This story (and video link) comes to us from Clayton Denny and tells the story of his Turkey Hunt with friend Ben Mcquagge.
As much as this Turkey season had been much anticipated for me, it was tenfold for my good buddy Ben Mcquagge.
Ya see, last year as I was wackin and stackin the turkeys, Ben had been deployed to Iraq on an eight month tour that forced him to miss turkey season. This year, not only did he know he would be around, he took the entire week of archery turkey season off of work. Weeks full of scouting led us to a group of turkeys we would come to know well by the hundreds of trail cam photos. These turkeys would always come to this certain spot in the morning to scratch, strut and just hang out.
Opening morning finally was upon us and we decided to put up the Primos Vision blind and give it a shot. We got in there well before light and it wasn’t long before the woods rang out with multiple adrenaline raising gobbles! The gobblers weren’t more than 100 yards away. We gave a few light tree calls and then put the calls away. When light came we heard them fly down out of the trees and the gobbles got further and further away. As we sat there, only slightly discouraged, about 45 minutes went by when a lonely hen appeared. She scratched around in the pine needles and then another showed up, and another, and another. Pretty soon two beautiful sun shown fans could be seen breaking the crest of the hill. No sooner did the two gobblers see the group of feeding hens and they let out a simultaneous hair raising gobbles! As I sat there silently cursing at my camera because it would not stay recording for some reason, all the while trying to play statue because the hens were less than a foot from the blind, the gobblers were making their approach. I noticed for some reason that words probably can’t explain, that both Ben and I were shaking like a leaf in the breeze and breathing like we had just run a marathon. The gobblers were now at 10 yards or less and still closing in and with six sets of the most keen eyes in nature less than five yards away, Ben had yet to even draw his bow. He waited until the two toms went behind the closed window of the blind and drew his bow, unfortunately for him to make the shot, me as the cameraman, had to lean back out of his way. He leaned forward and took careful aim, what seemed to me to be roughly 3 hours! All at once the arrow released and smoked the big tom at what was later paced as four steps! The bird hobbled away sickly over the hill and I quickly passed the camera off, grabbed my bow and took a 50 yard poke at the second tom, narrowly missing him.
We exited the blind and just over the hill laid the sight every turkey hunter hopes to see, a big beautiful Merriam tom turkey, laying there motionless. Deep breaths, hugs and high fives, there’s no greater high in this world than the rush that we had experienced that morning. The Video of my good friend Ben Mcquagge killing this Gobbler can be seen on you tube (in the video below).
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