Kaydiense Nelson, 12, of Dover-Foxcroft has been hunting on her grandfather’s property for five years, but none of her other deer measured up to the buck she shot on Saturday during the state’s Youth Hunt.
Kaydiense harvested a 213-pound, 14-point buck about an hour into legal shooting time on Saturday from her family’s enclosed tree stand in Dexter. She missed shooting a small doe last year, but in the other years she shot two does and a spikehorn buck.
None of them were as grand as this year’s buck.
“He was HUGE,” she said Monday.
The family had seen the deer on a trail camera three or four times. It would come out on a five-day cycle, said Mark Nelson Jr., Kaydiense’s father. The buck was seen on camera Friday night.
Kaydiense could not hunt on the first day of Youth Hunt. She had school Friday, then field hockey practice. But on Saturday, she and her father went to their tree stand to get settled around 5:30 a.m. and wait for first light and legal shooting time at 6:36 a.m.
Around 7 a.m., Nelson heard leaves rustling and the buck showed itself at about 7:20 a.m.
“It looked right at us and went into the bushes. It stopped and I shot it,” Kaydiense said, explaining that the deer had started to walk away from her. “You can’t let a deer like that go.”
She thought she had missed it because it ran off, but she and her father went about 100 yards in the direction the deer had run and stood in one spot for about 5 minutes, listening and looking. Suddenly they saw it lying on the ground. It had run about 120 yards and died.
The bullet entered the deer diagonally, went through the ribcage and lodged in its shoulder.
Kaydiense used her 7mm Elite hunting rifle. It’s the only one she has used to hunt deer since she began hunting at 7 years old.
Her dad gutted out the deer, although she helped him, Nelson said.
The young hunter said she likes to eat venison and she plans to have the buck’s head mounted. She also has an antlerless deer permit, so her season is not finished.
“Hunting is a favorite thing to do with my Dad because it’s something we do with just the two of us,” she said.
