00:00:01
Speaker 1: That bird was right there, twenty yards from me up that hill. It was just one of those moments where I just paused and went, man, what are the odds? Thank you Lord, what an amazing story.
00:00:15
Speaker 2: This episode of Turkey Stories is full of surprises. Probably a good title for this one would have been April Fools. But some surprises are good, some are bad. We’ve got stories from Missouri, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Texas, with some new voices and some old ones, but they’re chock full of goblins strutting, laughing, some fear, some grunting, and maybe even a tear. These stories tell themselves, so I doubt that you’re gonna want to.
00:00:47
Speaker 3: Miss this one.
00:00:49
Speaker 2: And hey, be sure to check out the Phelps three pack of Prime Cuts Turkey diaphragm calls. These calls were designed by myself, Stephen Ranella Jason Phelps.
00:01:01
Speaker 3: I really like them.
00:01:10
Speaker 2: My name is Klay Knukom and this is the Beargrease podcast, where we’ll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we’ll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
00:01:24
Speaker 3: Brought to you by to Covi’s Boots.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: I’m a cowboy boot man, and I’ve been wearing to Covis for years. They’re the most comfortable boot I’ve ever put on. Good boots for good times. We’re coming off the limb in full strut on this episode, and we’ve got a good one right off the top.
00:01:52
Speaker 3: You may remember our.
00:01:53
Speaker 2: American Loggers series with the the Lions Family episodes four twenty and four twenty four. Well, our first story is from Cody Vilines, and I told you back then that these guys were good hunters and they didn’t get this way by accident.
00:02:08
Speaker 3: These boys have been hunting since they were born.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: And Cody’s got a story from when he was fifteen years old and it involves an uninvited guest. Actually three, keep your eyes and the ears peeled on this one.
00:02:22
Speaker 4: Do you want mean to introduce myself? I’m Cody the Lines from Newton County, Arkansas. This is one of two times and all of my hunting that I can remember that I did everything right, and still it was like Mother Nature was like you’re going home with a empty sack. And the other one is a deer story, but this is a turkey story. And I was fifteen and I came home from school one day. Dad wasn’t home yet, he was at work. Still, that’s whole mom. I said, I’m gonna go out the road here. I want to see if out and hear a turkey. He’s getting pretty late in the evening, but I went ahead and went went off in. This is pretty rough places. But anyway, I strike a turkey, and I know it’s getting late, but anyway, I dive off in there, I go after it. I get to work in this turkey and I kind of think there’s more than one just by the way he’s acting. But I wasn’t sure. But I’m working this turkey and he’s coming. He ain’t coming very fast, but he’s coming to me. Well, I start to realize that it’s gonna get dark on me before I get this turkey killed. So sure enough, it starts getting dark, and he got close enough. I roosted it. There was three turkeys flew up, so I’m thinking he’s either got a couple hens with him or Jake or something. I knew there was something up just by the way he’s acting, but I got him roosted. I know what tree. I know right where this sucker is at for the next morning. So I go home and I told Dad, I said, I got one. I got one roosted. I said, I know right where this sucker is at. He’s so, I don’t guess you’re going to school in the morning. I said, no, I’m gonna go kill that turkey. And so the next morning, I get up early. When I get out there to the forests of the road, there’s a neighbor that used to live out the road here. His truck is sitting at this parking spot. Well, I know from where he’s parked, he’s probably gonna be on the other side of the canyon from me where this turkey’s roofsted. But I don’t think a whole lot about it. So I he’s off in there in the dark, and I get set up on this turkey, and I mean, this is public land, and there’s some people around here that can kill some turkeys. You don’t want that turkey goblin much on the limb. So I don’t hoot, I don’t do anything. I mean, I know right where’s at. I e’s in there, and I’m just gonna call out him gobble. And then I mean, I’m in I’m in a diversity. Well, this other guy’s on the other side of the canyon from me. He starts hooting. This old turkey finally got and he starts making crow calls. He’s even he squalls like a peacock. At one time he made the office record I ever heard in my life. Well, come and find out it’s what I think by sitting there listening to him. It’s a big turkey and two jacks. And I ain’t said nothing, but that old boy’s over. He’s eating his crow calling. These turkeys go to having a fit. I’m in there, gobbling like crazy, but I’m just setting there. But it gets about time, I think, and I make a little call, nold turkey gobbles, how just set there? The old turkey flies down, he gets the ground. He come my direction. I mean I had I had set up on him pretty pretty nice because I had on I to think about it. I was just up on the side of the hill, up out of the canyon, coming off from the top on the other side of that finger that ran off kind of an open hillside. I could see you over there pretty good. Well, that old turkey pitch down. He pitched over just dang near to where I could see him in that open spot. Anyway, I already pitched down, Hey, gobbled, when he hit the ground, and I mean, he’s just I’m gonna see him in just a little bit. He’s gonna be way over there, but I’ll be able to see him. And then he’s got to come around. And when he comes up over that finger, you know he’s dead. So turkey hits the ground, Hey, godle was he’s come my direction. And I’m sitting there watching and over there on that in that open spot, I see black spot and then I see another black spot, and I see another black spot. There they are old long Beard, two jakes. They’re coming. Well, they come through that opening and they go in behind that finger, and I got the safety off. I mean, it’s a done deal. This turkey is dead. He just don’t know yet. And I’m waiting and now I’m waiting no more goblin. But I mean, that wasn’t uncommon. And I mean, I’m just he’s fixing to pop up over that hump. Well, when he pops up over that hump, he ain’t a long beard. He ain’t even a he. It’s old sal BEARR. When she come up over hump, she was thirty five yards or you know, shouting, Take your range, and I thought, oh my, because I doesn’t see three black spots, I know there’s two more, and I got a pretty good idea what they probably are. She comes over that hump like she knows where I’m sitt like I in the back of my mind, I think I’ve just called this bear up. And she comes over that hump and she comes to beeline straight to me. And when she gets out there fifteen twenty steps, she kind of pulls up the hill and she comes right besut of me. She goes behind me. I can’t see her. I can hear, but I can’t see her. With those cubs are probably I don’t know, forty pounders, they’re pretty little. They had gotten behind her, you know, I don’t know how far that was behind her, twenty five or thirty yards. They were kind of playing around whatever. Well, when she goes behind me, they come around and they come right in front of me. So I’m between them. I mean, I’m mean, I’m right between them. And I’ve heard I had you know, I’m a kid, I’m fifteen years old. I hadn’t heard my whole life don’t get between a saw and her cubs. And here I am smack between a saw and two cubs, and I didn’t That ain’t what I had in mind when I left the house that morning. It wasn’t very long. I mean, honestly, probably wasn’t a minute that I was actually directly between them. But she’s making these little rackets at them so I can find here to where she’s getting around on where. So I finally get the nerve up enough, I turn to where I can see her out of the corner of my She’s right there. I mean, she is right behind me. I got us watch me to you, not too close, so I’m flatter my butt with my gun up, you know, and like I could jump up and run if I wanted to. And they finally the cubs kind of come along below me, and they come right up through there, and she’s just waiting on them. The whole time. I can hear her. I know she could smell me. There’s no way that bair don’t smell me, but she never did. I mean, you could hear like, you know, winding and whatever, but she never did do anything aggressive. I mean, they got back together, and when they went out of sight, I went to the truck to take count was over.
