Turkey season was approaching fast. I just had to get through one more week of classes and then I was off to the woods! My season started on the Wednesday of 3rd week in April, and I had to be sitting in class! I only was going to have the weekend to hunt, so I needed to make it count. I planned on leaving Friday afternoon to be able to scout and set up a blind, so I was all packed up on that Thursday.
Unfortunately, in the early morning hours of Friday my girlfriend had some severe stomach pains and was rushed to the ER. She ended up having to have surgery on her small intestine. She is now recovering and almost back to normal, but God was definitely watching over her!
Of course this took care of my turkey hunting season it seemed. I was in the hospital with her all day Friday and Saturday. She told me she felt bad and wanted me to go turkey hunting. I’m not kidding…she actually wanted me to go. But, I felt bad leaving her. I decided to head home that night once she felt like going to bed. We had a great property to hunt for my turkey season, so we were confident we could get a big old tom in the morning so I could be back at the hospital (which is 2 hours away) by noon on Sunday. This gave me about 3 hours to hunt in the morning, on a property we didn’t get a chance to scout. Because we didn’t get our blind up, I took out my brother Justin’s 20 gauge.
Justin was behind the camera. We got up at about 4:00 AM, after getting a solid 3 hours of sleep. Luckily, the adrenaline kept us awake and alert! We started out to the field where we planned on setting up and started hearing gobbles from all over the place, but none from the ridge we were hunting. We found a spot to set up and I got the decoys out quick. We got settled in and it didn’t take long before the turkeys started pouring into the field…on the opposite end of course. The toms were all henned up and we thought we had no chance. The toms were just following the hens in the opposite direction. All of a sudden, two jakes came out of the woods on the other side of the field and saw our B-mobile decoy. They came running at us from about 200 yards away and came 10 yards away. I was tempted to just fill my tag with one of those little guys! I decided to pass, even though our time was running low. When the jakes disappeared, I snuck out to get our decoys and we started to make our move on the toms that were with all of the hens about 700 yards away. We snuck up to within 150 yards without being detected, but we couldn’t do anything to get them to come our way. All of a sudden, all of the turkeys got in a single file line and started to make their way back towards where they came from. We had to think fast. They got over the hill in front of us and we made the quick decision to take our B-mobile and belly-crawl behind the decoy, to make it look like it was a real tom trying to take the hens. We could see two of the toms about 100 yards away looking our way. It looked like they were interested. We stayed low and I kept making the decoy look as real as possible. We picked our heads up again to see over the hill a little more. The two toms were still a long ways away, but out of nowhere, a white head started wobbling up over the hill right at us. We got down and I got my gun up. It was a big tom that was coming up to defend his territory! He came to the top of the hill and strutted for a few seconds. As soon as he picked his head up, I squeezed the trigger!
It couldn’t have gone better! A 20 yard shot at a big old tom! It wasn’t an easy one to get, but we do what we need to do to get the job done. Justin and I bounced up and went up to admire our trophy. We got some good footage of it all and I managed to make it back to the hospital on time as promised. I am very thankful the weekend turned out as well as it did, considering the circumstances. God was definitely with us!
