Descending the steep bank to the dry watercourse, I moved quickly as the 20 mile per hour breeze would cover a battalion of hunters moving through the crunchy leaves. I wanted to set up on a harvested soybean field in anticipation that sometime that morning, the local flock of birds would be out scratching the detritus for breakfast.
Low fast moving clouds hid, then revealed Venus off to the east.
No turkey noises were heard in the brightening dawn. Kansas Dept Wildlife and Parks traditionally does not harvest the periphery of crop fields such as corn or soybeans, so I was tucked back into the treeline looking out at standing soybeans, and then the harvested beanfield just beyond the 10 yard offering to the wildlife. The light of the early morning seemed to be multiplied by the whiteness of the soybean debris.
Deer and turkey legal shooting time is one half hour before sunrise. Nothing was stirring until well after sunrise, and I was fighting Mr Sandman. Gentle clucking alerted me to the flocks presence behind me. They started to filter out into the field, and I quickly saw that these were young of the year birds. My plan this fall was to wait for a tom, but I also had hoped to get my first harvest with my crossbow. My resolve to hold out for a tom evaporated. I turned my body to the left, and an alerted momma hen gave the "gather up" call. I put the bow up and focused on the bird furthest into the beanfield.
My story is, and I'm sticking to it, is that I did not jerk the trigger, and I had a very steady scope picture, so how I grazed this young birds neck with my crossbolt is a mystery. I could tell he had been hit, with feathers askew, and I thought I saw dripping blood from his neck as he staggered, but I didn't trust that the wound was a fatal one, so I picked up my 12 gauge and sealed the birds fate.
Tagging completed, and photos taken, I went about trying to locate my crossbolt. I knew that the bird had staggered for multiple steps before the #5 shot finished it, and I could see in the soybean stems where he had flopped, and died. I lined myself up from the presumed arrow contact and shot origination, and started to look, expecting to see the black glossy shaft with orange and white vains in short order. The first shot was taken with the bird 45 yards away, and the 12 gauge a little closer. The far end of the cut beans was another 45 yards beyond the impact zones, and I couldn't imagine that the bolt would have traveled that far.
Minutes turned into dozens of minutes as I walked imagined flight paths, sometimes gently kicking at the leavings on the field, as sometimes it was several inches deep. I kept returning to the start of the blood trail and the arrow strike location, and finally found a few yards further east several feathers with cut ends. With the correct start for the bolt search, and placing the bow at the impact site with it pointing in the flight path, I again moved methodically across the field, through the uncut beans on the opposite side of the field, and entered into the woods. 25 yards into the woods I finally saw the bright orange vains and yellow knock laying against a tree. I walked it off from the shot origination, to where I found the bolt.......125 yards!
Putting this tasty bird in the batwing of my pack, I headed back to town.
Heeding JRYoung and Hand Shaw's entreaties to save the skin, I plucked the bird clean, including his neck. I was trying to do determine if the neck wound would would have been lethal. It turns out that the shotgun was a good idea.