00:10:04
Speaker 2: It’s calling for turkey hunters to call in coyotes and bobcats. As a matter of fact, on our last episode, claud Straw called in a bobcat that whacked him in the face. And in recent years I’ve heard of guys calling in bears or you know, calling a turkey and a bear comes in, and some of them have been genuinely convincing to me that the bear was actually coming to investigate the hen call. But in this story, it really isn’t one hundred percent clear if it was a coincidence or if the bear was coming to the call. But in my research on the American black bear for my book that’s going to be released in spring of twenty seven, we talk about how bears have been proven to be the most curious mammal on the North American continent, and that curiosity has caused him to be successful and usually produces food.
00:10:55
Speaker 3: So I’ll let you be the judge. But here’s what Cody thought.
00:10:59
Speaker 4: It was like she knew where I was. That it was like I called her up. It was just like I called that bear up.
00:11:08
Speaker 2: Uh.
00:11:09
Speaker 4: And like I said, I hadn’t called a whole lot this turkey, you know, I called maybe two times when that take he was on the roost and I ain’t call him out, but I probably called three times. Question. She came straight to me. Coincidence, whatever it was, I don’t know. But not only does she come straight to me, she came straight through the middle of those turkeys. Like she scared those turkeys off. I know she did. It was drama for a fifteen year old kid. I’m gonna say that was probably quite possibly the first bear I ever seen on the hoof.
00:11:47
Speaker 2: That was a good story of the surprise ending. And our next story is a good one too. It’s a bow hunt from Nebraska told by doctor Adam McCall and his buddy Mark Yacht.
00:12:00
Speaker 3: And y’all may remember what my buddy.
00:12:03
Speaker 2: Lake Pickle always says is don’t bring a bow to a gunfight. Actually Lake never said that, but he talks about how he doesn’t like the bow hunt turkeys.
00:12:15
Speaker 3: But these guys put on a clinic on how to do it.
00:12:19
Speaker 1: Hey, I’m Mark Yacht from Fayetteville, Arkansas.
00:12:22
Speaker 5: I’m Adam McCall, also from Fayetteville, Arkansas. Happened to be Clay’s doctor. So we go turkey hunt every year. We’ve been three years to Nebraska. We met this fellow and invited us to come up and hunt. He’s got about four or five hundred acres of just solid northeast Nebraska l in and I mean, every time we’ve been, we’ve seen turkeys on turkeys on turkeys. So we show up on Thursday afternoon, seventy degrees, beautiful turkeys everywhere. We don’t have really enough time to hunt, and so we go scout for birds roost about sixty birds, i’d say. And so we get up that next morning and the temperature had probably dropped fifty degrees and I mean it was twenty six degrees outside cold, and we didn’t hear a god. We heard like three gobbles, but we knew they’d come off that mountain side. So we sat there all day just waiting, and so finally I said, Mark, I think that we’re gonna have to be hunters instead of sitters. And he’s kind of looked at me. He’s like, there’s zero chantz you’re gonna kill a turkey with a bow and arrow outside of a blind. And I said, well, we’re not gonna kill one inside of a blind if we don’t see it. So that next morning, you know, I hear four or five new birds goblin. So I went and sat down there for a little bit and didn’t see anything. It’s like, once they left the rooms, they didn’t make a sound, and so I thought, well, I’m just gonna be patient. You know, I’ve heard many times like if you think it’s time to leave, you wait another hour because that bird’s coming. Well, they weren’t coming as I got up and left, and I just started walking.
00:14:01
Speaker 1: And at the same time, I’m walking up the hill that morning, and I decided to sit at the top of this hill. I’m down wind and uphill from where you’d heard these birds the night before. So I hear them first thing. I can even hear the hens clucking with the wind and everything, and I’m like, great, they’re pretty far away. I’m looking on on X and deciding it’s probably about five hundred yards away or so. But I’m gonna go sit in this blind. I’m gonna call to them a little bit, get them to answer, and I’m gonna go sit down. And you know, the dreams of flocks of turkeys coming through, you know, we’re jumping through my head. And after about an hour of hearing nothing after that, you know, Adam’s words kept ringing through my head of are we gonna be hunters or are we gonna be sitters? And it was the last morning, and I’m like, you know what, it’s a beautiful day. I’m getting out of this blind with my bow and I’m gonna start going after those birds I heard this morning. Luckily it’s been an hour, but I go back to the same spot. I listen, and I still hear them down there where they were roosting. So I start kind of slowly trying to make a move on them while Adam over there running around the ridges on the other side of property.
