A Turkey Hunter s Legacy Lives on in an Unremarkable Shotgun

Strebbie’s Gun: A Turkey Hunter’s Legacy Lives on Through His Shotgun

Dave Streb’s TriStar 12-gauge wasn’t one of those fancy shotguns that you only take out once a year. It didn’t have a scope or red-dot sight either. It was just an everyday, everyman’s turkey gun. But it was Strebbie’s.

“It’s a shooter,” he said. “Dead on out to 50.”

The Man

“Gerald?” Only my mom and Streb ever called me by my given name. “Happy New Year, buddy.”

This phone call went the same way every year.

“Only 108 days left till turkey season. Get a shopping list together, brother. Oh yeah, it’s almost time.”

For over 20 springs, Streb, the business manager at Quaker Boy game calls, made the six-hour drive from Cuba, New York, to my Berkshire Hills turkey camp. What used to be a three-day hunt became a five-day, then eight-day event. And the countdown to opening day always started on New Year’s.

Long before mentoring new hunters became fashionable, there was Strebbie. Mentoring was how we met. When Streb invited an Outdoor Life editor on a fall turkey hunt with dogs, I managed to tag along. Streb was all about it. We met informally in the parking lot of Turkey Trot Acres in Candor, New York. Seconds after I arrived, there was Streb, looking excited at my window.

“Get your stuff!” he shouted. “We’ve got a flock located. Let’s go turkey hunting.”

And we sure did. There wasn’t much time for introductions.

“There they are,” said Streb, pointing to a distant hillside. “This game is pretty fun. The dogs will bust the birds, we’ll get to the break site, set up, and call them back together. Hopefully, we’ll shoot a couple when they regroup.”

I struggled to keep up with the ex-elk hunting guide on the scramble up the hill and into the oaks. We set up next to each other against the same tree.

“Let’s wait a little bit till we hear the first bird,” he said. “We’ve got plenty of time for a butt.” (Streb was a smoker like me.) “Then we can start calling.”

“I’d learned early on that when you’re hunting with a guy who’s won numerous calling competitions, you leave your calls in your vest.”

“Well, hell yeah, you’re gonna call,” he said.

Precisely one Winston later, a far off kee kee broke the silence. Streb chimed in with a kee kee of his own and nodded at me to do the same — and I couldn’t have sucked more.

“A little more tongue pressure on the reed,” Streb said. “It’s pretty damn good but just needs to be higher pitched. The best teacher is that hen out there at about 100 yards. Just listen to what she’s doing and imitate it.”

It took several tries, but I finally sounded passable. At least the birds thought so.

“They’re coming,” Streb said. “You shoot the first one in.”

I managed not to miss, but when I sprang to my feet to claim the turkey, Streb immediately pulled me back in place.

“Just leave him for now,” Streb said. “It’s my turn, and the rest of the flock is on its way.”

All I could do was laugh. I had never experienced anything like this in the spring turkey woods before. And then they came. Streb soon got tight on the stock, and our second fall bird fell in the leaves.

“How ’bout it,” he said with a wide smile. “If you can’t have fun, stay the hell home.”

The Kid

Strebbie knew he was hunting on borrowed time. He had a heart attack, and he was on oxygen and medication for his inflamed lungs. His doctors gave him a limited life expectancy. Whether it was five years or 10, Strebbie never said, and none of us ever asked. Through it all, though, he never lost his childlike enthusiasm for turkey hunting.

Ely and Streb first met on a backwoods dirt road in the Berkshire Hills. Ely was just a toddler, and he was sitting in the front seat of his dad’s Cadillac Eldorado. The odd hunting vehicle was pushing water through a flooded beaver dam.

“Good morning, Strebbie. I want you to meet my son, Ely,” said Ely’s dad, Marty. “Oh, and don’t worry about the rig — it’ll work just fine. Besides, the kid’s gotta learn sometime — might as well be now.”

Many town kids visited our camp each spring to talk about turkey hunting and take home one of Strebbie’s prized Quaker Boy calls. But none was more eager to learn than Ely.

Streb taught Ely about hunting spring turkeys, ribbing him the whole time. Ely made fun of Dave right back, but he was soaking in every second of it. Whenever Streb pulled out a new call, Ely was the first in line to try it. And in short order, he became a damn fine turkey caller.

Ely said, “Heck, Dave taught me everything. I’d go home and practice and practice—get kicked out of the house by Mom and Dad—and then practice more. I just loved it.”

By the time Ely was 14, he was ready for youth turkey season — as was Streb.

But that opening morning was cold and rainy. Ely, Strebbie, and I shuffled into our blind, opened the windows, and waited. Long after first shooting light, a group of birds approached our setup.

“Here, Ely,” Streb whispered. “Use my gun. It’s a shooter. Kill the strutter.”

“I’ll be honest,” Ely said after killing his first-ever longbeard. “I don’t even remember where I put the bead. I just kinda pointed and shot.”

After the hunt, Streb said to me, “Gerald, when I die, I’m leaving that gun for Ely. He needs to kill another 100 gobblers with it.”

The Gun

If ever there was someone who needed protection from COVID-19, it was Strebbie — and all his buddies knew it.

“I’d go food shopping for him pretty much every week,” said his close friend Tony Williams. “We just really tried to keep him safe at all costs, no matter what it took.”

We decided to cancel spring 2020’s turkey camp so we wouldn’t tempt Streb into making the trip.

By the time fall arrived, Streb had had enough of social distancing.

“I just want to go to the damn supermarket and pick out my own steak,” he told me. “Enough already. This is killing me.”

Ultimately, an impromptu New Year’s Eve gathering killed him. The first phone call came from Williams.

“Hey, Ger,” he said. “I tested positive, as has Nicole. I feel like dogshit. Don’t know about Dave yet.”

A day or two later, I got the word.

“Strebbie’s going into the hospital,” Williams said. “He can’t breathe.”

Ely Cormier texted me for a status report on Streb each day. It didn’t take long for the virus to steal away our friend and a prince of a human being.

April arrived, and Williams and another dear friend, Mark Wenke, showed up at my turkey camp. There were only three of us now, and we knew that our spring hunt would never be the same. Through the sadness, though, we howled with laughter at Streb’s expense only because we knew that he wouldn’t want it any other way. And when Ely came by to visit, Williams reached into the back of his pickup to deliver on Streb’s promise.

“Here you go, kid,” he said, handing Ely Streb’s gun with no fanfare — because that’s how Strebbie would have done it. “Dave wanted you to hunt with this. Now go and kill some turkeys with it.”

Ely sure tried. He was determined to kill his first gobbler on his own with Streb’s gun. He hunted with that TriStar on mornings before school and on days off and Saturdays. He hunted the same field where he had killed his first gobbler with Strebbie two years prior. Sometimes birds were there, but more often they weren’t. Even though Ely had more places to hunt, we all knew why he kept going back to the same field.

“It was getting late in the season,” Ely told me. “There were only a couple days left. I heard a bunch of turkeys off to my left, but there were other ones there too. So I just got into the woods, set up, and started calling. They pretty much gobbled at everything, and soon, there they were. It was those jakes I had been seeing, but I didn’t care. I was careful to aim this time, and he just went down.”

He tagged that jake within 100 yards of where he took his first bird ever with Strebbie.

“Dave was right,” Ely said. “That thing is dead on.”