SARAH BEILER INCHED her way forward, belly crawling through black Pennsylvania mud, carefully choosing her path to avoid twigs, leaves, acorns, and anything else that could give away her position. The seventeen-year-old’s long, gray dress was caked with mud, and her greasy, strawberry-blonde hair had begun to fall out of her bonnet. With each movement, she paused long enough to shift her granddaddy’s double-barrel shotgun an arm’s length in front of her. The stench of decaying vegetation filled her nostrils. Sweat dripped from her head, a bead occasionally snaking down her temple and into the corner of an eye. It stung like peroxide dumped into an open wound.

In the distance, a hen turkey yelped. It was answered immediately by several sharp peeps from its young. Sarah paused, raised her head slowly, and looked over her right shoulder. The field’s grass, eight inches high, swayed gently in the breeze. Sarah pulled a turkey wing bone call from the pocket of her dress and gave a short series of hen yelps. She was answered by turkey sounds from fifty yards away. Sarah crawled another ten feet before pausing at the edge of the shallow draw in front of her. She slowly parted the grass and looked intently up and down the path that wound its way through the twists and turns of the canyon. She watched and listened for several minutes, then sent another signal with her turkey wing bone.

A minute later, a young man on the other side of the draw rose up on his elbows, removed a backpack, and placed it on the ground in front of him. He rested his beat-up model 94 .30-.30 on the pack, its barrel pointing up the canyon.

Sarah placed her granddaddy’s shotgun on th