00:15:02
Speaker 5: Look, I was chasing a bobcat. I saw bobcat, and I thought, this bobcat knows something that I done. So when I say chasing, I saw him go a direction. I thought, well, that’s a direction I need to go in.
00:15:13
Speaker 1: And this is horrible hunting advice for anybody that’s listening.
00:15:16
Speaker 2: Adam and Mark split up and spend the morning chasing faint gobbles, but later in the morning they end up working the same birds, kind of from different angles, and Adam actually sees the gobbler he’s been hearing all morning, but he’s kind of out of position. He’s caught off guard, and the gobbler walks past him with no shot. But Mark and Adam finally see each other.
00:15:40
Speaker 1: What Adam didn’t it was I was watching the same gobbler at fifty yards because he was coming toward my call, and I didn’t know Adam had gotten down to where I was, and so he’s over there, and then I see this bird kind of struggle a little bit and then turn back and go where he had come from.
00:15:54
Speaker 4: And I’m like, what the heck?
00:15:55
Speaker 1: So I call Adam and then I see him answer his phone and stand up, and I’m like, oh, you’re right.
00:16:00
Speaker 6: So we put the phone down.
00:16:02
Speaker 1: And what I didn’t tell you is on the way over through that half mile walk, I had started shedding gear because it was hot, and I got my backpack and my stool and I put them in a random spot through that half mile hike in a valley, and I marked that spot on ONEX and go get my stuff later. And now I’m up with Adam when we’re deciding we got to put a move on these birds. So I’m like, hey, we’re on one side of this ridge, they’re on the other. In these woods, they’re going to go up toward that field. Let’s run around this side of the ravine and get up there in that field and set up and try to catch them when they come. And so we did. We did the classic kind of run and get out of breath. And he jumps in a bush and said, let me get behind you, because they’re clearly staying with their flock. Maybe they’ll get close enough for you to shoot, but I’ll call from behind you. So I start calling. They gobble once or twice, but they’re just strutting for their hens and coming and checking us out a little bit through those woods, and they just won’t get in closer and they won’t come up in that field. We still can’t really see them. We can just hear them clucking out in those woods. And he’s gotten himself up in this brush pile where he’s got an amazing shot out to the field, but nothing back into the woods.
00:17:06
Speaker 4: So I hear them start.
00:17:07
Speaker 1: Moving back into the woods, So unbeknownst to him, I stop calling for him as a good friend, and I start rushing to where I think I can cut them off in the woods. And I get halfway to where I think I need to get behind a log jam, and I start seeing a head over the side of the ridge, and I dropped to my belly on my knees with my bow in my hand. I’m sitting there going this is how turkeys don’t get killed. Where you’re not behind a tree, you’re with a bow first of all. So we’ve already decreased our odds by ninety five percent just by holding that weapon and not a gun. And that’s what season it is in Nebraska, by the way, So that’s why we were doing that. And I’m just like, oh no, And these two toms starts strutting where I can barely see them from the ground, and the hen stayed behind this big log jam where they couldn’t see me. So I get to a point where I can kind of see them strutting, but I realize Adam’s like ten yards from them.
00:17:59
Speaker 4: Why is he not shooting?
00:18:01
Speaker 5: So I had these two toms, I mean, there’s at seven yards at one point, I can see my reflection in this gobbler’s eye.
00:18:08
Speaker 4: And so this is.
00:18:09
Speaker 5: After I had to turn around in this like it’s like this Chinese elm tree got these big, low hanging branches. They’re thick, and so I was in. I was in had my release clipped in, and so when I was turning, I was trying to kind of draw at the same time. Well, I accidentally released my arrow into the tree, and I was like, well it’s over now, there’s zero chance. And so but I gave a little gave a little yelp and a little kluck, and man, all of a sudden, I see two birds just pop. I mean there’s seven yards six yards, and I get drawn and I’m like, this is gonna happen. But they never come forward for me to get a shot. And the only thing I’m thinking is I’m not gonna take a dumb shot and ruin this entire hunt, because if I do, I will hear about it for seven and a half half hours.
00:19:00
Speaker 1: Yeah that’s true. So I’m sitting over there watching these birds strut and I’m I don’t have my rangefinder with me because I dropped it. With my gear, I wouldn’t have been able to move to use it anyway. So I’m going look, I think that tree it’s almost like old school, pre rangefinder days. You’re like, I still have this skill. I think in my head, mark you can do this. So this tree looks twenty. They’re about ten past that. I’m gonna use my thirty yard pen. So I draw, and I decide I’m gonna take a shot when they move in between some of the brush, and one of them does, and as soon as I shoot, he struts sideways and it goes right behind him my arrow. I’m like, you’ve got to be kidneyed. So I stand up, assuming that they’re gonna run off. Well, when I stand up, luckily he was strutted the other way, so his fan blocked him from me, and I’m like, oh shoot, I’m gonna get another shot. So I knock another arrow, except I don’t knock it because it’s got mud in the knock, and I’m like, you’ve got.
00:19:51
Speaker 4: To be kidding me.
00:19:52
Speaker 1: So he struts around one more time with that. You know, when they put their fan back and they cover their head, you’ve got your moment. So I drop that arrow, grab another one and draw and take my thirty yard shot and I hear it just bam hit him, and I hear it hit cavity, and I’m like, man, this is awesome. I wonder if Adam saw that and all this stuff, because I know where he’s at, so I go running up to Adam and I’m like, hey, that bird just pitched off after I shot him.
