My daughter, Audrey White, has been wearing an ear-to-ear grin since 8 a.m. Friday, Nov. 9, just moments after she harvested her first deer ever – a five-point buck.



So have I and so has her grandpa.

Audrey, who turned 12 in August, has been hunting with me and my crew – which includes my dad (her grandpa), my uncle, and a longtime family friend – since she was 10. Deer hunting is a tradition in our family like no other. I've been in the woods with a rifle nearly every November since I was 14. That's nearly 30 years ago at this point. And my kids – all five of them – and my wife truly enjoy a good venison meal.

So we don't just hunt for the sport of it. We hunt to fill the freezer and to create the kind of memories only a day in the woods chasing game in northern Minnesota can produce.

Last year, after completing firearms safety, I bought her a rifle – a Savage .243 – and her grandfather and I took her to the range to learn about the weapon and hone her skills. We could tell early on that she had an eye for shooting. Her practice rounds filled the area around the center of the small paper target we planted 50 yards down field. With her confidence high, she headed into the 2011 season hoping to get a shot at a deer.

Unfortunately, after spending a couple of days hunting, she never saw a deer. That's hard on a young kid just testing the waters of the sport – especially a girl – and I wondered if she would lose interest sooner than later.

Heading into the 2012 season, however, her interest hadn't waned at all. In fact, she seemed more determined than ever to bag a buck.

With that in mind I hit this fall determined to help make her hunting dreams become a reality the best I could. The first thing I needed to do, in my mind, was prepare the area around the stand we believed would give her the best opportunity to not only see a deer, but also to get a good shot off.

And that meant doing some pre-season brushing. In 2011, while sitting in the same stand with Audrey, I actually saw a deer she might have had an opportunity to take aim on, but the brush and branches around where I saw the animal were much too thick for a new hunter to see a deer in a timely manner, let alone get off a good shot.

So I hit that spot and several others with my pruning blades and after several hours of chopping and clipping and general forest sculpturing, I had created what I believed would be the ultimate hunting hole for my little girl.

I found all the best deer trails and groomed openings aimed at providing her with the best and easiest shots possible. I figured I had every possible scenario covered.

Then it was grandpa's turn. He took Audrey to the rifle range in late September and helped her polish her gun skills so that, when the time came, she would be confident with her weapon.

Finally, I took Audrey to our hunting land a week before the season and sat her in the stand. I walked the deer trails around her, pointing out all the areas and openings where I believed a deer could emerge so that she could study those spots and be prepared when or if the opportunity later arose.

Then came the fateful day. We arrived early with a plan in mind. Audrey would sit with her grandfather – definitely the more patient, teacher-type of the two of us – in the main stand while I would sit in a stand not far away.

On my way in I kicked up a deer. At the time I didn't think much of it, but looking back I have a feeling I know exactly where he went – and it wasn't anywhere near where I thought he would when I was doing all that pre-season planning.

A half-hour after I settled into my stand I heard the gunshot to the north of me and knew it was Audrey's Savage. The only problem was it sounded like what we refer to as an air-ball – a shot that misses a deer.

It's not an exact science, but I believe any good hunter eventually gets an ear for shots that connect with deer, especially so close. There is a bang/thump effect that happens when a shot connects, whereas a miss usually seems to echo and just sound like the bullet is flying off into the distance. Audrey's shot sounded like that and when I arrived at her stand the look on her grandpa's face told me he believed the same thing.

The reason for the doubt, you see, was this: More times than not when a deer comes out of the woods in front of you it happens in the last way you would expect. It's random, chaotic and nerve-wracking and nothing like you see on television hunting shows where hunters set up shop over fields full of home grown deer bred to be shot.

It is wildlife acting as wildlife should – wild. So in Audrey's case, the buck came directly at her deer stand, through thick branches and there was limited visibility. The deer caught wind of her and my dad 15 yards away. When it spotted them – and they spotted him – the buck turned sharply to the right and got onto one of the well-worn trails. That move would have offered the perfect shot had the buck just walked along the trail and offered a broad-side opportunity like we planned.

But this guy, perhaps spooked, decided to deviate from the trail seconds before the shot presented itself and head away from their stand in three quick leaps.

Then, just before it would have disappeared forever into the darkness of the forest, it stopped in the last possible place it could, in one of the very spots I had spent time brushing and pruning to perfection before the season. It stood there with its tail toward the stand, facing away from them, but turned ever so slightly, offering her one shot, and one shot only.

She calmly put the crosshairs of her scope on the animal's front shoulder area as best she could and asked her grandpa, “should I shoot?”

He replied, “Go for it.” And she squeezed the trigger. The deer reacted like nothing ever happened and then slowly sauntered away into the brush.

After hearing the story I felt even less confident that we would find a dead deer that day. What a difficult shot, I thought to myself. So little to aim at and at 60 yards away, it would have been a hard shot even for seasoned veterans.

But when we found that deer, not 30 yards from where it had last been seen, a bullet hole in the very spot she had aimed, three sets of doubting frowns were immediately turned upside down – especially on Audrey's face.

When things had calmed down and I had time to reflect on everything, I came to realize that Audrey never really did have a frown on her face. She wasn't dejected when her grandpa and I discussed all the reasons she probably missed or when there was no blood in the spot where she had shot at the deer.

She knew she got that deer and told me so later that day.

“I knew I was going to get a deer this year. I kept dreaming about it and thinking about what I would do if one came out and how I would shoot it,” she said. “It just didn't happen the way I thought it would.”

“It usually doesn't,” I replied.