November of 2019 I built a bow for my cousin for his birthday.  He has never owned a bow of any kind and he dove into Trad head first! He practiced his but off all year to hopefully be ready to hunt this year.
I have been teaching him as much as I can about bow hunting and about how I go about hunting our highly pressured public land.
He's had a lot of ups and downs this season including a miss on a decent 10 point and even running over his bow ! But he stuck with it.

As some of y'all know I haven't been able to get out much myself this year due to my wife's health issues but she has been feeling pretty good the last few days and yesterday I was able to venture out.
So Tommy and I decided to hunt together and we went to a spot where I knew we would have a real good chance  of at least seeing some deer and possibly get a shot. I even told him on the way in one of us was going to kill a deer today !
As luck would have it I didn't see a single deer but got a text from him about 15 minutes  before dark saying that he had shot a buck. So I quickly loaded up and headed his way. We were hunting the Leeward side of a ridge with some thick bedding we were about 400 yards apart. When I got to where he was he had already recovered and field dressed it.
I was SO pumped for him!!!
I honestly don't think he realizes the difficulty of what he achieved his first year hunting traditional!  First year bow hunting ever, with traditional gear, on highly pressured public land!  I don't know who is excited more, him or me!

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Well done. 

Awesome Congratulations and Well Done!!!
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Congrats nice bucks.

Excellent story....congrats!

congratts! on your first. 

Big congrats to your cousin on a fine buck !!!  Hope your wife keeps improving 

         Congratulations to ya'll!

 

you're a good man Randy!

Excellent! Quite an accomplishment!

Good times! [attachment=1]

Well done...

,,Sam,,

Outstanding!  Hopefully your cousins sticks with it and comes to realize what a special thing he did in his first Trad season.  Nice Story!  Thanks.

Well done!

 

Bisch

Well done gentlemen and good shooting Tommy.  Congratulations on the first of many.

That's a heck of a first trad kill!