Years ago I was dating a young, very pretty, very girly, city-girl named Jordan. We had been seeing each other for about four or five months, when one night she told me that she was interested in trying hunting. She only said it in passing, but my mind immediately started planning out how to introduce her to my favorite pastime.

With our six month anniversary coming up, I had to act fast. I was in a local sporting goods store looking for a rifle for her and noticed that they had a Remington Model 7 Youth Model in .260 Remington on the clearance rack. I bought the rifle along with a 3-9 Leupold and gave it to her as a gift to celebrate our six-month anniversary. (I also gave her diamond necklace to make sure that I didn’t end up sleeping on the couch for a few weeks.)

Over the next couple of months, I started teaching her how to shoot with my old Daisy BB gun. While she wasn’t Annie Oakley, she did OK with it. After she got comfortable shooting the BB gun, we moved up to a .22 rimfire, which gave her a chance to start using a scope. I developed a nice mild load for her .260 using a 120 ballistic tip. After thinking about it, I decided not to have her practice with the .260. Her form with the .22 looked great, and I didn’t want her to develop a flinch. I just told her that the .260 worked exactly like the .22 and she didn’t need to bother practicing with it.

Where I hunt in Minnesota, the deer are very plentiful. This is where I fill my freezers with venison every fall. Most years, I have all of my tags filled in the first half hour of the season. I had a stand that overlooked a small clearing that I hunt on opening morning every year. Unfortunately, this stand wasn’t big enough for two people, so two weeks before the season I drove up north with $300 worth of lumber and built a stand for the two of us to use, complete with walls, a roof and a nice bench.

Jordan worked as a bar maid in a German bar in Minneapolis and had to work until close the night before opener. To get to our hunting property from where I lived was about a three hour drive, so I picked her up from work at 2AM and drove through the night to get us there by first light. As we drove through the snow, I was both excited and apprehensive. I really wanted to make sure that she had a positive experience. I hoped she wouldn’t get bored, cold or feel bad about shooting a deer. While this was just another weekend adventure to her, it meant a lot more to me.

She was sound asleep when we arrived at our hunting shack. I gently shook her awake and told her that we needed to go. When I opened the door of my truck, I was hit by a blast of very cold air. It had stopped snowing and cleared up, but the temperature was dropping. She didn’t say much as we got our gear together. I don’t know if she was just tired or nervous.

I love sitting in my deer stand waiting for the sun to come up. This was actually the first time I’d ever shared a stand with another person. As we sat there in the moonlight, we could hear deer moving around in the woods; the leaves crunching beneath their feet as they fed on acorns. The deer kept on getting closer and closer. While I couldn’t see them, I knew that they were within a couple hundred yards of us.

Crunch
Crunch
Crunch

Something changed. Instead of the sound of deer meandering around, it sounded like they were all moving on one direction. Checking my watch, it was three minutes before legal shooting light.

“Get ready,” I whispered. “They’re coming.” Jordan picked up her rifle, rested in on the wall of the stand for support and peered through her scope.

“I don’t see any,” she said. “Just wait, they’re coming.”

Then I saw the first deer, a doe. She was walking down the trail about thirty yards in front of us. “I see one!” she whispered. “Don’t shoot, it’s a doe.” I whispered back. Behind that doe came another , and another, another. In all, ten deer walked right in front of us in a single line. None of them had horns. As they passed by, I thought I could hear one more following them.

“Just wait, I think they’re might be a buck following them,” I whispered to her. As I peered into the woods, I saw another deer. It was big bodied and following the same trail the does had been on with its nose to the ground.

“That’s the buck. Shoot him when he’s right in front of us.”

As the deer got closer and closer, I strained to see its antlers. When it was finally right in front of us, I realized that it wasn’t a buck, just a very big doe.

“Wait!” I hissed right as she squeezed the trigger. At the shot, the deer dropped in its tracks.

“Shit, that wasn’t a buck.” I said to her. “It’s ok though, I have a doe permit we can use on her. Good shot honey!”

“Is it dead?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s dead. You center-punched it.”

“That’s good. I was afraid it might suffer.”

“Nope, you killed her dead on the spot.”

As we were talking about how dead the deer was, I saw its leg twitch.

“It’s moving,” she said.

“Yeah, sometimes they twitch a little after they’re dead. It’s no big deal.”

No sooner had I said this when the doe raised its head. A second later she hauled herself up with her front legs, her back legs dragging as she started pulling herself away from us. Grabbing the rifle out of Jordan’s hands, I centered the crosshairs on the doe’s neck and squeezed the trigger. At the shot, she went down again.

“Is it dead now?” she asked me.

“Yup. Now she’s dead.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. Your first shot was a little high. You hit her through the spine. She’s dead now though.”

As I sat there hoping that Jordan wasn’t too traumatized at my having to shoot her deer again, I saw it’s leg twitch.

“Oh, shit.” I thought to myself. “Please be dead.”

It wasn’t.

And it proved that it wasn’t as it started bleating. Very few things sound worse than a dying deer. It almost sounds like a baby crying.

Jacking a fresh shell into the rifle, I realized that the only shot that I had would be right through the head. My mind started racing. “OK, first the deer gets up and I shoot it again. No problem. Now is laying there bleating, and if I shoot it in the head, its head is going to explode. She’s going to be so traumatized that she’s never going to want to go hunting again.”

Time to make a plan.

As fast I could, I climbed down out of the stand and ran over to the downed deer. I had my .44 in a shoulder holster, which I quickly drew and fired a round into the deer’s heart from about three feet away. The bleating stopped.

As I got back into the stand, I just about wanted to cry. I felt horrible for the way we’d killed that deer. Granted, it was a better death than Mother Nature ever gives a deer, but it was still not very pleasant.

“Is it dead now?” Jordan asked, looking straight into my eyes.

“Unequivocally, yes,” I said looking right back at her.

“That’s good,” she said. With that, she leaned her rifle in the corner, leaned her head against my shoulder and went to sleep.

“Huh, that’s interesting,” I thought to myself. “She should be crying her eyes out right now.”

A couple of hours later my dad showed up to see how we did.

“You guys sure did a lot of shooting this morning,” he said as he walked up. “Did you get anything?” Without a word I pointed in front of us.

We got out of the stand and walked up to where it was laying. As the three of us looked at the dead deer, the first words out of Jordan’s mouth were “Wow, they have really pretty eyes.”
I thought about the look in those eyes as I had fired the last round into it from point blank range. “Don’t tell me how pretty their eyes are,” I replied rather crossly. “Let’s get her dressed out.”

My dad is a doctor and always used to give my brothers and I anatomy lessons when we’d clean game. Since this was Jordan’s first deer, he did the same with her. She seemed fascinated by all of the different parts of the gut pile, and even got some blood under her manicured nails as she helped me with field dressing.

As we were driving home that night, I had to ask her. “So what did you think of deer hunting?”

“Well, deer hunting kind of sucks. It’s really cold, kind of boring and you have to get up early. But shooting deer is fun!”

“I thought that you’d probably cry when we killed the deer,” I said. “I cried when I shot my first deer.”

“Why?” she asked, truly puzzled.

I should have taken it as a sign right there. In the end, she ended up showing me even less compassion than that deer!

Tags: Deer Hunting, First Hunt