Boyfriend wouldn’t sit with her, but her hunt went just fine
Caroline Reid of West Columbia gave her boyfriend, Brad Youngblood of Chapin, a chance to sit in the stand with her on an Oct. 3 deer-hunting trip to Allendale County.
He turned her down. “I begged him to set with me, and (his answer) was still no,” she said. “Boy, I am glad he didn’t.”
That afternoon, Reid, who said she’s been hunting almost since her parents first carried her to a hunting camp at six months, killed a 130-inch 8-pointer. She entered the deer in South Carolina Sportsman’s Bag-A-Buck contest, and on Oct. 31, she was drawn as the winner for the October contest.
Reid, a 20-year-old student at Midlands Tech who works full-time at a jewelry store, is saving her nickels to get the buck mounted by a taxidermist. Her contest winnings should make her feel better. For winning the monthly contest, she won a $25 gift certificate to the Sportsman’s Outdoor Store and a year’s subscription to South Carolina Sportsman. Like every person who enters the contest, she remains eligible for the grand prize, a one-person, two-day deer hunt at Chesterfield County’s Cherokee Run Hunting Lodge.
Maybe Youngblood will sit with her on that trip. When she killed her big buck, she was sitting in a tripod stand overlooking a peanut field. At around 6:15, the rain slowed enough to see six does passing 350 yards out, and then Youngblood sent her a text message that he was about to shoot a doe.
“As soon as I looked up from my phone, he was there, exactly 220 yards away,” she said.
Taking her time, she lined the buck up and finally squeezed the trigger, anchoring the deer on the spot with a neck shot from her Browning .30-06, topped with a Redfield scope.
“When I texted (Brad) and told him I’d killed a big one, he figured it was 14 inches or so,” she said. “When he came to pick me up and saw the deer, he freaked out. It was bigger than anything he has killed, my brother has killed, or my dad has killed.”
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