Last Thursday, I made a phone call to Mike, the guy I was mentored by as a teenager and still hunt with, to ask if I could invite Timmy, my mentee of the past couple years, to come with me to hunt on opening day of the firearms deer season.

I explained that I had 3 DMPs for the unit we hunt in (1 from the original application in August and the 2 from the leftover DMP process on November 1) and that I would sign over a tag to Timmy to use since he used his regular season tag during the Youth Deer Hunt. Mike just asked if that meant we would be limited to hunting from ground blinds since Timmy is only 15, so he cannot firearm hunt from an elevated position. I said yes and he said that’ll be fine. Upon hanging up with Mike, I called Timmy to ask him if he would rather hunt with me in Watkins on Saturday with me or hunt locally in Chenango County on Sunday (I have a 7P DMP I would sign over to him). He pondered it a couple seconds and said he enjoyed going to Watkins on the Youth Hunt and would like to go there again. I told him that I would text his parents with the details of when and where to meet Saturday morning.

My alarm went off at 3:00 Saturday morning. I got out of bed, showered, and loaded my truck with my tote of clothes, my boots, and our rifles. I met Timmy and his dad at a gas station at 4:15 so that we would be at the winery by 6:00.

We pulled into the winery right at on time. I carried my tote of clothing in to the shop. I changed into my clothes for the morning sit and chatted with Mike and Russ about what tree stands they were going to sit in. Once we all were set, we headed out. I parked my truck above a fenced-in vineyard that Timmy and I needed to walk through to get to our ground blind that overlooks a food plot just below the vineyard. We got our rifles out of their cases and made our way to the blind. Once in the blind, we got situated in our chairs, tweaked the window openings to out liking, and then loaded our rifles. At about 7:45 Timmy whispered, “Right here.” I looked up to see a 4-point buck walking into the food plot straight ahead of us at 40 yards.

I wasn’t going to shoot him, so I pulled out my phone and snapped a couple pictures of him before he got our wind and went back into the brush. Only a few minutes later, I looked to the left and saw a tail wiggle a little bit. I got my binoculars up and it was a doe heading downhill towards the brush. She was extremely to our left and with Timmy sitting on my right, he would have to put his rifle practically in my face to get a shot, so I told him to hang on and lets see what she does. She ended up going downhill while staying behind a rise in the food plot so she was hidden for most of it. We stayed in the blind until 10:00 before calling it a morning.

My mom lives 10 minutes from the winery so we went and hung out there for a few hours before returning to the winery for the afternoon hunt. We knew we were hunting the blind in the afternoon so I left my shooting stick rest in the blind when we left in the morning. On our walk to the blind, I stopped at the bottom fence gate and looked out into the food plot before opening the gate to get to the blind. When I looked to the right, I saw 2 deer out feeding in the plot. I froze and told Timmy to be still. The deer were both does and were roughly 100 yards away. I was wishing I hadn’t left the shooting sticks in the blind when I came up with the idea of using the fence frame as a rest.

Timmy got the .243 on the frame of the gate and got comfortable as he aimed at the deer on the right. He waited for the doe to turn broadside before squeezing the trigger. POW! I saw the deer on the left take off and heard Timmy say “I dropped her!” It took me a few seconds but I could see the deer lying in the tall grass of the food plot right where she had been standing moments earlier. I had Timmy run the bolt of the rifle and turn the safety on before be opened the gate and got into the blind.

Timmy and I both were ecstatic with what had just happened and tried to keep our excitement muffled in the blind. Roughly 45 minutes later, Timmy spotted a deer to our left. It was a doe and she was taking the exact opposite route of the doe we saw in the morning. As she worked around to the left side of the rise in the field, I had my .308 on a steady rest and the safety off. I stopped her before she walked out of the field and squeezed the trigger with the crosshairs just behind her front shoulder. She took off after the shot and made it out of sight. With a few minutes left before sunset, we got out of the blind to go look for blood before it got dark. It took a couple minutes but I finally found blood on the ground and we started to track it using headlamps when Timmy said, “There’s a dead deer by that tree.” I had to take another couple steps to get the angle but he was right, my doe had gone maybe 40 yards from where I shot her. Timmy and I exchanged high fives at doubling up on opening day.