Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Mule Deer and others, youth rifle advice, please

Fraser;
Top of the morning to you sir, I hope that the winter in Deep River has been as mild as our Okanagan winter has been so far and that you and the family are well.

While it might be breaking with tradition, I did read all of the responses before answering and honestly in my experience you've had some good ones for sure.

Like your daughter, our girls very literally grew up in the mountains here and when they were old enough wanted to hunt on their own.

Photo of the beginning, middle and then first bucks for both just for fun.



Pro-D day at school that was spent with the old man



First buck for both, within 15yds and less than 15 seconds of each other.



To the choice of rifles now..

Both of them resolutely refused to shoot their Mom's little .308 carbine, despite me loading it down. They just thought it had too much muzzle blast and that was that as they say.

We didn't have a .223 in the safe then and honestly I should have had one as the little RAR I use for a training rifle at the Hunter Safety course we run at the gun club every spring is always a class favorite. Well the female students somehow seem to love shooting a little .38Spl 92 trapper clone, but that's different.

My initial search then centered on finding a decent .243, but when a buddy was dispersing an estate which had a .250AI that nobody seemed to want because there was no ammo in the Canadian Tire for it, I bought it. We reworked a 788 stock that was in the parts bins that had been shortened already, then loaded 100gr Hornady Interlocks and that worked fine on some fairly good sized Okanagan whitetail and mulie bucks.

Our eldest took a different route and when spotted her late Granddad's 96 Swede in the back of the safe, upon learning I'd built it for him back in the day, decided it would be hers.

She had a wee bit of an issue with the cock on closing part of it at first, so I installed a Dayton Traister cock on open kit which included their trigger.

If memory serves that first buck died with a 120gr Nosler Solid Base and then we switched to 130gr TSX which she's used since and still uses as an adult. We've never, ever caught one of them by the way. They all pass through and head off into the mountain behind the buck, even the bigger ones.

For a wee bit of a summary then sir, both rifles were reworked with their input to fit them and suit their inclinations as much as possible. I believe that was fairly important.

If one goes the route of say a RAR or something with a black plastic stock and she wants to customize it, I'd encourage you to head to the local Can Tire, spend what is now admittedly a small fortune on a few cans of paint and let her have at it. We did that on a couple stocks, they both enjoyed it immensely and it allowed it to be at least somewhat customized for them.

Here's a RAR that I did on my own, but I'm sure you take my meaning.



Anyways those are my experiences with setting up our daughters with what turned out to be effective choices for them when they were at your daughter's stage in life.

Hope that helped and made some sense.

All the best to you all this Christmas Season.

Dwayne