Wade Tiemann worried his daughter, McKenzie, would suffer a severe case of buck fever if she ever got an opportunity to shoot at the whitetail wearing the dark, aloe vera-like rack roaming their ground. But he should’ve given the 9-year-old more credit.
When the two saw the deer on Oct. 26, 2017, thoughts of shooting anything less were banished. He told her she didn’t even have to announce if she saw it, to just point the gun and squeeze the trigger.
Wade didn’t want her to give to much thought to the deed before it was done.
Cold weather moved into their part of Texas the next day, a Friday. On Saturday, father and daughter shared a tower blind 50 yards from a feeder.
About an hour into their vigil, Wade saw and whispered the aloe vera buck and its sidekick, a 20-inch-wide 15-pointer, were coming. The smaller deer jumped the fence surrounding the feeder (to keep cows out), and the big one slid under it.
“I told McKenzie to take off her gloves, and I held her gun,” Wade told John Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.
“McKenzie then took the gun from me and found her big deer in the scope. I asked, ‘McKenzie, are you on him?’ She answered, ‘Yes.’ I told her to shoot him whenever she wanted.”
The first shot missed, but the whitetail only turned a full circle, which gave her time to re-acquire it in the scope.
Wade again whispered, “McKenzie, are you ready?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
When he told her to squeeze the trigger, nothing happened. Her scope was “blurry.” The little girl’s hair had fallen over her eyes, and she couldn’t see through it.
He swept her hair back and waited. And waited.
“I finally said, ‘Well, shoot him, McKenzie!’” he continued.
And she did.
“After I shot, my dad was shaking really bad while holding my hand. I must admit I was shaking some, too,” McKenzie said. “I told my dad to, ‘Settle down,’ and he did. I wasn’t that nervous, because I’d already taken five whitetails – an 8-pointer, a 10-pointer, a spike and two does.”
A final shot might have been unnecessary, but she followed instructions and put a second bullet into the largest free-ranging Texas whitetail ever taken by a youth.
Its BTR score is 219 2/8 inches.
— Read Recent Blog! Why a Maine Hunter Keeps Staring at His Phone: Hunter: Gene Doughty | The deer tallies 187 6/8 inches on the BTR scale.