JustinL1, That would have taken place on a cold morning, December 28th.1963. I had just recently turned 11 years old, and I was hunting Whitetails with my “one armed” grandfather (Paw Paw) that lost his lower right arm in a sawmill accident when he was in his teens. At that time, deer were almost non-existent in Louisiana. We were sitting in the top of an oak tree that had recently been cut down.
We were cold, so, we had started a small fire. It was about 8:00 in the morning, the smoke from the fire was drifting down the little “two-track” road which passed by our stand. Suddenly, my Paw Paw whispered to me, “There’s a deer boy, he’s big as a yearling”! The deer was standing in the “two-track” with a thin veil of smoke around him. The smoke may have helped cover our scent, as he was downwind from us. My Paw Paw told me to shoot, but I was petrified, as this was the first deer I’d ever seen. I insisted that he take the shot. I didn’t realize that, from his angle he had to shoot between two trees. We later found out that 8 of the nine pellets from my Paw Paw’s Model 12, 12 gauge, printed a nice tight pattern in the size of one of those trees. At the time of his shot, the deer jumped strait up....then stood for a moment at “high alert”! This is when I took my shot! I was using my Stevens 22/410 over/under, and at the shot, the deer jumped straight up, seeming to do a 180 in mid-air and vanished into the timber.
We initially thought that I had missed, but, while following tracks in the muddy ground....my Paw Paw found a bright red blood drop. We followed blood, for what seemed a long ways, once finding a large pool of blood with a track in it, on a little high spot of ground beneath an old Beech Tree. The deer went into a “low lying” (we called it the “Flats”) area, which was covered with water.....making tracking a bit difficult. My Paw Paw was leading, and suddenly shouted, “There he is boy”! The deer had crawled into the top of another recently cut tree, and had died there.
We, with help from my Dad, got the deer back to my grand parents home, where we skinned him out. From there to a local community store/butcher shop to have him cut-up. It didn’t take long before the word was out, about the kid that had killed the big deer. Local folks came to the store to see the deer and meet the kid! I quickly became a “little, local celebrity”!
The deer, was a fairly large bodied, nicely balanced, 8 point (4x4)......all of 11” wide on the inside.
My Paw Paw, lived his entire life in the backwoods of Louisiana, trapping, hunting and cutting timber to support his family. He passed away in his late 80’s......never having killed a deer!
Since then I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to take, Deer, Antelope, Elk, Moose, Bighorn Sheep, and Bear.....but, none compare to that hunt! memtb
