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Never say a turkey won’t do that

As anyone who has spent time in the woods in any kind of hunting and has had success knows, there are many hunts and success stories stored in an individual’s memory bank. We all know that there is always that one story, that one moment that all things known, or thought to have been known, went awry — yet somehow, the hunt still ended in success.

This is definitely one of those stories.

It’s not uncommon to hear turkey hunters both young and old say, “A turkey won’t do that.” I’ve heard it all: They won’t cross a creek, a fence, a ditch, a downed log and won’t travel that distance — you name it. Turkeys won’t come downhill, and turkeys won’t go uphill. The latter has baffled me having grown up in Pennsylvania. I guess for a long time I was convinced that flat, wide open fields were the only place to kill a trophy long beard.

The fact is, all of these cause hunters both young and old to doubt their positions and their setups and resort to moving on turkeys — and in some cases fowling up hunts, when it isn’t always necessary.

I’ll never forget a few years back as I sat outside with my feet kicked up on my patio table and a dear friend pulled up in his truck. It was 80 degrees that early April day and for me, it had already been a long weekend.

I spent hours on Saturday and earlier that Sunday morning trekking through the hills and mountains of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, trying to help a disabled veteran bag a bird. Regrettably, that was done to no success.

Now, most turkey hunters can tell you how competitive things can get between friends in the spring.

No friendly bragging or rivalry runs deeper than that between the guides for the wonderful men and women involved in Operation Second Chance and No Person Left Behind. We all had success for these folks as our ultimate goal, and bragging rights over each other a close second. There may also be a trophy at stake with a large brass turkey perched atop of it that motivates that rivalry (that trophy sits proudly on my mantle for the second out of three years of the hunt).

I was definitely a little discouraged after two unsuccessful days of hunting, I leaned back in my chair, taking in the afternoon sun, and the pleas of my dear friend to put aside my plans to hunt the next morning with my dad and take a veteran just one more time.

What did I have to lose? The property was covered with gobblers in all of our trail camera pictures. It was a property every hunter dreams of, and I couldn’t turn him down or the veteran.

To put even more on the line, I decided to take my father along to watch me work. As the three of us sat there that morning and watched the sun come up, the gobbles began echoing through the woods. Then, the two closest turkeys that were gobbling pitched down the opposite direction, gobbled a few times as they walked further away from us, and they were gone.

Two hours passed, and it was about 9:15 and finally a gobbler from that same direction had sounded off again. Unfortunately, he wasn’t anywhere close to us and was on a neighboring property, so I had begun to soak in the third straight day of defeat. Not only had I failed the man who had so valiantly and dutifully served our country, but my dad was there to watch it all come to a pitiful end.

Then, just like that, it happened. I called, and that same turkey responded from maybe 800 yards away. I thought to myself, “A turkey won’t come from that far away,” but slowly he proved me wrong.

Now aside from being on this a property a handful of times to pull camera cards, I was ill prepared and completely unaware of what was about to happen. As the turkey first popped into our line of sight, now 400 yards away, he caught sight of my decoys sitting on the field edge just in front of us. I would call and he would boom back with a gobble and he began to run toward us until he stopped at the cattle fence about 100 yards to our right. I doubted this hunt again as I thought he wouldn’t cross the fence.

I was half right: He didn’t cross the fence, he actually ducked under it and disappeared completely.

The turkey gobbled again, and this gobble was much different — it sounded like he was really far away. But the ending to the hunt was picture perfect.

At 10 a.m., the turkey reappeared in the line of sight, marched the remaining 45 yards to our decoys and there, with a perfect shot, he was laid to rest.

We laughed about the veteran’s very first turkey, and that is when it happened — I walked over to the fence in shock that the turkey crossed it. There, just on my side of the fence was a drainage ditch that ran into the stream below that was well over my head when I stepped down into it — a small canyon of sorts.

This story is ingrained in my mind every time I talk turkey, because a lot of assumptions about turkeys proved wrong.

The turkey was one of the turkeys that we had originally heard that morning as we listened to them move off into that direction. Where they last gobbled before they were gone they had already come down a hill and across a creek. This particular turkey came from a distance well over 400 yards, went under a fence, crossed a huge ditch and faced his fate.

So this spring as you hit the woods, ease the anxiety of the chase and put the doubts to rest. Have a little faith and your patience will grow and so will your overall success.

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