I grabbed my Bear Kodiak Magnum recurve (one of my Dads collection) and knocked a giant old heavy cedar arrow tipped with a 150 grain Zwickey broadhead. At 6 steps the gobbler started to push my DSD jake around. When I drew back everything went into slow motion... snap shooting with a recurve takes a second but I distinctly remember all the old instructions my Dad would tell me as I shot when I was a kid. Breathe, draw, aim, anchor, relax, release, follow through, exhale.... At the end of the shot a big ol longbeard lay flopping by my decoy with a severed spine. Got lucky, a half inch higher and I'd have missed, caught the spine and that was it. Better lucky than good I guess!!
As I tried to calm down we had another gobbler start working in almost immediately. My bird was still flopping when bird #2 ran up and Moose shot forward thru the breast feathers, the bird flew off none the worse for wear. I was still going batcrapcrazy when I looked out the back of the blind and yet another gobbler was there with a hen. Minutes later the hen walked by the blind about 2 feet away, I'm not kidding. She came up to the DSD upright hen and started flogging and pecking her in the head!! This got the 3rd gobbler all in a tizzy and he came running up also to beat on the DSD jake deek. Moose again shot forward, this time severeing some of the birds beard!! Both turkeys ran off a little bit but soon calmed down. The hen and tom stayed around for another 45 minutes and when they started to work off we got shuffled around and Moose got an arrow into him at 30 yards!! The bird ran off looking HURT but we still gave him time. We got out to admire my bird first, then started recovering arrows.
Arrow stuck into a tree behind the bird.
We recovered all of Mooses ammo and put the hound dog track job on the bird. A long blood trail led to a nice 2 year old gobbler piled into some leaves.
We got everything back to the blind and took a nice hero shot.
I had to think real hard to think of a better turkey hunt and honestly cannot. I've had some good hunts but never one that had this much close up in your face action with so many adult birds in so little time.... and with such good success!! The fact I got my very first traditional kill is the trumping frosting on the cake. I get excited from time to time, but if you ever meet Moose ask him how I was in the blind when that bird hit the ground. Literally I was shaking so hard the blind was moving, I could not talk, and the emotion was just pouring out like crazy. I'm hooked on traditional shooting now, in fact in the past few months part of my absence from forums is because I've been shooting all of my Dads stick bows in the back yard and getting all 60+ of them shootable. That's a lot of new bow strings!! Anyway, I'm going to wait on a 4th season tag and hopefully "Fan one in" to the bow or shotgun. I hope everyone has some success this spring. Later.
This bird has great hooks but we couldn't get him to "limb hang" so I gave up and got it done another way. =) So far this is my favorite pic, it's brought a lot of laughs.
Limb Hanger
