A month passed and Carly was out of school for Christmas break; it was time to get down to business. With the rut fast approaching, we decided to go back to the same stand as earlier in the season since we had the wind in our favor and I had been seeing a lot of does hanging around the last few weeks.  As we walked to the stand, I noticed something in the food plot directly in front of the stand.  As I adjusted my binoculars, I noticed a group of twenty 30-pound hogs feeding in the food plot.  I told Carly that if I was going to shoot a hog, then I was going to try kill two in one shot.  I took an deep breath and squeezed the trigger.  As I looked up over my scope, I noticed two shoats lying in the food plot, thinking to myself, “This hunt can’t get any better.”  I couldn’t have been more wrong!

We sat for the next couple of hours watching the same does and yearlings that I’d seen from the previous evenings.  As they fed and slowly began to fade with the sun, I began to think that at least we had some pork for the weekend at the camp.  As I scanned the brake to my right, I noticed a set of antlers bouncing above the palmettos.  I alerted Carly to the approaching buck, and one glance got her nerves working overtime.  I could hear her breathing heavily and feel her arms trembling as I helped her get the gun out of the window.  She was using my Savage 7mm-08 and had never shot it before, so I made sure she understood that it was a little more gun than she was used to.  The buck made his way into an opening and began feeding underneath an acorn tree as Carly readied the shot.  I flipped the safety off and she settled the crosshair right behind the buck’s shoulder, whispering those last few words of advice about not leaning in too close to the scope.

Carly forgot all about leaning in too close to her rifle scope once her first buck was down for the count.

Following the rifle’s report, the buck dropped in his tracks, with Carly looking at me with her eyes wide-open and her jaw hanging to the floor of the stand.  It took only a second for the pain in her eye to get her attention as she began rubbing it. As we hugged, laughed, and high-fived, I noticed tears in Carly’s eyes, and it wasn’t because of the scope.  The were just no words to describe the mixed emotions that she was feeling, so she let the tears say it for her.  As we both sat there and cried, I realized that that moment was what hunting was all about.   It had taken a couple of years and many hours in the stand, but we had a buck on the ground and the hug was worth the wait. 

Hunts like that one will give you chills each and every time you think about it for many years down the road. When the focus turns from us chasing whitetails to getting our kids involved in the outdoors, then life tends to come full-circle and becomes less about the kill and more about the time spent together.  We as hunters should be proud of what we do and instill those values and way-of-life in our kids, because when Father’s Day comes around and our children are grown, the gifts with the most sustenance will have came from the memories garnered afield.