I don’t know how your deer season has gone so far. For Halle and Matt Thompson of Pollok, opening morning turned out to be one they won’t soon forget.
Matt is a deer hunting dad who always has his daughter’s back. Halle is a 14-year old freshman at Lead Academy who scores an A+ for her deer hunting perseverance.
“She’s always been real independent and determined,” Matt Thompson said. “Whatever she is doing — hunting or fishing — Halle is all about it. She’s even got her own trotline at Toledo Bend.”
“Hammer” was at the top of the young hunter’s hit list on opening day. Just when it started to seem like the salty ol’ buck had her number, she threw him an early bird change-up he wasn’t expecting.
Thompson knew the handsome 10-pointer well. She had been chasing the deer with no luck since the beginning of the Archery Only season in late September at her family’s 600-acre lease in northern Throckmorton County.
To hear Thompson tell it, the buck always seemed to be a step ahead and consistently managed to give her the slip. She had hunted the deer eight different times leading up the Nov. 2 general season opener, but never laid eyes on him a single time.
“We had him on game cameras several times and he always showed up before daylight in the mornings and after dark in the afternoons,” she said. “I bumped him on the way to my bow stand several times during archery season. He would always come back, but it was always after dark.”
Thompson knew there had to be a better way. She dreamed up a masterplan and put it in motion well before sunrise on opening morning. She beat the buck at his own game.
“If I was going to have a chance to get him, I knew I was going to have to get there before he showed up,” she said. “I told my dad I wanted to be in the stand at least two hours before daylight on opening morning.”
The youth hunter frequently hunts alongside her father, but she chose to go at this one alone.
Thompson’s dad dropped her off at the head of a dim trail about 5:15 a.m. She slipped in quietly for about 1/2 mile to a box blind that sits on a single axle trailer for portability.
The stand, fittingly called the “Trailer Stand,” is situated about 125 yards from a fenced feeder pen that’s flanked by a series of narrow shooting lanes. The fence keeps the hogs out while allowing the deer easy access to all the goodies inside. The Thompson’s run corn and free choice protein feeders simultaneously.
Thompson’s father went to a different blind about 700 yards away and opened the REVEAL trail camera app on his smartphone to pass the time. Like clockwork, the device started to ping with photo notifications about an hour before shooting light. Hammer was munching corn in the pen at his daughter’s stand, but she had no idea he was anywhere around.
“I sent her a text about 10 minutes earlier but she didn’t respond,” he said. “Come to find out, she was afraid the light from her phone might spook the buck if he was out there somewhere. When she finally did reply, I told her the deer had been in the pen for a while. It was just still too dark for her to see.”
Roughly 30 minutes passed before the lady hunter was finally able to identify one of the four deer around the feeder pen as Hammer. She said the buck’s big body and tall, near-perfect 10 point crown were dead giveaways.
“I had no doubt it was him, but he was acting really anxious for some reason,” she said. “He would hop inside the pen and stay for maybe 10 seconds, then hop right back out again. I was waiting for him to get outside the pen before I took a shot, but he was moving around a lot and never turned broadside. At one point he stepped into the brush and I thought he was gone. I thought I had blown it, but then he walked back out into one of the lanes.”
Thompson placed the crosshairs behind the buck’s shoulder and touched the trigger on the Remington 6.5 Creedmore. The buck didn’t travel far.
Hammer isn’t the biggest buck on Thompson’s lengthy resume, but the video her mother, Brielle, captured following the recovery is arguably one of the best and most compelling examples of raw deer hunting emotion between a father and daughter you’ll ever see.
Check it out at facebook.com/ 100025776701264/videos/ 769079995354004/. It’s definitely worth the watch.
