LUCKY IS BETTER THAN GOOD JUST ABOUT EVERY TIME

By Mike Faulk

Just as the weatherman said it would, the southwesterly wind started picking up in advance of an approaching cold front. There wasn’t much of a temperature drop but the trees began yielding their leaves making hearing the deer a task. Success this October morning on Strum Island in eastern Hawkins County would depend on keen eyesight and deer traveling northward upstream toward, instead of away from, the Holston Ordinance – a 5500 acre preserve unhunted this year due to restrictions imposed after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Fortunately, I heard what was most definitely not falling leaves. Out of my peripheral vision I saw movement on the ground sixty yards away between the tree stand and the river. At first, in the gray morning light on this densely forested island I thought the movement I saw was two or three fawn. They were too low to the ground to be full-grown deer.

My excitement grew when I realized my eyes had deceived me. Those weren’t fawn; instead they were a flock of 12-15 wild turkeys! Though it was deer season, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency granted special permission to hunt wild turkey simultaneous with the opening segment of bow season in seven counties throughout the state.

The flock moved slowly feeding its way toward a food plot of millet some 50 yards north of my location. While they were moving at an angle, their path would take them through an opening some twenty-five yards away for which I had a shooting lane.

While I am at best an average shot with my Fred Bear compound bow, a wild turkey at twenty-five yards wasn’t going to be easy but was within the realm of possibility. But, they were moving to a point where I could no longer see them without moving my whole body. The birds would have to reach the edge of a thicket before I could turn around or reach for the bow.

The pirouette used to pick up the bow, knock the arrow, and set my feet properly took what seemed like minutes. Having moved without warning these wary-eyed woodsmen, I thought I was set. Then I realized I wasn’t wearing my shooting glove [having never learned to use a release]. While trying to hold a bow and put a glove on the right hand with my servient left hand, the turkeys appeared in an opening on their way to what I hoped was the kill zone.

They were now only 30-35 yards away – not in the shooting lane – in an opening through which one might coax an arrow if absolutely necessary. All they had to do was travel 15 yards more through one other area of thicket and they’d be in striking distance.


Single file they entered the brush. As the leader of the single file line of turkeys neared the opening, I drew.

There was a huge commotion. Leaves dropped, wings flapped, birds clucked and my heart sank. I had spooked them with the unnatural noise from the draw of the bow. Instead of exiting the saxophrage into the area with the open shot, they reversed course to the other opening – the one I had told myself just wouldn’t do because of the distance and because of the limbs just waiting to knock my arrow off course.

But lady luck found her way to my perch. In an area of that opening the size of a freezer, three old hens lined up close to one another in single file in a perfectly straight line from me. From my angle eighteen feet up in the sycamore tree, it seemed like one large body with three heads.

Since I was deer hunting I had the range finder with me, but hadn’t shot this little opening due to all the intruding branches in between. My guess was 35 yards, but it might be 31 or 32 yards. I tend to overestimate distances. So, I held the 30-yard pin at the head of the middle bird and cut the aluminum arrow loose.

I sure wish there had been a videographer there to capture my luck on film. To put it mildly, the turkeys reacted to the arrow release. The nearest bird ran into the middle bird knocking it into the legs and feet of the third bird. But for it trying to lift off over the middle turkey, the arrow would have sailed high over its head. Instead, she took the arrow in the body just at the base of the neck.

I know it was a lucky shot. I also wished for a videographer for another reason. There was another aspect of my luck that should have been documented. Field dressing this bird was easier than most. I would just like someone to explain to me and to the rest of the turkey-hunting world how a single arrow can cause a turkey to lose so many feathers. This day “lucky” was so much better than “good’.

-First published November, 2001
Tennessee Valley Outdoors