Like father, like daughter?
Well, the Dupuis family of Broussard is probably the No. 1 example of how that old adage might still have some juice – especially in the world of deer hunting.
Father Seth, 42, killed a 169 ⅞-inch, 232-pound, 11-point buck in Avoyelles Parish last Nov. 7.
Daughter Julia Dupuis, 9, almost matched the old man on Oct. 10, on the same tract of land. Her 10-point buck, killed with a Barnett crossbow and a Grim Reaper Whitetail Special broadhead, scored 166 ¼ and weighed 217 pounds. The heavy rack had bases 7 ½ and 7 ¾ inches in circumference.
“I wanted that buck,” said Julia, a fourth-grader at Cathedral-Carmel School in Lafayette, who had killed deer in 2024 and 2025 and arrowed a wild hog earlier this season. “Now, I’ll probably just kill some does and some pigs.”
Seth Dupuis had been watching the big buck – and another impressive 8-pointer – on his trail camera all summer. The buck, 19 inches wide with a split brow tine on the left antler and a long, non-typical tine on the right antler, was a regular visitor to an area on his 385-acre hunting land where he had set up a feeder with rice bran.
“I (had him on camera) a little bit last year, and he was pretty big then,” Seth Dupuis said. “He had double brow tines on both sides, and he was really close to the same size; he might have lost a little this year.”
Letting things settle
When the special, early CWD season opened in Avoyelles Parish on Sept. 12, the Dupuis duo was in a 16-foot ladder stand overlooking the feeder. That afternoon, the big buck and his 8-point buddy wandered in, but they acted suspicious, circled downwind and left, Seth Dupuis said.
“They had been coming in pretty frequently, then they backed off, so we let it settle down until they started to come in again,” he said. “She shot a pig, then I relocated the stand; it was in a bad location. We knew where the buck was coming from, and they’d already busted us in that stand (location), and for the next few days, we knew the wind was going to be coming out of the north – and our stand was on the north side of the feeder. So we moved it the day before (Oct. 9), moved it about 50 yards to the other side of the feeder, the downwind side.”
The move paid off almost immediately when a spike buck and doe wandered in and began feeding shortly after 6:30 p.m. About 20 minutes later, as it was starting to get dark, the big buck popped out.
“He had shed all the velvet on his right beam, but not on the left,” Seth Dupuis said. “The velvet on the left antler was still on there, and it looked like it was starting to rot. It was turning black. When I saw that black antler coming through the woods, I knew it was him. I got her up on the crossbow.”
A solid hit
The buck was at 25 yards, broadside but quartering toward the stand just a bit, when Julia finally got on him.
“I couldn’t tell what he looked like, but my dad told me when he walked out,” Julia Dupuis said. “I had trouble finding him in the scope. I told my dad, ‘I don’t see him.’ I waited a minute or two until I got him in the scope.”
Julia let fly and got a solid hit. The Dupuis duo waited a few minutes after the buck bounded away, got down and found the arrow, covered with blood. Seth did a little trailing, found more blood, and pulled back and waited.
“We were sure it was a good hit,” Seth Dupuis said. “A had a friend who had some trailing dogs, and that was my backup, but when we went back in there, we went right to him. He probably ran 80 or 90 yards.”
The proud papa said his daughter said something on the way back to their camp, with the big buck safely in the back of their truck, that crowned the whole day.
“She told me on the way back to camp, ‘Dad, is this the feeling you get when you shoot a big buck?’” he said.
