"Snood" is the Word of the Day
Posted By
Bill Winke
at
4/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
Filed under:
journal
Drew is our eight year old son. He likes to hunt with me and we always have fun. Well this morning was the first chance I had to get him out turkey hunting for this year.
We went straight to the tree where he shot his bird last year. I let him pick the spot and of course, what else would he choose. It was nearly a year ago to the day that we hunted the spot last, a big cedar tree out in a small clover patch up by the cabin. If you watched Chad's deer hunt from mid-October (Episode 10, I think), you saw the tree in the background as the buck approached. We set out the decoy, burrowed in under the branches and started listening. It was kind of windy so it was hard to hear gobbling, but we did hear a few distant gobbles between gusts.
I did some calling with the box call and Drew used the push button call. At about 6:30 we heard two birds answer us from the direction of the cabin. It was a repeat of the 2008 hunt. They came closer, gobbling whenever we called. Once they got into the small clover field, I stopped calling and they slowly strutted and picked there way to the decoy. It was nerve-wracking for me, but Andrew stayed focused.
Being under a cedar tree, we had to wait for them to come past the branches (we were set up for birds to approach from a different direction). When the first tom's head cleared, the 20 gauge roared and down he went, just 15 yards away.
Afterwards, Drew said, "I know I was supposed to wait and aim at the bottom of his neck, but when I saw his head, I figured the head is good enough and shot." He was right about that. He pegged him.
So he shoots a nice 2 year old tom almost to the minute a year after shooting one that did the exact same thing last spring. Pretty cool.
Now we have spent the last hour saying the word "Snood". It is our favorite word. We even wove it into the song "Sunshine on my Shoulder". Imagine that! Sunshine on my Snood can make me cry! Snood is a cool word and when you are eight years old, it is fun to repeat any cool word a million times. So, I expect "snood" will be permanently etched in our vocabulary. In case you didn't know, the snood is that little diddly-whopper that hangs off the top of their heads, by the beak.
It was a great morning to be a part of God's glorious creation.
