There was a time not too long ago when young ladies didn’t go hunting. Most girls and young women were busy doing other things and just didn’t think about going. Dad carried the boys hunting and the girls stayed home with mom and did their own things. That all changed recently as a new generation, such as cousins Ashley Giles and Mikayla Giles, wanted to get in on the deer hunting action like the boys.

“Daddy, I want to shoot a deer,” Mikayla Giles said. The youngster was only 7-years-old at the time and didn’t have a rifle that would fit a little one so small. However, the next year we went to R. W. Williams’ sporting goods store and bought a .223 rifle and young Mikayla promptly harvested her first deer, a nice 8-point buck. That deer was the first of many and continued right up to this year with her latest deer kill.

Mikayla Giles was simply following in the footsteps of her older sister Chandler Giles Gowens who harvested many deer of her own as well.

More recently cousin Ashley Giles has gotten in on the action and has become a sharpshooter as well. This year Ashley joined her dad, Joe, on a deer hunting trip to harvest a doe for the dinner table. Giles grew up eating venison and it has become a preferred part of her diet and she wanted some for her own freezer now.

Since her husband doesn’t hunt she had to take matters into her own hands.

“Ashley called and said she wanted to get some deer meat,” Joe Giles said. “Although she’s been going to the woods with me for many years, she just started shooting deer about 5 years ago and she had never seen a buck in the woods before and just didn’t think she would ever see one.”

Ashley and her dad climbed up into a deer stand late one afternoon and the hunt began. From their perch they had an eagle’s eye view of the surrounding area.

“I’d been seeing a couple does feed in near the stand every time I went so I knew she would probably see a doe,” Giles said. “We hadn’t been there long when a spike and a small 4-point came out. We were watching those deer when a doe came out, too. Before we could shoot the doe, a rack buck came charging out and ran all of them out of the field.”

The buck came through so fast that it didn’t present a shot. Ashley’s hopes plummeted, as she thought she’d missed her chance and thought it was over for the day.

“They’ll be back,” Giles said.

Sure enough, a few minutes later the deer came back in followed by the rack buck.

“Get your gun up in the window and get ready to shoot,” Giles said.

As the rack buck came into view Ashley squeezed the trigger of the rifle and the buck flinched and took off.

Dejection set in as the young lady thought she’d missed the deer, since all of her prior shots had dropped them in their tracks.

The father and daughter team got down and made their way to the shot sight and found a piece of meat and only a few drops of blood. It didn’t look good for sure.

“We followed the drops a few yards and then we found more and more until it looked like you’d opened up a water hydrant of blood,” Giles said. “We only went out of the patch about 30 yards when we found the buck, graveyard dead!”

Ashley Giles had harvested the buck of her lifetime while hunting we her dad. The buck sported 9-points and provided a memory that will last a lifetime for the father and daughter team. There’s just nothing quite as exciting as being there when a daughter harvests her first buck!

Call Mike Giles at 601-917-3898 or email mikegiles18@comast.net.