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OXFORD, Miss. (AP) -- It wouldn't be fair to call Oxford resident Brion Whitten a jack of all trades. Just a lot of them.
He's a former Marine who toured Iraq, Africa and Peru before being honorably discharged with a rank of corporal.
He's authored a book about his experiences outdoors and how they relate to his faith.
He created his own line of award-winning turkey calls.
And now, seemingly out of nowhere, he's become a content creator who's steadily amassed a sizable online audience.
But no matter what adventure life takes him on next, Whitten, 39, remains focused on having fun, spreading the gospel, and telling a few good stories along the way.
As a teenager, Whitten didn't care for turkey hunting. But while on the way to his usual deer hunting spot, he would come across lots of turkeys.
Knowing his stepdad was an avid turkey hunter, Whitten showed him to the spot one day when he was 16 years old.
He had no interest in bagging a gobbler that day, but while his stepdad was unpacking his calls, he handed Whitten the shotgun.
"He called one time, and that bird came down and landed (in front of us)," Whitten said.
From that moment, he was hooked; he's been turkey hunting on his own ever since.
In nature, the hen goes to the gobbler. When hunters use a turkey call, they're essentially reversing nature, tricking the gobbler to come to the "hen."
"That's really one of the things that really intrigued me about making a turkey call," Whitten said. "Because you handmade something, take that handmade something and go out in the woods. And it has to be good enough to fool the actual thing. When you do that with your actual call, that's a feeling that you can't explain."
After receiving a custom hand-turned turkey call from his brother-in-law for Christmas one year, Whitten decided to try making a call himself.
"I got to looking at it, and I said 'Man, as much as I like turkey hunting, I bet I'd be good at this because I know what they're supposed to sound like,'" Whitten said.
Whitten made his first turkey call in 2015.