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A 25-point buck [UPDATED]
Published 10:55am Thursday, November 18, 2010 Updated 1:59pm Thursday, November 18, 2010Kellie Carroll considers herself to be pretty fortunate. After all, she downed a 25-point buck in Maplewood State Park on the first day of deer hunting season, and it almost didn’t happen at all.
Carroll, an 18-year-old Elizabeth resident currently in her senior year at Kennedy Secondary School, shares an annual fall tradition with her father, Michael.
“I go hunting every year with my dad,” she said. “It’s kind of our thing.”
This year, the two won the lottery for hunting in Maplewood, which Kellie, who had never been to the park, wasn’t sure she would enjoy. Instead, she said, she loved it.
“I thought it was going to be really crowded,” she said. “It’s a nice, open space.”
Though Kellie had never been to Maplewood, Michael had been out to plan ahead. “(He) scoped out the place where he wanted to go two days beforehand,” Kellie explained.
That could have been that. The two could have hunted in their preferred area on Saturday, and who knows what would have happened?
However, Kellie said, “When we got there, some other people were there, so we went somewhere else. Somewhere else was pretty lucky for us.”
The two found a secluded, grassy area and hid in the brush. At about 8:30 a.m., they saw it: a 25-point buck that Michael estimated weighed about 200 to 210 pounds.
Kellie said that before she took the shot, she looked over at her dad, who she said was itching to pull the trigger. In the end, though, Michael let his daughter bag the giant deer.
Kellie said that she is getting the deer mounted by a family friend, Rodney Zentz, a taxidermist from Pelican Rapids. The buck’s head was so big that Zentz had to make a new size mount for it, she added.
Though Kellie originally had her doubts about hunting in Maplewood, she’s a convert now. She hopes to hunt again there in the future.
Very nice deer.