Thread: Skylar is 8 for 8 and learning to manage on her own.

I was at my hunting lease yesterday with my 11 year old granddaughter Skylar. We were in the stand about 4:00 pm when this 6 pointer cut the corner of a field running. We got him stopped and Skylar decided she wanted to take him. She was shooting my 7mm for the first time and one shot one kill. I put my hand behind the gun butt against her shoulder and held the barrel down on the stand rail for her. This makes her 8th deer with 8 shots, I told her that she would eventually miss.

To back up a little, Skylar was at the lease with me this past Friday to muzzleload and got sick. I took her home Friday evening. My grandson and wife was coming down Friday evening for gun season on Saturday. Skylar normally shoots a .270 and I told my grandson to swap out her .270 for my 7mm since I assumed she would be sick Saturday also.

Anyways, she felt better Saturday and I met my daughter in Asheboro to pick Skylar up to hunt Saturday evening. When we got up the stand Saturday evening I told her I had my 7mm Browning A-bolt and not her .270. She was scared at first. Then the buck came out fast, we had to move fast, when I braced the gun off and she took the shot the buck started doing the side to side tail moving. He jumped a fence and I saw him go down. I asked Skylar how it kicked and she didn't remember it even going off.

I told her since the Browning was a new gun to me last year and I hadn't even killed a deer with it yet, I thought it would be fitting to just give her the gun. She loved that, I just asked her if I could use it until she got a little bigger. She was okay with that to.

Her buck was a big bodied 6 pointer and nice deer for a youngun to shoot. While we were cleaning it, she told me that she is done shooting bucks unless they are trophies. I told her that they are few and far between, that I hadn't shot a buck since 2006. She said no more smaller bucks for her unless they were hurt and needed to be shot. She said if she wanted to shoot a deer that wasn't a trophy there was plenty of does out there. Makes me proud that she decided this on her own.

Skylar is the one in the orange hat.