Ahhh, which one do you want to hear?
I've told this story a half dozen times, but here it goes again.
My senior year of high school my buddy and I talked up going turkey hunting pretty big. Opening morning we hunted separately and didn't have any luck. There was a small piece that we figured we'd hunt on Thursday morning. We set the blind up on the corn of these woods, put the decoy out in the open field, and sat tight. We heard some gobbles off the roost, but worse, we heard a crappy caller on the other side of the woods. Freaking Amish. We didn't see any birds, but we heard at least a hundred gobbles.
Saturday morning when we got out of the truck he looked at me and said "we're gonna bag 50 pounds of long beard this morning". Same set up, only I guarded the side of the woods to make sure that we were the only hunters in the woods and then slipped into the blind. We heard quite a few gobbles off the roost and then heard a hen coming our way. She came out to our left and did a large circle in the field for about 45 minutes, dusting herself and making a racket. She finally came around to our decoys and got a little skittish and went on. We waited about a minute and he touched his slate once. Gobbles, instantly. The big boys came right into range, two longbeards.
I'm right handed and he was to my left and he's lefthanded. We slowly got our guns ready and I foolishly stuck my gun out the window of the blind to fit it to my shoulder. Those gobblers went straight to the decoys. He had the first one and me the second...he's whispering to me "I gotta shoot man, I gotta shoot" as they got right to the decoys. My gun was pointed straight and need to go a few degrees to the right. He shot and when he did he says to this day "I felt terrible, I knew I folded him but I knew that you couldn't shoot yours". When he shot, I flipped my gun to the next blind window and blasted mine. We tore out of the blind and stomped some heads, holding up our flapping birds in disbelief!
His (left on in the picture) was 22 pounds, 11 1/2 beard. Mine was 24 pounds and 11 1/4 beard. We were a little shy of our 50 pound goal, but that morning is a hunt that I will never forget. It was my first longbeard and to shoot a double with my best friend was absolutely incredible. We could hunt for 50 years and even shoot another double and it'd be nothing like that.
