Teagan gets her first deer as she stays on track

I didn’t shoot my first deer until I was 21, but I was blooded at 12.

And it wasn’t blood from a deer that my father smeared on my face, but blood from a rabbit.

We didn’t hunt deer when I was a kid. They were few and far between in Indiana back then. Instead I was raised hunting small game -- rabbits, squirrels, and quail.

I don’t remember exactly where I got my first rabbit, but I do recall my father dabbing his fingers in the critter’s blood and marking my face with it. He told me I was a hunter now or something to that effect. I’m sure it meant more to him than it did to me. I was just glad to have finally hit something with the old 12-gauge single-shot Winchester I carried.

I suspect my oldest granddaughter Teagan felt the same way last week when she killed her first deer.

It was the second year in a row we took advantage of the early youth hunt, held prior to the opening of the general season in Montana. We’d been unsuccessful last year and it was undoubtedly my fault. I’d insisted on taking her on foot into some rugged breaks country where I’d seen a big buck earlier in the year.

We walked half the day. The only buck we saw never stopped moving and Teagan wasn’t comfortable taking a shot.

But she wasn’t discouraged. She wanted to try again.

Teagan and her dad arrived at our house in the middle of the night and after only a few hours sleep we piled into the pickup and headed out to a friend’s place on the river. At dawn there wasn’t a deer in sight.

We sat for a while before going back to the house for breakfast. Teagan joked that she would probably be an old woman before she got her first deer.

Later that morning we took a drive south of town and saw a pair of forkhorn muleys disappear down a draw on public land.

After a 30-minute stalk Teagan took a shot and missed, shot again and the bullet made a resounding “thump” as it hit the deer. Her shot, however, was a bit low, and the buck took off at a fast walk.

She got on the trail and less than an hour later made a killing shot at 150 yards.

I’m sure the hunt didn’t go as she had expected. No kid dreams of wounding their first deer. But she did the right thing, stayed on track, and followed up the errant shot with a better one.

I dabbed my thumb in the warm blood and smeared it on her face.

She said it was gross.

I was thinking something else entirely.

Parker Heinlein is at

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