Whitetails from the ground blind

I had decided to pick my son Jack up from school, so that we could make it into the ground blind with about an hour of shooting light to spare. It was an awesome time!! We chatted about what his day was like at school, what all the different bugs were that were crawling around inside and outside of our ground blind and just having a good chat. He did really good for about 30 minutes keeping his wiggles and giggles in check. Sunset this time of year was listed at 4:36 pm, at 4:15we really hadn't seen anything except deer in adjacent fields that we weren't allowed to shoot, so we decided to pack things up.


After I had stowed everything in my backpack, we had taken along some munchies, water and hunting magazines, we stepped out of the blind. As I turned to close up the entrance flap, I saw a Whitetail Doe standing in the exact spot we had just been staring at for the last hour. I told Jack to stay right where he was, I slipped around the ground blind and made a good shot on the doe. Jack was so excited that we had actually seen a deer within shooting limits and had harvested it as well. We walked up to the doe, in order to field dress her & take some necessary pictures. My camera battery was dead by this time, so I really hope the picture I took with my phone camera will turn out OK.


I field dressed the deer, while Jack was asking all the questions, as this was his first deer to be seen dressed out. He did really good right until the very end and then he got really quiet and wouldn't talk to me. He said that he was just really sad about the whole process as he had just seen the deer walking and now her entrails were laying in the field. That's alot for a little boy to try to process in his brain that usually only thinks about sports, Star Wars & the occasional girl. I tried to explain to him that this is how we get our food for the table, and that this was our way of helping Mother Nature balance herself out. Without hunters there would be an over abundance of deer and alot of them would die from starvation or disease if they are not managed in an appropriate way. He seemed to be able to grasp that it was better for this deer to end up on our table than to starve and suffer this winter. Hopefully he will accompany me again this fall, but I will not push the point. I am just glad he went with me this time, we had a blast.