"Elsie" meets "Tom"
By Jim Heffelfinger
I was determined to hunt this special bird, a Gould's turkey, with my great-grandfather's 1894 L.C. “Elsie” Smith side-by-side, Damascus steel, double hammer, double barrel 12-gauge. A great friend of mine had the cracked stock fixed on this family heirloom as a Christmas present to me. He also loaded up some No. 6 shot reduced-power loads with Pyrodex that was safe for firing in the 130-year-old Damascus steel barrels. My son Wyatt agreed to come along and help which was special to me because it was Wyatt who got me into turkey hunting in the first place.
We were mostly big game hunters, but when Wyatt was 10 years old and a brand-new hunter education graduate, he told me he wanted to hunt turkeys because he loved dinosaurs so much. With the help of some friends and youth turkey hunting camps, we learned together and became quite good at it. After I called in both Merriam’s gobblers he harvested up to that point, he returned the favor on this hunt.
The fourth gobbler we talked to that day was a stubborn bird with commitment issues. He was hot to answer every hen yelp with a gobble, but would not cross a deep ditch between us and him at 50 yards. The reduced-power loads I was using means I needed a 30-yard shot or closer. I thought he figured out a way around the ditch but the hen he was with started walking away.
Predictably, he followed her up an open, pine-covered hill. Wyatt called and called more aggressively but the tom kept gobbling as he walked out of our lives. When the tom neared the top of the hill I decided I had no choice but to try to sneak up the hill and make something happen on the other side. Wyatt called aggressively to keep him gobbling and cover my rapid stalk up the hill after him. The big tom answered him almost every time, but then fell silent as I approached the top of the hill. Wyatt followed me far behind calling more aggressively to make it sound like the hen was following him.
As I approached the top of the hill, I started sneaking and carefully looking into the clump of pine trees where I last saw him when suddenly he gobbled in my left ear! He had circled back and surprised me because of Wyatt’s aggressive yelps from the bottom of the hill. I swung Ol’ Elsie to the left, put the bead at the base of his head and squeezed the front trigger. The shotgun roared with a belch of gray smoke and the turkey fell where it stood.
The old heirloom did its job just as it did countless times on small game in my great-grandfather Frank's hands. I am lucky I didn't have time to think about the shot or I would have surely missed. The bird was 21 pounds, had an 11-inch beard and 1 1/8-inch spurs.
Jim Heffelfinger writes for the Journal of the Texas Trophy Hunters and works at his day job as a wildlife biologist for the Arizona Game & Fish Department. You can find Jim on Instagram: @Jim.Deere, and at deernut.com.
