Granted, Lauren Smith might not have been thinking clearly when she followed a blood trail to an enormous dead buck last November.
This isn’t my deer, is it? She wondered.
Why would someone sneak through the corn and switch deer?
Her father, Paul, had no answers. He was sitting right beside her in the elevated blind, but he hadn’t even seen what she was shooting at when she ended their stint afield before it really got started.
The Smiths hunt a private farm, part of a 186-acre preserve managed for upland bird hunting.
The night before Kentucky’s 2019 rifle season opened Nov. 9, the preserve’s owner called to tell Paul that he was going to take his 6-year-old grandson hunting. The news meant he and Lauren would have to hunt from an elevated shooting house overlooking two creek-bottom fields.
When they struck out before dawn, they took only one rifle.
“Dad said I could shoot whatever came out in the front field, and he would shoot anything that came out in the back one,” Lauren told Dale Weddle, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “I had decided that as cold as it was (26 degrees), I was going to shoot the first thing I saw.”
The first thing stepped out of the corn 40 yards in front of them, about 10 minutes after sunrise. It looked like a doe, at first, but then portions of the antlers, which had blended in with the stalks, began to take shape.
Because the deer wasn’t moving, Paul couldn’t see it at all.
“Dad was looking too far off,” she said. “He finally said, ‘Just make sure it’s a buck. We’re not killing any does today.’”
Feeling the cold and knowing only that she was looking at a buck, Lauren shot it.
The Smiths took up the trail an hour later, Lauren in the lead. At one point, Paul thought it would be a great idea to film his daughter tracking her deer, so he dug out his phone.
Neither he nor she was prepared for what was lying at the end of the trail.
The “little” buck she’d shot mainly to get out of the cold wound up being among the top 10 Blue Grass State whitetails ever harvested by women. Lauren was so surprised that her first words were “Is this my deer?”
The Pulaski County 14-pointer’s BTR score is 184 inches.
— Read Recent Blog! Switcheroo: Granted, Lauren Smith might not have been thinking clearly when she followed a blood trail to an enormous dead buck last November.