The day started as a cool, crisp morning with calm wind. My daughter Emily was getting ready for school, and I (-Duckaholic-) commented that the afternoon would be a perfect afternoon to sit in the deer stand behind the house. I told Emily that if she was finished with her homework, I would take her deer hunting when I got home. School work comes first at our house.
“When I returned from work, she and I quickly grabbed our gear, and she grabbed some study material to look over in the box blind and we headed out,” -Duckaholic- wrote.
The rest of his post reads:
As we made our way down the trail that leads to our well hidden box blind, I glassed through the cover and saw a deer that had made it to the feeder before we made it to the stand. I whispered this to Emily, and she looked through the binoculars and commented that it looked like a doe.
We climbed into the box blind like two cat burglars sneaking in for a heist and slowly opened the front window of the box to reveal the deer standing at the feeder 65 yards away.
Emily said, “It’s a buck!”
I carefully moved the curtain to the side and started filming the deer. I asked her if she wanted to take this deer as her first buck, reminding to her that I had seen an 8-point a few days earlier at the same stand.
The deer was looking into the cover every so often, and I told her that bigger bucks usually come out later right before dark. The deer began to move and turn a bit under the feeder, and Emily said that she wanted to take this deer.
The gun was out of the window and in her hands quickly as she focused her attention on the illuminated crosshairs of her .243, aiming at the small spot right behind the deer’s left front leg standing broadside.
“Aim small, miss small,” what I was telling her when she asked me if she could shoot when she was ready.
As soon as I said, “Yes,” BOOM!
The deer jumped up with that mule kick reaction that I’ve seen so many times before with a double lung shot.
“You got him girl,” I said.
She looked at me without hesitation and said, “I love this feeling!”
I called my buddy, who is training his Jagdterrier, and he came over quickly with his dog. The aggressive little dog made quick work of the blood trail and found the deer in short order. The deer did not go far from where the deadly accurate shot had hit its mark, and we found it in the cover about 60 yards away.
On the walk back to the house, we talked about how we had put in time and effort into making food plots for the deer and maintaining the land so we could harvest and animal. I reminded Emily of Ted Nugent’s phrase, “You can’t do this in France” and we thanked the Lord for our blessings as we talked about how lucky we are to be Americans.
Emily is very proud of her first buck and now asks me every day to go back deer hunting to see if we can fool that 8-point.
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