I shot my first deer when I was 12 years old. I beat my older brother Michael to it and I’m certain that this pissed him off. Anytime a younger sibling does something before an older sibling, it’s a big deal. Bragging rights!  It’s a gut punch when your younger brother beats you to important life experiences. Honestly, it might be the first and only time I ever beat him to anything?

I was sitting on a picnic table style bench behind a pile of brush with my .257 Roberts (a gun that was 30+ years old when I got it and I still own to this day) and with a gun rest made from an old, dried out, cedar stump that I would use as a brace to help hold the gun steady. If you know anything about guns, my rifle had a match barrel, which basically makes it twice as heavy. Weight helps it from kicking so much...or at least that’s what I was told by my father to keep me from being afraid of the recoil. When I was 12 years old I didn’t quite have the “cushion” that I have these days.  Back then, the recoil from a rifle or shotgun would leave a bruise on my left shoulder for a week. 

Hunting season is in the fall/winter and it starts to get dark around 6pm. A couple of deer walked out into a clearing next to a large oak tree about 50 yards from where I was sitting. I slowly picked my gun up from my lap, swung it from right to left around the front of my body (I’m left handed by the way), raised the barrel and rested it in on one of the nooks of the cedar stump. Looked through my scope, took the safety off, placed the scope crosshairs on the shoulder of the first deer I saw, took a deep breath like I was taught, slowly exhaled and squeezed the trigger. You squeeze.  Never pull. 

Boom!

The trees shook and birds flew up and everywhere.  Deer ran in all directions. The world around me scattered and moved. I disrupted all that was quiet and calm. A huge ripple is created when you fire off a gun in a perfectly quiet and calm surrounding. Every tree, bush and living thing around you is disturbed for a second or two. It also helps that my gun is the loudest hunting rifle in the world and my dad probably found humor in buying the heaviest and loudest gun and giving it to an 11-year-old kid for Christmas. Before you start to scratch your head on why an 11-year-old kid gets gifted a gun, know this...In Texas, when you get your own gun, it’s a rite of passage. You’re a man now. It’s a big deal. I got a gun before hair ever started growing anywhere new on my body.  Think of it like getting a car at 16 or getting to stay out past 11:30pm. You are trusted with great responsibility and you instantly feel grown up and “manly”. Whatever that was for you as a kid, know that getting your own gun is like that for a kid growing up in rural Texas. As much as it was exciting to have your own gun, it also came with a bit of fear and anxiety.  Getting the gun at 11 also gave me a full year to learn how to shoot it properly.   

As I was taught, I stayed seated in my brush blind and waited. Even though it was really only a few minutes, it seemed like an eternity. Honestly, any hunter will tell you, the wait after shooting a deer is the longest and most anxiety filled part of hunting.  If you get up and start making noise too quickly you could scare it off and then have to track it.  You could also scare off a much bigger deer and miss your chance of telling the ultimate hunting story! 

You fire the shot.  The deer often disappears in the tall grass or behind bushes or trees.  Did you get it? Did you shoot it right? Is it what you think it is? Did it run off injured or did you miss it entirely? You are so focused on the shot; you can often miss what happened to the deer. For those who still don’t follow, the best way I can describe the experience is similar to hitting a golf ball and needing someone to help spot it because you are so focused on your shot.  The ball drops somewhere and you have no idea because your head was down and you were locked in on the club hitting the ball.  Maybe that’s a terrible comparison, but that’s the first examples to come to mind.  It’s a focus thing.

Also, every hunter will tell you that this is where the adrenaline in your body really kicks in and you start shaking like it’s -8 degrees outside and you’re only wearing boxer shorts. It’s especially a scary and exciting feeling the first time it happens to you. You feel like you want to jump out of your body.  As you get older, the feeling is different, but the shaking and shortness of breath is still there.  When you’re a 12-year-old kid experiencing this for the first time, it’s exciting and scary all at once.  Your heart is beating so hard that you feel and hear it in your ears.  It’s like your first kiss times 100.   

I clicked the safely back on. Set the gun back on my lap and started to try to slow down my heart and breathing. I was shaking like a leaf. You have to understand and come to terms with that, even though you are filled with excitement and wonder over the event, you also just took a life. A life that will help feed your family, but also be with you forever. Especially with it being your first time. This is where you find out if this is something you can do for the rest of your life or if your parents just blew a ton of money on a Christmas gift you will never use again.

About a year prior to this event, I shot a bird with a BB gun and cried for an hour about being a murderer and now, here I am, staring down the barrel of a gun and shooting at a much larger animal. Don’t get me wrong, this is nothing like being a combat veteran, but know that every deer that I have shot, I have been thankful for and the experience has stayed with me for all the right reasons. I pray over every animal I have ever killed. This is food. This is what we are supposed to do. This is part of my upbringing and what has helped to make me and many others that grew up like this way, who we are today. There’s a lot of depth and gravity with being a hunter. A lot of responsibility.  It’s not a mindless or soulless activity.      

I grab my gun, stand up, walk around the tree next to my brush blind and head towards the spot where I believe the deer fell.  Sure enough, there it was on the ground.  Lifeless.  Perfect shot.  When I was a kid, we were taught to shoot them in the shoulder (larger target and it hits the heart). As an adult I have graduated to shooting them in the neck.  Harder shot, but you ruin less meat.  I knelt down next to the deer, said my prayers and “thank you” and waited for my dad and brother to come.  Although it was my first deer, it was also the smallest deer ever shot on the Murphy Ranch.  For those who hunt, it was a “button buck”.  A very young deer, likely not quite a year old, but it didn’t matter because it was my first success as a hunter.  I was so focused on the moment; I didn’t check to see if there was a larger target to put in the crosshairs of my scope.  It didn’t matter, it was food and I just became a real hunter.  My mom never owned a great camera, but I am pretty sure she took a whole roll of pictures of me with that deer. 

I didn’t write this to convince you that tomorrow you need to go out and become a deer hunter.  Just sharing a story of how my appreciation for the act of hunting was born and the reasons I still do it today.  I have friends that love hunting.  I have friends that despise that I do it and “cancel culture” me during the season.  I respect all of you.  If my children grow up and have no interest in it, that’s fine with me.  As long as they understand why I feel it’s necessary and are respectful of the opinion of others, I’ve done my job as a parent. 

#Tryharder to accept and understand things that you question.  Being in the media and playing Shawn Mendes songs for a living would never give you a pure impression of who I am and where I came from in life.  Often people want to judge or interrogate me over being a hunter.  I welcome the questions, but I want to make sure we are having an open discussion about “why I do this” and not “I can’t believe you would do this”.  The two sound alike, but come from different places in your heart and curiosity.  This one thing that I do does not define me, but it’s part of who I am.  I welcome respect and understanding without politicking or arguing.  I think we can all agree that the world could use a little more of that these days.