker 1: You got? No? Because I didn't hit it in the head.
Speaker 1: And I had asked her this year after we hunted,
Speaker 1: I said, you need to write a thank you note
Speaker 1: to the landowner where we hunted and write him a
Speaker 1: letter and thank you for letting him hunt. And she
Speaker 1: writes her letter, and I read her letter, and she's
Speaker 1: like all this stuff like as your property and all that,
Speaker 1: and she gets to the end and a paraphrase a
Speaker 1: part of this and directly quote her the other part.
Speaker 1: She basically says, if you really stop and think about it. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is technically my second turkey. But the last line
Speaker 1: in her note verbatim is but this is the first
Speaker 1: one I nailed. For the first few seconds that I
Speaker 1: see a guyler's red head bobbing through the timber coming
Speaker 1: to my call, after I've only heard him gobble, I
Speaker 1: am mesmerized to the point of emotional trauma. I continued
Speaker 1: to be amazed at how it feels like a gobbler
Speaker 1: can look into your soul, scrutinizing every square inch of
Speaker 1: your beam. It feels like he can hear your thoughts.
Speaker 1: For a moment, you're completely out of control. It doesn't
Speaker 1: even make rational sense. But it's at this moment we
Speaker 1: connect to and flow inside of something. Primal chemicals are
Speaker 1: released in the body, no less addictive than crack, and
Speaker 1: then the spirit, which science can't track, flames to red
Speaker 1: hot interaction with a wild place that's such an incredible
Speaker 1: time of year, the spring is surely something special. The moment, however,
Speaker 1: is ephemeral. It doesn't last long. It either quickly evaporates
Speaker 1: as the turkey slides into the timber after a soft put.
Speaker 1: But now and then the plan comes together and the
Speaker 1: big gobbler steps into range and you get to take
Speaker 1: him home after the blast of a shotgun or the
Speaker 1: release of an arrow. This happened so few times in
Speaker 1: one's lifetime that most of us keep detailed counts of
Speaker 1: its occurrence. We notch knife handles, keep the beard and
Speaker 1: spurs of turkeys, we collect their tail. Fans, think about that,
Speaker 1: how many things do you actually keep count of in
Speaker 1: your life? Like we said in the last podcast, turkeys,
Speaker 1: especially in the Southeast, are in a tougher spot than
Speaker 1: they've been in a while, and we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: work hard to protect and improve habitat and be cooperative
Speaker 1: with our state game agencies as they begin to manage
Speaker 1: turkeys in a new era. Opportunity is key to igniting passion,
Speaker 1: and passion is the gateway to getting humans excited about
Speaker 1: protecting wildlife. It's a fine balance between a lot of
Speaker 1: opportunity to hunters protecting the resource in the in whatever
Speaker 1: we have to do will be worth it to see
Speaker 1: that big red headed gobbler strutton through the timber in
Speaker 1: the April's yet to come. Long live the goblin turkey. Hey,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for listening to bear Grease. Do me
Speaker 1: a favor, leave us a review on iTunes, and tell
Speaker 1: the worst turkey collar that you know about this podcast,
Speaker 1: and tell somebody about bar Grease this week. I hope
Speaker 1: you finish out your turkey season strong and we'll see
Speaker 1: you next week on The Bear Grease Render