Bill Lowen’s oldest child, Nevaeh, is in heaven (her name spelled backward), but she might be little harder to live with for a while.
As Lowen talked about his 10-year-old daughter killing the biggest buck among the extended family of hunters, you could hear the Elite angler’s eyes roll. Oh, daddy sure is proud, but he might not have wanted such success at her age.
“I was speechless,” Lowen said. “I mean, for a 10-year-old kid? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime deer for anybody. Now she’s got a big mountain to climb.”
Nevaeh sounded a bit like she was already on top of it.
“I got the biggest one in the house. I even beated (sic) my grandpa’s deer,” she said before being asked if she expects to ever top the 14-pointer. “Maybe … I’m probably done with deer hunting. I’ll just go duck hunting the rest of my life.”
Lowen said there’s a discernible difference in her demeanor since the Wednesday afternoon hunt in Ohio, 20 minutes away from their Brookville, Ind., home. Lowen said his wife, Jennifer, and Nevaeh had been pursuing the buck since before Christmas, but it never presented a shot.
On Wednesday before dark, Nevaeh got the job done with a crossbow, but there was concern finding it. The fear was it disappeared into the woods before expiring.
“I was talking to Jennifer on the phone when they were tracking the deer, and she’s like there’s blood everywhere,” Lowen said. “I was going to meet them for dinner so I was already on my way over there.
“I suggested to leave for dinner and then go back to look for deer, and my daughter is like, ‘No, we can’t leave, we can’t leave. Just cancel dinner.’”
The deer was actually not that far, but they didn’t see it go down and tracking in the dark can be difficult.
“We were walking and there was just a whole ball of blood in the snow, and then we would keep walking,” Nevaeh said. “At this point, we thought it went up in the woods, but then we looked down at our feet, and it was right there.
“At first I thought it lost an antler because it was under the snow. I thought he had broken one off until I picked him up off the ground.”
The buck, which had only gone about 20 yards, was found while Lowen was still on the phone. He got a pretty good idea just how big it was when his wife and daughter got all choked up and began crying.
“When I saw it, I was like ‘Are you kidding me?’” he said. “My wife knows what a big deer is. Everybody says they see big deer. I’m just assuming she just shot a really nice buck. And then the wife is like, it’s bigger than anything in the house. I was just amazed.”
With “a lil’ sticker” point, Nevaeh proudly proclaimed it was a 14-pointer, and Lowen said the processor rough-scored it in the 170-inch range, considerably bigger than any other trophy in the hunting family.
It was Nevaeh’s third buck. Bill has some nice bucks to his credit, as does Jennifer. Fischer, 6, killed his first deer last year. Nevaeh’s first was an 8-pointer she took with a .50-caliber muzzleloader two years ago, then last year she got a 7-pointer with a crossbow.
“This one, it’s a giant,” Lowen said. “This year, she had to show out.”