Ten-year-old Kendel Sobek isn’t a southpaw, but she proved last fall she’s ambidextrous, at least when shooting at a deer.
Drew Sobek’s little girl got a crash course in left-handed marksmanship the day before Iowa’s Sept. 19 youth opener. Because her right arm had been in a cast for a week, her daddy took her out to shoot at a can of water.
The first time she squeezed the trigger, she missed. The gunstock was against her left shoulder, but she was looking through the scope with her right eye.
“After I put a second round in the rifle, I told Kendel to close her right eye and look through the scope with her left. Doing that, she hit the can dead center,” Drew told John E. Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.
The next day, father and daughter went to a ground blind beside a pond. Drew was distracted the whole time. He was two weeks out from a second back operation, and the man from Indianola was in pain.
He just wanted the hunt to be over as soon as possible, which is why he told Kendel she should shoot the first deer they saw.
While she was studying the nearby alfalfa field, looking for a deer, he was using a phone app to make a mortgage payment. He just happened to glance up in time to see a familiar buck approaching.
“I’d nicknamed the deer Christmas, and he just popped up 20 yards away from our ground blind, looking straight at us,” he said.
He’d first seen the buck among summertime trail cam photographs over a mineral site, but it wasn’t a regular visitor.
The girl had no idea it was there until Drew nudged her.
To stop the walking whitetail, Drew bleated with his mouth. The tactic worked, but Kendel couldn’t see it in the scope until her dad explained to look at the deer with both eyes, and then close her right one.
“I told her to take a few deep breaths, and when she was ready to shoot, I’d try to stop the buck again. He was walking off by then,” he said.
The shot was perfect. Christmas covered only 30 yards before going head over heels to the ground.
“Kendel didn’t say a word after we saw the buck fall,” Drew said. “She’s learned that when in a blind, she shouldn’t talk. But I was freaking out. I was so excited that I knocked the ground blind 4 feet in the air!”
— Read Recent Blog! Wham, Bam … Thank You, Mams: The deer wound up scoring 200 1/8 inches, the fourth-largest from Dubois County that’s recorded in Buckmasters’ record book.