00:20:15
Speaker 6: I hate that.
00:20:16
Speaker 1: I don’t love that. It’s not what we’re looking for. But maybe that was a quick pitch and he’s right down here. So Adam comes out of the bushes trying to figure out why the heck you know what happened? And we got to figure out we got to go start looking for this bird because the other ones had kind of ease down the hill. At this point, it’s a tough go at it, so if you can use a gun, might just do that. But so we start looking for this turkey and we’re grid searching these couple of little dips and at this point we’ve walked over one hundred yards in grid search up and down the hill, and I’m yeah, I’m just getting sick. I mean, nobody likes wounding an animal and not finding it all of that. So we’re looking at at this point, I’m like, Adam, go make a move on those birds, go try to find them again. They’re still they weren’t too skittish. I’m gonna keep looking for this turkey and I’m just getting depressed. So I pull up on X and I’m like, I’m gonna find my way back to that gear that I dropped, by the way, which is four hundred and fifty yards away, and the opposite direction that the turkey pitched off to. And here’s the climax of the story. Adam goes off to try to find those birds, and I depressingly walk back to try to get my gear, and I come over this big hilltop looking down in this valley of these woods, and I’d kid you not to get up to my backpack a random spot four hundred and fifty yards away from the direction that bird went opposite direction, and I hear I hear something moving in the leaves twenty yards away from me. That bird was right there, twenty yards from me up that hill. It was just one of those moments where I just paused and went, man, what are the odds? Thank you Lord, what an amazing story. And that we got a chance to harvest that bird clean eventually at the end and be able to get him.
00:21:55
Speaker 2: That is wild that you found that gobbler right back at your over four hundred yards the opposite direction that the bird flew. Shout out to aun X, because I think all of us have left a pen where we dropped some gear.
00:22:10
Speaker 3: I love it. It was a great story.
00:22:12
Speaker 2: Loved the camaraderie and the excitement of that one. But our next story is from you guessed it, Andy Brown in Arkansas. Yep, Old Andy. And he had just told me a story about his family member, Bill Decker. We played that story actually on the twenty twenty five episode, and he kind of had a tack on story and I wanted to play that one. So this is another story about his family member Bill. Here’s Andy.
00:22:47
Speaker 7: One more story with Bill, same kind of same place, same mountain, and we got we had went in there and we heard a turkey north way north and I told Bill, I said, come on, we’re going to go down and we did. We fell off the main mountain and goes down there and it makes a divide and ties onto a kind of a high ridge in there that runs off west. And that turkey when we got there, that turkey was straight across across the next canyon over on what we call a well there’s a name for the ridge that we used, but that turkey was on that ridge. And I said, and he was gobling good, I mean, this is you know, this is eight o’clock in the morning. I mean, he’s goblining good. So we get in there and we get set up, and I called that turkey, and shoot, he just just immediately just broke me off straight across from me. Well, quiet game. Five minutes. I called him again. When I did, he’s already off the mountain. He’s already come down. He’s right down below us, still still in the bottom, but he’s below us. I said to Bill, I said that Turkey’s coming. I called him again. He just he just broke me off again, and so I just kind of shut up. In a minute. I could hear him drumming. Back in those days, I could hear it. I think I could hear a turkey drum one hundred and fifty yards. I mean, I’m still morning. I mean I could hear him a long way. So something I can’t hear anymore. I can’t hear him drum, But anyway, I could hear that turkey drumming. And I could tell he was coming up to our right. And Bill’s right in front of me about from here to well, let’s just say, fifteen foot in front of me right there, thinking he’s coming up here. But I could tell he’s going to come up to the right right there, And I said Bill, And no, Bill’s intense because that turkey he’s drumming and he’s gobbling. And I said Bill, right here, and Bill he’d look over his shoulder at me and say, I say right here, and he goes right here. He was coursing, coming straight up and drumming. And I said Bill, I said, Bill, that turkey is right here, coming.
00:25:05
Speaker 4: Up to your right.
00:25:06
Speaker 7: And he’d shake his head no at me. You know, you know he’s got that good I mean he’s he’s got or pointed north right here, and that turkey’s coming up to the day. He’s straight there. And of course I had my gun laid across my lap and I just kind of laid down like that, and all of a sudden, Clay, there he is. I mean, he.
00:25:25
Speaker 4: Comes up, he comes up right.
00:25:27
Speaker 7: There, you know. I mean he’s not he’s not ten yards from Bill. They’re just straight across from each other. And you can see old Bill. He had that good pointed door at anyway, that that turkey comes up there, and I’m thinking he’s not getting away because I’m going to kill him if he if he if he, I mean he’s got too close. But I wasn’t gonna shoot him for the world if Bill could kill him. But I’m thinking Bill’s busted. Doesn’t mean he just builts right there. Now, about that time, that turkey just he just turns and he just starts right off, right off the mountain, going in an angle right in front of Bill. And about that time, old Bill he just raced up. It just kills that turkey about ten yards right in front of him. And I’m thinking, I’m thinking this guy God has blessed him today. It’s all like he be goues. This stuff don’t happen, you know. But Bill’s a great guy, I mean a great guy.
00:26:34
Speaker 2: That was a good one, Andy. But our next storyteller is an absolute wild card.
00:26:41
Speaker 6: We gonna have some tears coming when the gobbler dies.
00:26:46
Speaker 2: Yarnis Poo tell us the Light being Eagle has a story hot off the press from deep in the heart of Texas and involves a recent height with a new friend, and the twists and turns might make your parsick.
00:26:58
Speaker 8: Here he goes nothing all right, So this is like a bottom of the ninth two minutes left in the fourth quart. Does that make sense to you?
00:27:07
Speaker 5: You know?
00:27:07
Speaker 8: What that means you have enough sports to make Yeah, well, and then two minutes left in the fourth quarter that could be.
