By Rich Miller
I hope everyone has recovered from all the Thanksgiving feasts. I did the usual and ate way too much, but man I love everything food wise that is a part of Thanksgiving! After all of the family gatherings and eatings, my son and I had “made us a plan” as he says and headed to our hunting camp for the weekend. His mom wasn’t too happy that he was going to be gone for two nights without her, but man was he excited!
He has hunted with me most of the times that I have had a chance to go and we have seen a lot of deer. He has been content with passing on all of the smaller deer and just watching them, but on this trip he told me that he wanted us to kill something! I am in a club that I have been in pretty much for as long as I can remember, and there are a lot of deer down there with some very liberal limits. So I told him we would go and we would take one if we saw it as long as it was not too little; he liked that idea.
When we got there we didn’t have a lot of time left so we went to a box stand that we have on a food plot that was my grandfather’s. Tye slept for most of the way to the club, so he was fired up and ready to hunt when we got to the stand. We rattled and grunted a lot throughout the afternoon but it was uneventful until right before dark when out stepped a doe into the middle of the food plot. He spotted her about the same time I did and he said “deer dad, deer let’s shoot her”! So I got the rifle up and luckily made a good shot on her and she never made another step. That made for a great evening.
When we got back to camp all the guys had heard us shoot and Tye had to show everyone his doe. He had to help skin the deer and do all the stuff the big boys were doing. I just enjoyed watching him and I couldn’t help but think back to when I was a kid and remember doing the same thing. Most of the guys in the club were there to see me growing up, and they all made comments on how they remembered someone else being the same way.
The next morning we went to another spot and sat in a box blind. It got pretty cold that night and I thought that might help keep him warm with us being in a blind. He was still very excited and wanted to know when we were going back to camp. He thought we were the only ones hunting and all the other guys were still back at camp; he didn’t realize they were all in the woods, too. I convinced him we should stay a while and that we would see everyone when we all got back to camp. About 8:30am out stepped a small buck into the logging road in front of us. Again, he saw the deer as soon as I did and I told him “Look! It’s a buck!” I hadn’t planned on shooting it, but he just stood there and Tye said “shoot him, dad, we need some meat!”
Well, that was all the prompting I needed so I put the crosshairs on him and we had our second deer on the ground. He dropped in his tracks, too, and there was no sitting around after that. Tye grabbed all of his stuff and said, “Let’s go see his horns.” I finally convinced him to sit there and give him a few minutes but all he kept telling me was “he’s right there Dad, I can see him”. After keeping him in the blind as long as possible, we got the deer loaded up and headed back to camp. Shortly after we got back, everyone else showed up and then the stories started again.
To say we had a good time would not do it justice, because I could have watched that kid run around there forever. We did kill a couple of deer just like he wanted to do, but deer or not I think he is going to enjoy the experience as much as anything. I know I am; that’s for sure. We have hunted hard all year for a big buck and like I said earlier he has been with me most of the time. We didn’t get that big-racked monster we have been looking for, but it couldn’t have gotten any better than that doe and little 6-point!!
Congratulations, that is an awesome buck!
Posted by: Michael | December 15, 2011 at 09:35 PM