My new position at work is making this a little harder to keep up to date, but I'll get it all up here eventually!
Would you believe that Sunday morning was almost a repeat of late Saturday morning? We started straight out on the hill where we chased the tom the day before. It was absolutely gorgeous weather and a great morning for a hike. I couldn't tell you how many hundred deer we saw. We explored a bit more than the day before and only once we started our loop back did we run into a gobble!
We tried to be more cautious this time, but the tom was obviously not interested in coming to us. After several setups where he just kept on walking perpendicular to us, we about gave up. We had climbed all the way to the peak and sat down for a rest. FireTiger did some clucks after our rest and wouldn't you know it he was down where we started. It sounded like he was well away from us, so we cut the distance to a ridge before attempting to locate again. GOBBOBOBOBLELE. Holy crud we were about on top of him. He must have been just over the ridge, making him sound much further away.
I think we were both so caught off guard that he went into hiding. After 15 minutes of silence, the next gobble we heard was well behind us again. It was starting to get hot out and there may have been a bit of crankiness floating around, so we decided to call it a day. If it had been just FireTiger and I, you'd dang well bet we'd have been charging back after him!
Maybe 40 yards from where we had stopped on the ridge, on our way down, someone flushed something large. FireTiger called out turkey but nobody actually saw it. It may have been two different toms, with the close one just hunkering down after we about stepped on him. It had flown off the mountain, so there was no getting on him.
Someone, or some thing, had beaten us to this one.