00:27:13
Speaker 6: Basketball or football. Anyways, Clay said.
00:27:18
Speaker 8: He really liked it, which is something that I actually don’t like about his storytelling is when he tells you ahead of time what’s gonna happen or what you should like about something that he’s about to tell you. I prefer just having the story laid out and then I make that decision.
00:27:33
Speaker 2: You never know what, mete eater, when you’re about to get roasted, come from the east or the west, or from above or below, and it’ll sneak up on you. Lack a bear, but Jannis roasting doesn’t mean that you can roost them. See how I flipped that old saying from the Turkey hunters.
00:27:51
Speaker 8: Here’s Jonas all right, So this is like a bottom of the ninth two minutes left in the fourth quarter type of story. Jesse Griffiths, the chef owner of Die Duey in Austin, Texas, and I donated a hunt to the National Wild Turkey Federation’s Hunt and Hook Sweepstakes. There was a three day haunt for two people in southern Texas in.
00:28:13
Speaker 6: Mid March the winner of the hunt.
00:28:16
Speaker 8: Holly killed her bird on the second morning, so that just left her husband Zendel, to get a bird. He and I hunted together the rest of the second day.
00:28:27
Speaker 6: No luck.
00:28:28
Speaker 8: The third day we went to a spot where a giant, big plane kind of next down to like what we’d call it pinch point, and every day somebody had seen turkeys and strutting. Tom’s traveling through there and he’s like, giant is the way I like to hunt. I like to like sit in a spot and just let him come by me. I’m like, man, that is a perfectly fine tactic for me. Like, let’s go do it. We sit there from dark until one pm, and we get like ten hens that go by us, and I’m like, don’t hear gobbles, don’t see gobbles nothing. That afternoon we find some strutters in a field. We chase them around, trying to sneak up to them.
00:29:07
Speaker 6: No luck.
00:29:09
Speaker 8: So technically the hunt’s over because we only had three days. But the fourth morning is the next day, and I don’t they drove. I don’t have to be at the airport until one, so I’m like, Zendel, let’s go do it. We’ll just get a couple hours in, make one more swing for the fences. We’ll see what happens. I’m like, as long as we quit by nine, like, I can get back to the ranch, take a shower, and get to the airport on time. So he and I go out and we think we have got the plan. Like we’re in the next is where all the birds have been goblin every day prior to that, and if we start there, we’re gonna have at least a place to start. Daylight’s been about seven am sunrise with seven point thirty. By seven forty five, we haven’t heard a gobble. Like, my gosh, how did this happen? Like the birds just had moved out of the area. So I’m like, all right, Zendel, let’s start walking. So we walk a little ways and finally we hear some birds, but they’re on the neighboring property. So I’m like, well, let’s at least get down there and listen to them. And I know they’re gonna come onto our property because we had water, so like, let’s get between them and the water, and you know, maybe what happened. So we do that. We sit down. The birds are goblin, goblin goblin on the other side of the fence. But thirty minutes goes by, they’re not moving any closer. So I’m like, okay, we gotta keep pushing. We got to make something happen here. So we’re in a piece of woods that’s like a triangle and we’re at a point of it, so it’s only fifty yards wide or so. So I tell Zenda, I’m gonna go peek out the other direction onto this giant big they call it the plant grande, which I believe just means like great plane. And I’m gonna peek out there and see what’s going on. I do that, I see two strutters with like fifteen hens a couple hundred yards out run back to Zendel. I’m like, there’s out there. Let’s make a move at this point, like any tactic goes and so I’ve left the decoys behind, but I do have a turkey fan with me. I’m thinking, just get close and at least I can show the fan to these strutters and if we get the reaction we want one, maybe both of them come running towards us. So we make a move, get to a couple hundred yards of them, and as we’re nearing the edge of the tree line. I notice another gobbler strutting off to our right about one hundred yards on our tree line. To my left fifty yards is a pack of fifteen hens or so maybe a jake in there too. Can’t be any better. I mean, it’s like where you want to be. The sun’s at our backs, passing a nice long shadow out into the to the opening. We creep right up to the edge, get Zendel set up, flash the fan, make a few calls. Gobbler looks over sees us and immediately just turns ninety and starts marching towards us. I’m like, oh yeah, baby, like I’m looking around, like we need a nice tree to take this picture of Zendel and his dead turkey here.
00:32:05
Speaker 6: In a minute, the.
00:32:08
Speaker 8: Bird makes it to like fifty yards and puts the brakes on. Best I can figure, he had gotten his butt kicked recently. That’s why he wasn’t with those hens. That’s why he wasn’t with that other flock and the other two strutters. And he’s by himself, and he makes it to fifty and he’s like, eh, I don’t need to get any closer. Like I’m a little worried about the situation. So we’re sitting there talking it over, and I’m like, Zendel, you know, he’s shooting tss. He’s got a nice shotgun, red dot scope on it. I’m like, fifty yards, very makeable shot. Turkey’s not like moving or running, He’s just you know, kind of sitting there eyeballing us. I’m like, I’m gonna yelp, you shoot him. We discussed it. He’s like, got it. I make a couple of yelps. Turkey cranes his neck up. Zendel, not a single feather on that Turkey is harmed, and he just goes scampering off like nothing happened. There was no time for us second shot. So I’m like, yeah, that’s a bummer, you know, but what are you gonna do?
00:33:07
Speaker 6: You know?
