Adams accidentally grabs her husband’s rifle, but still connects from 200 yards
When a big buck stepped out at 200 yards, Kim Adams raised her rifle and reached for the safety.
It was only then the Ruston housewife realized she had accidentally picked up her husband’s Remington .30-06 instead of her Browning .30-06. Fortunately it didn’t matter: Her shot was true and the buck fell dead in its tracks.
“I hunt on a 125-acre lease in north Lincoln Parish with three other families who also hunt the property,” she said. “I climbed into my stand Sunday afternoon Dec. 9; the weather was cloudy and cool.”
Sitting in her box stand on a pipeline, Adams looked out at a pasture on the right with pine timber and a creek on her left. She had arrived at her stand around 2:30 that afternoon, with plans to put out more corn for the hunt.
“I realized there was still plenty of corn already out, so I chose to not mess the area up by leaving my scent and I decided to hunt over what was already there,” Adams said.
She’s a serious deer hunter: She got into hunting some 20 years ago because she decided if she wanted to see her husband, she might as well learn to hunt, too. Her husband now works out of town and seldom gets to hunt, so she goes it alone for the most part. She already has one good deer — a 146-inch 8-point she got two years ago, so she is no novice when it comes to going after big bucks.
“I hadn’t seen anything and was texting my cousin who was working on one of my heaters when I happened to look down the line and all I could see was horns. There was this big buck standing and eating at my corn pile about 200 yards down the line,” Adams said.
The first thing she did was throw her phone on the floor of the stand and pick up her rifle. That’s when she discovered a big slip-up.
“After throwing down the phone, I picked up the rifle and when I tried to push the safety off, I realized I had made a mistake. The safety on a Remington is different from my Browning,” she said. “The thing that really bothered me is that my husband had dropped his rifle, and we hadn’t taken the time to check and see if the scope had been knocked out of line — so here I was with a big buck standing down there and I’m holding a rifle that I was afraid would not be accurate.”
Adams decided to proceed, and after a quick prayer the gun would be accurate, put the crosshairs of the scope on the deer’s neck.
“I knew if the gun was on, I’d drop him and if it wasn’t I’d miss, so I squeezed the trigger,” she said. “To my relief, the buck dropped right there.”
Calling a friend to help her load up the deer, she walked down and realized the buck she had just shot was not the big one she had on her camera. This was a completely different buck, one that had never shown up on before and hadn’t been seen by neighbors on adjoining property.
“I assume after all the rain we’ve had, the high water may have pushed him out, or he just came from somewhere cruising for a hot doe,” she said.
The buck carried a 10-point rack, with a 17 3/8-inch inside spread with 24-inch main beams and 4 ½-inch bases. The deer only weighed about 160 pounds, as most of nutrients apparently went to its rack.
At Simmons’ Sporting Goods in Bastrop, the antlers were measured at an even 162 inches — good enough to put her in second place in the women’s division.