Katie Hootman took this Whitetail Deer in Van Buren County, Iowa

December 07, 2003

It was the second day of First Shotgun Season. My party of 6 was doing a deer drive and I was a stander. There was a little snow on the ground and the leaves were wet. It was hard to hear anything that might be coming.

I was standing behind a bulldoze pile. I had been on stand for at least 30-40 minutes. All of a sudden around the bulldoze pile came this buck and another one. They stopped facing me at around 30-40 yards. I shot and didn’t think that I had hit it. I heard the next stander shoot, so then I was sure I didn’t get it. Afer the hunt my husband, who was driving toward me, said “lets go look at it.”

I was very confused! We went not 45 yards from where I was standing, it was on the other side of the bulldoze pile, and there it was. The lucky part of the story: When my husband was driving the deer toward me he saw the same two bucks and tried shooting at them, his gun wouldn’t go off. Later we found out that there was a stick jammed in his gun. We had the deer mounted and it is the first one on our wall.