00:33:08
Speaker 8: Zendal’s beside himself, just sick to his stomach, like I would be too if that happened to me. You know, I’d already killed a bird. So I’m like, you know, stinker, we’re just gonna have to go three out of four. Zendeals out goes. But we’ve got two other strutters, and those other hens only three hundred yards away from us. They had made it to the water hole and now turned around and we’re coming back across this great, big, giant field. So I’m like, look man, like, it’s probably eight thirty at this point. I’m like, let’s make one more move, Like we have a little bit of time left. Let’s just make a loop through the woods and we’ll try to cut them off and hopefully they’ll come right to us. So we do that, and we get to a spot where we’re on a nice little rise. It’s pretty flat country, but we’ve got a nice little rise underneath this big, beautiful live oak tree with beautiful shade. And that time of day, it’s getting hot in South Texas, right, so these turkeys are looking for a shady spot where they can stop and basically loaf, do some dusting, and just chill.
00:34:12
Speaker 6: I’m thinking, this is the spot. We sit down.
00:34:14
Speaker 8: I can see these birds coming towards us. They’re probably at like one hundred and fifty yards. And as we settle in, I hear three other hens like clucking behind me. That’s again, You’re like, we’re like in the middle of birds, Like, this is perfect. What else do you want?
00:34:29
Speaker 6: Right? So here they come?
00:34:31
Speaker 8: Here they come the hens from behind us come out and go past us. And the birds that are coming towards us with the strutters in the group, they meet at literally the first giant mesquite tree that’s out in front of us, like out in the meadow, and literally decide to hold up there and start loafing. A couple of the hens jump up onto the limbs like they’re just like chilling. They’re not gonna come any closer for quite some time. I’ve like shown the fan. The gobblers saw the fan. I’ve call no reaction, nothing, nothing, nothing. So again, like nine o’clock is like knocking on our door. Now, Zendel’s even like, Yanni, you need to we need to leave soon because you got to catch your flight. You know, you can’t be late. I’m like, I know, but let’s try something else. Like we still have a nice long shadow. The sun’s not that high, and the shadow line goes out maybe ten yards in front of us, and there’s literally the smallest mesquite tree on the entire ranch is out there, and it’s like a shrub. It’s like five feet tall, maybe six thirty inches wide, like not a lot of cover. But again, we’re down to minutes to the hunt. We’re just gonna try it all. So I said, leave everything behind. I’m gonna hold this fan out in front of us. What you’re only doing because we’re on a private ranch and we’re absolute, one hundred percent sure that no one else is out there hunting in our vicinity. But we’re gonna scoot behind this fan and then try to get to this next little piece of cover. So now we’re at maybe sixty yards and I’m showing the fan and I’m calling nothing, nothing, nothing, like they just will not pay any attention to me. The strutters have actually kind of moved around the backside of this mesquite to us. I can see hens in there, but nothing’s going on. And Zendel again. It’s like, dude, we had to stand up and just walk out of here. I say, you’re right, like we’re out of time. But I said, you know, I think if I leave by eleven, I’ll make it to the airport by noon.
00:36:22
Speaker 6: Like we can probably go to like nine thirty.
00:36:25
Speaker 8: You know, we can push it a little bit, like let me just try to throw the kitchen sink at him, by which I mean I’m gonna give him every call I know how to make it from a diaphragm. So I just start getting after him, yelping, clucking, cutting, fighting, purs love, making, purs everything.
00:36:42
Speaker 6: I know.
00:36:43
Speaker 8: It sounds like like if you did this to some if you met a turkey hunter at the National Wild Turkey Federation and you’re like, hey, check out my calling and you did that to him, they would look at you and go, your calling sucks.
00:37:00
Speaker 6: But it’s like all I had left. I’m just like gonna give it all to them. Well, a couple.
00:37:05
Speaker 8: Rounds of that, and one of the hens sort of like I can see her. She sort of like cocks her head and looks up at me. I’m like, okay, someone, I got someone’s attention. I keep doing a little bit more, and all of a sudden there’s two hens doing it, and those two have taken like a few steps towards me.
00:37:21
Speaker 6: And now I’m like getting confident.
00:37:22
Speaker 8: I’m getting very dry mouth because South Texas, nine o’clock in the morning, I don’t have any water on me, and I’m just calling my brains out.
00:37:32
Speaker 6: But here they come.
00:37:34
Speaker 8: There’s two hens, then there’s three, then there’s four, and they’re kind of all doing that when they’re coming at you, kind of like in a little bit of a mob and they’re like, something’s going on back there.
00:37:42
Speaker 6: We need to know what it is. We want to investigate what is it.
00:37:46
Speaker 8: They’re kind of craning their necks and looking, and obviously there’s two full grown men trying to hide behind really nothing and a one turkey fan.
00:37:56
Speaker 6: They call.
00:37:56
Speaker 8: They get to the closest hens probably gets to five yards, maybe three yards. The gobblers still haven’t really left their little shady spot underneath the mesquite, which is at sixty Finally they are like, okay, we’re gonna follow the hens, so they break here they come. They get to twenty five yards. So I said, look, just let me know when you’re gonna shoot, cause I need to plug my ear. He’s like, all right, I’m ready, So I plug my ear. I’m holding the fan in the other hand. Boom, first gobbler just folds. Now, usually when you shoot at one and there’s two of them sitting there, the other one will just sort of like flap his wings once or twice twice, and he hops up ten fifteen feet in the air kind of lands will run off with everybody else.
00:38:42
Speaker 6: This bird.
00:38:42
Speaker 8: If you can imagine if you’re sitting next under like a power line like that, not like a high high line, but just like a regular old power line, you know at t post.
00:38:50
Speaker 6: This bird jumps so.
00:38:51
Speaker 8: High that it could easily like roosted on like where you normally see an eagle’s nest, you know, on a power pole. Gives me enough time because my shotgun is laying in my lap, so I unplug my ear, drop the fan, pick up my shotgun, put it on my knee. When that turkey lands, boom, he falls over too. We’re so excited. We just hoot, hooting holler, and we high five. And I’m like, all right, Zendel, you pick up the birds and get all the gear.
