Joe sadly looked at his empty turkey tag last night. He dropped his head in shame, wondering how an animal with a brain the size of a marble had outsmarted him again this season. He bought those fancy new decoys for $70. The ones that have a warning sticker because they are SO LIFE LIKE! Didn’t the turkeys read those stickers?
He watched 16 hours worth of calling videos and You
Tube clips. Will Primos, Knight and
Hale, Babe Winklemen, and others told him how to cluck, purr and yelp. Turkeys have access to those, right?
He dressed in the best camouflage. You know that
stuff that the deer can’t smell and the ticks avoid? His jacket and matching pants look like pine
trees, oak limbs and alfalfa stubble all at once! A line up of attacking Navy Seals couldn’t
notice him in a 20 square foot flower garden!
BUT, how then, did those 2 jakes, the most easily fooled of any turkey specimen,
pick him out of a 40-acre band of hardwoods and ground shrubs, like he was
wearing a blinking neon bar sign?
He entered the woods by 5:00 each morning and let
the area settle down for a good hour.
The robins were barely peeping when he left the house for goodness
sakes. He approached carefully, all of his set ups; landing the heel of his
boot first, then the toe. He didn’t
rustle the leaves or snap twigs. The one
time in five days when he got that tickle in his throat, he coughed into the
“Cough Muffler” that only set him back $39.99 from Ebay. The stealth was so great, if Joe had to walk
through soft mud, he even whisked away his tracks with a spruce limb so the
smart gobblers wouldn’t see the imprints.
Regardless of the painstaking measures, 11 times during his season,
after cresting a knoll, he saw turkeys running faster than Olympic sprinters in
the direction totally opposite of he.
Joe went nearly 72 hours without hearing a single
gobble; even though he tried all the turkey sounds and locator blares he could
muster. His new call budget for 2012 was a modest $100. Coyote yips, owl hoots, goose honks, and elk
bugles apparently fell upon deaf turkey ears. After his last ditch effort
Sunday afternoon, he collapsed in exhaustion into his black Toyota Tundra. His
elbow bumped the horn, and the ridges around his parked vehicle erupted with no
less than 17 gobbles from multiple toms… “Go figure,” Joe responded to the
Turkey Gods who were not listening anyway.
Ah…so Joe wearily sits in his armchair in the den.
Like an aging punch-drunk fighter, he riffles through the pages of Turkey
Hunter Magazine and has the Outdoor Channel on his flat screen, as he nods
off to sleep. Of course, his dreams are
not about the nightmarish shortcomings of his past turkey hunting
failures. Nah… he anxiously imagines
slowly snugging his $500 shotgun to his cheek, as a full strut gobbler dances
into his very own decoys…you know, the ones he ordered 15 minutes ago at
Cabela’s Online. They are sure to be here in time for his second tag of the
season…beginning on May 4th.
-TGI
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