How many 10-year-olds manage to tick off two bucket-list items in a span of one second?
Ella Perkins did it — taking her first buck AND breaking the 200-inch mark — while hunting with her dad, Cody, last September.
Cody says the whitetail they’d nicknamed Big Boy was bedding on the adjacent property, near a lake that serves as the town’s water source. Hunting isn’t allowed there.
He and his daughter saw several deer on Sept. 4, opening Saturday of the youth season, but they didn’t see Big Boy until legal shooting time had passed. While they were walking out of the soybean field, a cellular cam sent an image of the buck to his phone.
It was as if the deer had been waiting for them to leave.
Six days would pass before the Perkins could hunt again, and they went to a blind Cody had created a month earlier by pushing two hay bales together.
The wind shifted about 15 minutes into their two-hour hunt, and a doe busted them, sounding the alarm as if horseflies had crawled into her nostrils.
“We were afraid she’d spooked every deer on the farm,” Cody told John Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.
“After some time there in the north corner, Ella and I called it an evening and started heading back to the south, where the side-by-side was parked,” Cody said.
“That’s when we saw deer had come back out in front of the south corner, where we’d previously sat.”
Big Boy was there, too.
“We managed to close the gap, but we were still over 200 yards away,” he added.
The little girl got down on her knees and rested the .243 on the shooting sticks her dad had positioned. For her, the scenario was much like shooting at the range.
“I waited until Big Boy had his head down, feeding, before I shot,” the girl beamed. “After I squeezed the trigger, the buck ran away quickly, while Dad watched through his binoculars.”
The buck didn’t react to the shot. It simply disappeared over a rise. Had it not been for a few drops of blood where the animal had been standing, Cody might’ve written off the shot as a miss.
After dark, the family — Cody, Ella, her sister Lexi and Grandpa Justin — found the dead deer, which had traveled only 20 yards.
Scored a couple of weeks later, the rack tallied 214 inches.
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