00:39:20
Speaker 6: I dropped my vest. I said, I’m gonna go run and get the truck.
00:39:23
Speaker 8: I had three quarters of a mile to go to go get the vehicle, so I just run up there, grab it, turn around, come back.
00:39:30
Speaker 6: Load up.
00:39:30
Speaker 8: Zendel, two turkeys, vest, seats, guns, and we just high tail it twenty minutes back to their ranch house. I plead for Jesse to clean my bird.
00:39:41
Speaker 6: He does.
00:39:42
Speaker 8: I jump in the shower, throw everything into a duffel and take off to the airport and made it back to Bozeman, Montana by eleven PM.
00:39:51
Speaker 3: That was a good story, Yiannis.
00:39:53
Speaker 2: Multiple lows and the surprising double at the end. Man, I thought the story was over, and then you killed one.
00:40:00
Speaker 3: I thought.
00:40:00
Speaker 2: I actually thought it was gonna be a dud hunt and it was just gonna be our buddy missing a couple of times. Let’s jump straight into our next story with no foreshadowing.
00:40:14
Speaker 3: So I’m gonna tell you the next story. Yep, this is Clay.
00:40:18
Speaker 2: And in response to Jannis saying that a foreshadow too much, I’m not gonna give you much information at all.
00:40:25
Speaker 3: This may not even be a Turkey story.
00:40:28
Speaker 2: But me and my friend Lake Pickle were invited to hunt with our other buddy justin House in northern Arkansas on opening day of the Arkansas season in twenty twenty five. We hunted a bird early that morning, couldn’t get on him, but had heard a bird a half a mile away all morning that Eventually, about nine o’clock we decide to go.
00:40:52
Speaker 3: After we go over.
00:40:55
Speaker 2: There, crow call and the bird responds, but he is a long long ways away, across a big canyon from us. I’d say that it’s one of these birds that low likelihood that he’s gonna come to you, and we really can’t go to him, but we call pretty hard at him.
00:41:15
Speaker 6: Lake does.
00:41:16
Speaker 2: Lake’s a great caller, and the bird responds well. Five minutes later we hear him and he’s closer. Five minutes later we hear him and he’s way off in the bottom of the canyon. We think he’s gonna get hung up, but he keeps coming. When he starts coming up the other side, we get tucked into a big brush pile. I’m about five feet behind Lake Pickle and Justin House is back deeper in the woods, kind of completely out of pocket. The bird keeps coming, and Justin has told us that we can’t shoot on the other side of this fence. The bird has to cross a fence before we can shoot him. Well, this bird’s coming, and directly there he is, and he’s on the other side of a five strand bob wire fence at about sixty yards and Lake starts to soft call. We start to scratching the leaves and this bird just stands there and looks and he won’t cross this fence and we can’t really figure out why. But he starts to move down the fence away from us, and we think, well, he just has a place that he wants to cross, and sure enough.
00:42:26
Speaker 3: That seems to be right.
00:42:27
Speaker 2: He goes about fifty sixty yards down the fence, crosses under the barbed wire fence and starts to hook around, and we think, well, he’s going to come in now. He just wanted to come in from this direction. We’re watching this gobbler out in the field now, probably seventy five yards in front of us, no fence between us, and it’s getting serious. But this turkey is acting funny. It’s just throwing its head up and just looking. Won’t move, won’t move, won’t strut, won’t gobble. Something has happened from him being hot before, so hot that he was just barreling in. And Lake’s looking down the barrel of his gun. I’m right behind him, and all of a sudden, from my left side, which is the field side, it’s.
00:43:14
Speaker 3: Real bright over there.
00:43:16
Speaker 2: I see something out of my peripheral vision, and I immediately think there is a strutting gobbler like six yards from us that has come in to the left of us. The pit just forms in my stomach. It almost scares me, just like somebody walking up behind you. It was that surprising and I see this black blob strutting gobbler, just moving just at a pace of one, just in full strut. And I mean he is on top of us. He has five yards from lake. Something’s about to happen. And this turkey is out there seventy five is yards and he is just staring, and you know, kind of makes sense. Well, this gobbler didn’t want to come in because there’s another.
00:44:00
Speaker 3: Coming behind us.
00:44:01
Speaker 2: Well, I cut my eyes to the left, and what I thought was a strutting gobbler is not a strutting gobbler at all.
00:44:09
Speaker 6: It is a pig.
00:44:12
Speaker 2: And what I didn’t foreshadow to you is that on the house farm, about a year and a half ago, a pot belly pig showed up and it has lived on their farm. They’ve not fed it, they don’t know where it came from. And it is fat as a hog. It’s belly almost drags the ground. They’ve just tolerated this pig. Well, we saw the pig that morning when we were walking from the first gobbler to the second gobbler, and he never even lifted his head to look at us. And we go on over at least a quarter mile from where we’d seen the pig, and I am fully convinced that that pig winded us and came into us, because the wind is hitting us right in the face, and I believe that that gobbler was We had a hot and he came to the fence wanted to cross, but he saw that pig way down the field, slowly working his way towards us, and that’s what turned him. You just never know what’s going to ruin your hunt. Well, we just can’t believe it. You know, of all the things that could spook a hunt, you know, a bobcat, a kyo, another hunter, a four wheeler, a cow, just all the things that could have happened, we weren’t expecting the pig to blow this hunt. Well, we run the pig off, you know, and we’re just like, justin why do you have a pig on your farm? And we decide to make a big loop and go after this bird. It’s mid morning that we think he’s by himself. We make a big loop, get about three hundred yards in front of where we think this turkey’s going, and to make a long story short, we softly call and we hear a hut that cuts us off. And we start calling it this hen real aggressively. This hen comes right in, comes on past us, and Lake says, man that Gobbler’s got to be here, and Lake just plays the patience card. This turkey never gobbles and he just sits there, and sure enough that Gobbler pops his head up over the hill. Probably ten minutes after that hen passed us and moved on. Most people I think would have moved on themselves, and Lake Pickle kills that Gobbler. About an hour after that, Pig winded us and came in and blew our hunt. So the moral of the story is you never know who the villain’s going to be on your turkey hunt, but be suspicious of everything. I never in a thousand years would have thought that Dad gum Pig was going to ruin our hunt. But our next story is straight out of one of the country’s turkey hunting states, Missouri. I give a lot of credit to Mississippi for having great turkey hunters, but Missouri has some incredible turkey hunters.
