HuntingNet.com Forums - A turkey gun story.......

Years ago as an upstart turkey hunting teenager I had a dream that todays modern turkey hunter may not find to intriguing due to the evolution of our modern day turkey guns!This true story took place before things like gun camo,backboring,porting,scopes,shorter more compact designs,on todays turkey thumpers became so prevelent!
Once hooked on our beloved sport of huntin longbeards we all begin to look for improvements in our overall gameplan to help become a more succesful turkey hunter.One of the more common areas is we begin to evalute our own gear we take to the woods and our firearm is no exception here!With the continued improvement of pattern densities year after year by better loads,additions to improve your aiming point,and opportunties to have your firearm structually maximized to its best overall performance such as backboring or adding an after market choke,the hunter is presented with many opportunties to improve on his overall performance and comfort afield.
With all thats been said I as young turkey hunter longed for a better firearm at the time.Not that the gun I was using at the time wasn' t getting the job done,its just I knew that there was better out there at the time and I just really couldn' t afford it!The gun of my desire was Ithica' s 3 1/2 inch mag 10!Everytime I' d get a new addition of Turkey Call magazine at that time, they would have a full page add on this gun and I found myself constantly wondering what the capabilities of the gun really were!10 guage auto' s weren' t very popular among the sporting enthusiasts around these parts so none of our local merchants carried the gun so much of what i knew about the gun came from articles and adds I would read among all my turkey lore!I figured it was all just dream and heck I really didn' t need it anyway because what I had worked just fine!
Well,to my delighted surprise I got a phone call one evening from a friend of ours about a gun he had picked up!I didn' t think much about it until he told us it was a shotgun!He was traveling on one of our major highways when his son said dad there was a chainsaw in the ditch back there as they drove by!Thinking it fell off the back of someones wood truck he got off at the next offramp swung back by and pulled along side the road where his boy seen the saw!As his son got down to the saw there was a gun laying right next to it and his dad told him to bring them up!He took them to the police station and they told him it was probably stolen property that someone was probably going to retun for as there was a rest stop nearby and they had stashed the stuff there to return later!Anyway no one ever claimed the stuff and a few months later they awarded him his find!When he aquired the items from the police station he took them home after looking the stuff over and called me on the phone!I was about 14 at the time and was a little perplexed why he wanted to talk to me because Jim was an adult and usually associated with my dad!I answered the phone and jim said hey I think I have something you may be intrested in its a gun!Totally confused I said a gun!He said ya its an Ithica Mag 10!I almost jumped out of my shorts and told him I' ll be right over!!!As it turned out the gun was in mint condition and for less than a quarter of the price of what the gun would normally have costed me Jim sold the gun to me!!Needless to say I was estatic!!!A little getting use too,and a few load modifications,and the gun was everything I dreamed it to be!Sure in todays turkey world there' s more economical and user friendly gobbler thumpers out there.But on that day to a 14 year old boy it was the best piece of equipment I could take to the turkey woods,and to many a longbeard since passed it turned out to be there worst nightmare!Since then Jim passed away do to sudden heart attack but his memory still lives as I still to this day chase longbeards carrying that old 10 that he so kindly sold to a young turkey hunter!!!!BOB:)