Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Kids at the Campfire daughter's first deer!

It is a pretty neat feeling when a plan comes together just like you hope and that is exactly what happened this evening! After lots of practice in 4H BB gun class, practice in our basement shooting an air rifle with a scope, and then handling the excitement to bag her first turkey last spring, our daughter Grace was determined to make this the year she shot her first deer. Having praticed using shooting sticks and learning to "pick a spot" using lots of pictures in magazines, all of the work Grace did paid off on her very first deer hunt. One month before her 9th birthday and Grace's dream of taking her first deer is now a reality!

Both my wife and I are school teachers, so we didn't have a lot of time to hunt this evening, but having hunted this place several years we have a pretty good idea of what the deer usually do. I got out to the field early enough to set up the pop-up blind and leave their stuff in it, then headed back out to the road to meet them. My wife served as Grace's "turkey guide" last spring and was anxious to be her "deer guide" tonight while I took our younger son around and hunted 1/2 mile away. With about 15 minutes of shooting light left, I finally heard a single shot from their direction...





For those of you who like details, Grace made a perfect shot at about 50 yards with the deer quartering slightly away. She was shooting a Rem. Model 7 in 7mm-08 using reduced loads I worked up using 120 gr. Hornady soft points. It isn't a very fast load, but worked just as hoped as the deer piled up less than 50 yards away. The bullet didn't exit, but both lungs were destroyed, so pleased with that result. Grace is small enough (only 51 pounds) that I was concerned about too much recoil, but using the shooting sticks she did just fine. Now she has an antlerless tag to fill, so we will be headed back out again this weekend.