A few weeks ago, fellow BBSer Randy McCune allowed me to adopt his F-grade back action steel barreled L.C. Smith hammer-gun and bring it South on the condition that I would see that it would continue to be hunted. As promised, I've been carrying the gun since turkey season opened here in Georgia March 24th. I've also been loading it each trip with the same two paper Republic Metallic Cartridge black powder 3.5 dram number 4's.
My turkeys have been most uncooperative up untill this afternoon. The Toms have been gobbling in the tree before day and then disappearing the rest of the day all season for me. I had begun to feel like the Lord of Glenthorne with his two "lucky shells".
Yesterday evening though, I located three big gobblers across a cow pasture I was hunting, but could not convince them to cross the pasture over to me. This afternoon I got tired of 'tending to the law' about 4:30 and went back to the cow pasture. This evening, I set up on the other side, next to a thick black-gum swamp.
About 6:30 I got a tripple-gobble response to a series of clucks. Within minutes a nice longbeard stepped out of the swamp-side thicket some 20 yards to my left. I cocked both hammers and took a shot at him with the left, full choke barrel. As the white smoke-cloud began to clear, I saw my Gobbler dead on the ground, and a second gobbler stepped out of the thicket followed by a third, the biggest of the bunch.
With my Smith hammergun in hand, smoke still curling from the left barrel, I peered through that cloud of smoke at my trophy and two more live gobblers, all backlit in the sunset against the dark green of the swamp and the lighter shaded green of the pasture. I felt as if I were looking back through time to an earlier, primeval Southland I've always dreamed of inhabiting. I stood and waved off the other two gobblers. Probably regret that later in the season, but today it felt like the right thing to do.
My bird was 18 pounds even and had a 9 inch beard. Hope Y'all had a good afternoon too...Geo
