By Tom Charbonneau
Opening day of the 2003 Turkey season was dark and dismal. My wife Julie arrive at our hunting spot at 6am. We got the blind set up and the decoys out and I began calling without results.
The rain subsided so we decided to walk and call. We had only gone 100 yds and we had a tom gobble to my calling, so we headed his way. The next hour and fifteen minutes we had to chase after him, because he was walking away from us. We finally got to within 200 yds of him and he made a sharp turn to the right. I told my wife that he was headed for the pipe line, so we ran through the pines to the edge of the pipe line. I started to call again he answered but he was no more that 100 yds from our position. I quickly set up the hen and jake decoys on the edge of the pipe line, while Julie got set up by a small pine tree. I setup about 10 yds behind Julie and call again, he immediatly answered, and was no more than 75 yds away, but he was in the pines not on the pipe line. I stopped calling and hoped he would come out to the clearing where he could see the decoys. Thats exactly what he did. He stepped out, seen the decoys and made a beeline for them. When he was 25 yds away Julie shot, and down he went. I was up and running as soon as he went down, but he was down for good.
When I got up to him that is when I noticed he had two beards. It was not till later the we had a chance to measure them and they were both 9" long, what a trophy. His spurs were 3/4" long, and he weigh 19 lbs.
This was Julie's first turkey.
We hunted real hard last year, but come up empty handed, so my goal this year was to get a gobbler in front of her and let her do her magic, and that is exactly what she did.
I harvested a nice gobbler two years ago, [before Julie started hunting turkeys], but it was not near as exciting as being there when your wife harvest her first gobbler.
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