Hunting with Mason, My Oldest- Part 1

Mason is ten years old and prefers an Xbox to a tackle box for now.  He would rather stay inside and whines when I make him go do things that he doesn't want to do.  Don't get me wrong, he is a thoughtful and polite young man and I love him with all my heart.  I also know him sometimes better than he knows himself.  What I mean is that I know when I force him to go shed hunting or fishing, I know he is going to end up having fun.  On one particular day, he complained the ENTIRE way to the woods about having to go shed hunting on such a cold day.  But then, I had to literally pull him away from a tree at the end of the day because he said he wanted me to leave him there and that he could live in the woods on his own.

When he looked less than enthused about going to our family farm and getting up at 4 AM to hunt turkeys the next morning, I wasn't surprised.  What softened the blow was when I told him that his little brother would not be coming along.  I had a feeling that might tip the scales in my favor.  

So we got to the farm on a Friday night, made sure the dirt road we had to drive down the next morning was in good shape, and hit the sack early.  To my surprise, the young man woke up without a complaint and got dressed pretty quickly.  That morning found us in a pop-up blind in some creek bottoms with three decoys in front of us at 5:15 AM.  I usually go with two hen decoys but I ran across a third and thought I would hedge our bet a little bit more with an extra hen.

What I have failed to leave out up until this point is that Mason has been deer hunting a few times.  He has hunted with me a couple of times at my uncle's farm in Stockton, Missouri.  While we have seen deer, I've never pulled the trigger on one.  I also meant to take him on his first squirrel hunt last winter but the weather was lousy when I wanted to take him the weekend before the season ended.  To summarize, the kids has been told about hunting but never heard the bang of a gun or seen an animal harvested.

So there we are in the blind with 7-8 birds gobbling all around us and me as giddy as a kid.  And there my kid is, dozing off and not particularly interested in the hunt.  I was a little disappointed that he wasn't excited but the idea of maybe pulling the trigger on a bird took the edge off that emotion.  Mason's heart rate DID increase when I squeezed his knee and told him that we had two gobblers coming in.  He perked up, eyes wide, and peeked through the opening in the blind.  

The two toms came into view, I knew that they were smart.  They didn't come running in to the set up but instead peaked cautiously from around some trees.  They figured out pretty quick that something was amiss.  They would sneak in and out of view but I knew they weren't going to commit.  We also saw a hen in the cut corn field and a hen with them as well and that pretty much sealed the deal in my opinion, but then another variable factored into the equation.  They had a jake with them!