Avery The Deer Hunter

I'm gonna have to get an orange hat

My eight year old granddaughter Avery has never been interested in outdoor pursuits. Knowing that she will encounter them as she visits friends, for years now, I’ve done my best to ensure that she is familiar with guns, at least enough to ensure her own safety if one of her friends does something stupid with one.

Last Christmas I bought her a Red Rider BB gun. She thinks the Christmas Story movie is great, but isn’t so sure about the BB gun. She’s also got a fixed blade Buck Knife, a birthday present from me when she turned eight. As with exposing her to guns, the knife is an attempt to teach her how to use something potentially dangerous in a safe way. She wasn’t too impressed with the knife either!

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

So imagine my surprise when she came over from school the other day declaring that she wants to go deer hunting.

It turns out that her best friend at school has a brother about their age who just shot his first buck. And she and her friend have decided that they need to do the same.

Now, I deer hunted most of my life, as did my father and my grandfather. And I can honestly say that in three generations we never actually shot a deer. That wasn’t the point of it. The point of it was to get my brother and I, our cousins, all the men of the family together, camping in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains, with guns. It was a bonding opportunity, not a deer shooting opportunity.

But, what’s a guy to do?

I told Avery that I’ll take her hunting. But, first she has to learn to shoot a rifle. Luckily her uncles have their own rifle range on their farm, so we’ve got a great spot for her to learn. She’s apparently keen on doing just that now.

We’ll start with a .22 and slowly move up from there, but a Winchester Model 94 30-30 is the smallest deer appropriate caliber I have, so she’ll have to learn to shoot it before we can go hunting. I imagine she will, she’s determined when she has her mind set on something.

And she’ll have to go to the State run hunting school.

Lastly, she’ll have to wear orange. I figure if anything gets her off of this deer hunting kick, that’ll be it! I’ll buy her some orange clothes for Christmas, that could well be the end of it.

(The gov’ment didn’t make us wear no orange when I was a kid! We all wore red back then, except my uncle, he was a blue kind of guy. Gonna have to get us both blaze orange Effanem Crushers.)

But, I’m too darn old to go camping in freezing weather now, so we’ll rent a cabin in the foothills instead.

And we won’t actually shoot a deer, because I know that if we did, it would likely haunt her for years. Not to mention the fact that I’m too darn fat and old to be packing a deer out of the brush! She’ll be able to say that she went deer hunting though, and my hunch is that is sort of the point. To be able to say that her family takes her to do what her friend’s family does.

It’ll be a great opportunity to bond as well. Without the feminine influences around, because there’s no way Mom or Grandmom will join us out in the cold.

Now I just need a sunny day to get Avery out to the range, I figure it’ll take a year to get her worked up to the 30-30. It’ll be good if she learns how to shoot well, so I won’t break the ‘have to wear orange while deer hunting’ thing to her quite yet.