One thing I do at the end of every fishing season is review the year and grade myself on how I performed. I do something similar each hunting season, and as I start to wind things down here, I’m happy to say that this has been the best year for everybody in my family, as far as the quality of deer taken.
I didn’t kill my biggest, but I got a nice one. And what’s more important, we all got to hunt together in Kansas, where my dad, my wife and all three of my daughters got their biggest this year.
My wife and daughters didn’t just increase their personal best by a little bit; they kinda went crazy and killed way bigger deer than anything they’d killed before.
What has made this so special is that this is the last year for us all to hunt together for a while. My oldest daughter, Ali, is going off to college next year, so it was nice that we all got to stay in the cabin together and enjoy several days of hunting in Kansas.
This was my girls’ first time hunting in Kansas, and since they had heard so much about it, there was some debating about who would sit where. They were saying “I call this spot” and “I call that spot.” But ultimately, I positioned everyone where I thought they’d have the best chance to shoot a good one, and it worked out great.
We all hunted out of ground blinds because the area we were in is really flat; plus the wind in Kansas can make a 30-degree day feel unbearable. I put little portable heaters in the blinds and we spend a lot of money on snacks, so it’s pretty comfortable.
What’s cool about hunting with family is that we were seeing a lot of deer so we were communicating on the phones. The kids were sending pictures of the deer that they were passing up and how many deer everyone was seeing.
We were talking about how the deer were reacting and if they were moving or not moving. Whenever you have several people out there, you can see that there are tendencies among the deer.
Just because you’re not seeing any deer doesn’t mean that somebody else isn’t. In most cases, it would be kind of slow for everybody, and then you’d have peaks and valleys of deer movement.
Some would be mid-morning, some would be early or late. That happens a lot in fishing too, where you have parts of the day where they’re biting all over the lake and times of the day when it’s kind of slow.
Some of my favorite memories were sitting with my wife when she got her biggest deer and also with two of my daughters when each of them killed their biggest. The only one I missed was Ali, who was sitting with my dad when she killed her biggest deer.
That’s about the only thing that didn’t go as planned. I wish I could have sat with her. But I’m just happy she got to experience that accomplishment.
It’s kind of funny, but when my other two daughters had the opportunity to take those big deer, I think I got more nervous and excited than they did. When I’m hunting by myself, I’m in control so I stay calm. But when your kids are holding the gun or a bow, you’re nervous for them because you want it all to go as planned, so I get a little worked up.
That was particularly true when my middle daughter Ana got her big deer the last evening we were in Kansas. It was a deer that I had wanted to kill the entire season; I just never saw it.
Everyone else was done and Ana was being kind of picky. We were letting a lot of really nice deer go and when I saw that big one, I got pretty excited. After she killed it, she said, “Dad, you have to settle down a little.”
One of the things I was proud of from our Kansas trip was the fact that my dad, my uncle, my wife and my three daughters all took a deer (my youngest daughter took a doe and a buck); so we had eight attempts and we took every deer smoothly. They all went down pretty quickly and we didn’t lose a deer.
The good thing about having a successful Kansas trip behind us is that it kind of wraps up the season. I’ll still do a little bit of hunting around home, but this is kind of the time when I start getting fishing on the brain again.
The freezer is really full of deer meat, so that’s taken care of and now it’s time to transition. In October, I was really excited to go hunting and now I’m getting that same excitement to go fishing. I’m ready to go, and I can’t wait to get back on the water.
Good thing is I’ll carry the memories of a great family deer season with me.