Opening the heavy door on my gun vault, I saw my three specialized turkey shotguns were front and center, right where I’d put them at the end of last season. Each gun had a short barrel, sported an extra-full choke and wore a red-dot reflex sight.
I stared at the guns, crunching numbers, and felt almost ashamed. Do I really need these to kill a turkey? I asked myself. Is it necessary for my turkey guns to shoot with rifle-like accuracy at distances that weren’t even deemed possible when I started hunting these birds 48 years ago?
In my hand was a box of five turkey shells. They were specialized, too, made of Tungsten Super Shot at a cost of nearly $10 a shell. I was going to pattern the load in one of my fancy guns. That’s when the feeling in my heart turned from bad to worse.
I put down the box of TSS, moved the first three guns aside and looked in the back of the vault. That’s when I saw it, my very first 20-gauge shotgun. Bringing the Savage pump into better light, I was pleased with how good it looked. I remembered when and where it got every scar. It had been locked away for nearly 15 years. The last time it had been used was when I taught my sons how to shoot a shotgun.
The buttstock had been shortened to fit me when I was 10 years old back in 1974. Two years later I shot my first ducks, geese, grouse, quail and band-tailed pigeons with that shotgun, but I had never hunted turkeys with it.
Putting the fancy turkey guns back in their place, I locked the safe
