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Bill Cochran

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BILL: Saturday I had the opportunity to spend the morning hunting turkeys (on Youth Hunt Day) with Jowe Begin, and his son Joseph. Joseph is an 8-year old from Chesapeake who loves the outdoors. For the past several years he has hunted deer with his Dad a number of times at our club, sitting patiently at his side with a BB gun.

This past Christmas he got a .410 shotgun, and has been practicing diligently hoping to hunt turkeys this spring. He and has found out that to kill a turkey cleanly with his .410, the big bird must be within 20 yards.

Friday afternoon we all got up to the club early to try to roost a bird at dusk. We stopped several places to scout, and found a big tom strutting in a field with four hens moving towards a stand of oaks along a creek where we were sure that they would roost. We checked another place that had always been good for turkeys, and although we didn't raise a gobble, we jumped a turkey off the roost and knew they were close. We went to bed knowing that we had two good spots.

Saturday morning we woke up to find a light blanket of snow on the ground and snow flying hard. We had an early breakfast and headed for the woods. We first went in to the place where we had jumped the bird off the roost. The woods were beautiful and white, but we didn’t see or heard a gobble, so we left to look for the big strutter we had seen in the field.

We spotted him feeding up a sheltered edge with his four hens. My calling didn't do anything but make the hens decide to take their tom back the other way, so I stopped calling and suggested that Jowe and Joseph try to get ahead of the birds and cut them off. I settled-in under a big pine in the driving snow and waited for the shot I’d hoped to hear.

A few minutes later I noticed the birds moving out into the field, and I knew already that they were well past Joseph's range. I eased up the edge of a tree line and let the birds see me just enough to get nervous and move back to the cover they had come from. The four hens flew, but the tom just walked nervously back to the edge of the woods. There was no shot to greet him as I had hoped. I found out later that the bird came back just a little too far past Joseph's 20-yard limit.

We tried a few other places and saw a few birds strutting in distant fields, but closed the day with no shots fired. Joseph did great in the woods, and it was obvious that his Dad had taught him a lot about gun safety and hunting. I hope to have the privilege to hunt again with them soon.