00:47:10
Speaker 3: This story is from dairy farmer.
00:47:12
Speaker 2: Brian Patten in southwest Missouri, and this story we call the First and the Last Turkey and it’s good.
00:47:22
Speaker 9: I had mentioned to a lot of people that I wish my wife turkey hunted, you know, and be careful what you wish for, because she’s turned into quite the turkey killer. I’d got her some calls over the years, you know, and their cousin had made a few calls, and Cameron had left one up there at our house and it’s a box call, and it really is nice. And I walked in the house one day, and of course it was during turkey season, and these boys had left turkey calls all over the bar, you know, and lo and behold, I’ll be dog. She had that call, and she was a yeaping on that call, and I’m like, that sounds pretty good. She said, Well, listen to you guys all the time, they said, ain’t that big a deal. I’m like, oh really, And you’re going to go try to kill one? Now, Well, if you’d put me out there, I might do it, since you can hunt in the afternoon, and she’s an afternoon deer hunter too, you know. And so I said, well, I said, your dad has really been wanting to go. And my father in law, he had got to be quite a turkey killer hisself, not never was much of a call guy, but oh he loved to go and he liked to get out there, and he’d killed a pile of turkeys and I said, won’t you take your dad, it’d be good for both of you. She’s like, I don’t know if I can do it. I said, you sounded great. I said, just do do like he was doing. The cadence is more important than a lot of the other things. And I said, you don’t have to call as much as Tanner and Cameron. Just call something. And I said, I’ll put you ins in a good spot. I said, I’ve been seeing these old gobblers come through there in the evening quite a bit, going back to their roost, and so I had them a blind set up. And I mean one of these turkeys was a whopper. I mean he had a beard on him. And my father in law likes those big bearded turkeys. He always has. He’s got COPD and he couldn’t walk very far, and so I got him down there. I said, now when we go and I call you, we got to go. Oh yeah, yeah, you’re gonna go with me. Now I’m gonna put ten in the blind with you. And there was some silence. He said okay. And so anyhow we got him down there. I set up a decoy for him, and I told Tina, she’s watched some of our videos that we’d done before, and she knew what to do, but she’d never been the one to do it. And she was getting to experience that, and me actually seeing her and seeing that enthusiasm and seeing that passion start to build, it meant a lot to me. And so anyhow, she said, I started making a few calls when Daddy would tell me to, and nothing was happening. And then all of a sudden, I made one and one gobbled, and she said, she said, I looked out the fine and there was like three or four of them, and here they come. And she said, Daddy, get your gun up, get ready, here they come. And so I had one of those. We call him Old Rattler. He’s took some collateral damage over the years. When you pick him up, you can hear some shot bouncing around in him. And i’d set him up out there just about eighteen yards and I told her, I said, now, your dad has been known to say that’s close enough, and I have witnessed that not to be accurate. A few times. So I said, if he’s at Rattler and a little past, he’s okay. But I said, if he’s on out there ten yards or so past Rattler, you need to put the brakes on him. She said, I’ll try. And so these three come in there and they was roughing up old Rattler and she said, don’t shoot, don’t shoot. He said, I’m waiting on that one. He’d already picked out that big one, and he was coming in the end. And so as he got up there, she said, them others is just like Moses part in the Red Sea. Whenever he come in there, all full stretch, she said, them things just spread out, and he said She said he just kind of done a dance around that. He wasn’t even. She said he wasn’t even. He was about half sidling decoy, and she said he just half posed there and Daddy shot and she said he just hit the ground and then he started flopping and she was so excited, and it really spoke to me, that’s probably the last turkey that my father in law will pull the trigger on, unless there’s a miracle, because he’s in he’s in hospice care right now. But to see her get to experience the joy that I had experienced all those years, you know, and it finally the light come on. There’s a lot of things in life that we go through that it’s just a matter of timing, you know. That was That’s one of the greatest turkeys that I have ever had in my hands. That turkey had six beards, he was a twenty five pound turkey. This is a turkey unlike any that I had ever killed. And it’s the first turkey that my wife had ever called in and it’s probably the last turkey that my father in law will ever pull the trigger on. But it was. That was a great turkey.
00:52:59
Speaker 2: I can’t thank you enough for listening and supporting Bear Grease. We really work hard to bring you the best stories that we can conjure up that we can find, and it means a lot. All the support, all the listening, all the following us on Instagram and Facebook, and I mean, the main thing that you guys do for us, though, is you represent the American sportsman with honor integrity in the field, with your families, with people all over the country. And I hope in some way these stories in this podcast build that culture that continues to allow it to thrive in the coming years. Thank you for listening to Bear Grease Brints this Country Life, Lakes, Backwoods University.
00:53:51
Speaker 3: We’re putting our heart and soul into this.
00:53:53
Speaker 4: We thank you.
00:53:55
Speaker 3: Did I say that already?
00:53:56
Speaker 6: Thank you?
00:53:57
Speaker 2: These episodes are some of my favorite and if if you’ve got a great story that you think would be good for us to hear next year, be sure to email us at Bear Grease at the medeater dot com and as always, keep the wild places wild because that’s where the bears live.
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