How It All Started

Ever since I can remember I have been fascinated by every aspect of nature. The more time I spent outside or with animals, the more in love I fell. I would spend hours of daylight playing in ditches after a long rain, catching bugs, minnows, crawfish, turtles, tadpoles and frogs. I would sneak stray animals into the house and separately convince each of my parents that the other was okay with keeping it. I had rabbits, dogs, cats, snakes, ducks, chickens, the list goes on. We didn't live on a farm, but to me, we did. I remember every once in a while my dad would go with a friend on a hunting or fishing trip and I always wanted to go, but Mom & Dad said "not this time." What they didn't know, was that this little girl was born for this. However, my dad did take my sister, Rebecca, and I deer hunting when I was two years old. That was a bust due to me hollering "I see one!" or "I have to potty!" every two minutes. This is most likely why I never got to on Dad's trips anymore. When I got to go fishing with my dad, I loved it and would want to stay 'til dark, catching or not catching. It was a bit longer before I got to go hunting (and actually understood what I was doing), around 7th grade. My first real experience was coon (raccoon, for you yuppies) hunting. We brought a beautiful champion blutick coonhound, Blu, out with us and let her loose in the woods. While we waited for the dog to tree the coon, we built a fire to keep warm. We finally heard the dog and she had treed. Now, I was not prepared for the long hike we had to take to find the dog, and of course I had to pee. We killed the coon and sold it...I wasn't real sure about all of this, but I thought it was fun enough to go again and kill one myself! Then deer season came along. My brother-in-law, Tim, and sister, Rachel, took me out a few times and we didn't see any deer, but for some reason I wasn't ready to give up. One evening Tim and I were sitting in a box stand and nothing came out. As we got down he told me that deer are almost always standing at the bottom of the hill, and sure enough, two big does stood there and stared us down. It wasn't past legal shooting hours, but it was getting close and kind of hard to see out of his old 30-30 scope. Heart throbbing, knees shaking, I pulled the trigger..."did I get it!?" We rounded everyone up with flashlights and searched for blood, finally we found the bullet in the dirt. It was a miss. I had no idea that I had just become addicted to this way of life. The next deer I had the opportunity to shoot was a spike, with my Dad's crossbow. I heard the crunching of the leaves behind me and started going crazy inside. It walked right under my tripod, where Tim was sitting on the ground with a compound bow. They were face to face and surprisingly the deer was not spooked, he kept on walking. When he got to the fence line, he turned and looked, I shot. Long story short, it was another miss. Time passed and I finally had another hunting opportunity...my first deer, and my first buck. Keep reading :)