Jacob Pierce is nine years old. The buck in the picture is his first deer. This season, he passed up several does and small bucks hoping for his first deer to be a trophy.

He shot the deer with a Thompson Encore .308 Winchester. The night prior to the hunt, Jacob asked if we could hunt from the lean up stand in the corner of the cotton field. I reluctantly agreed.

We were watching the corner of a cotton field adjacent to a drainage that ran between two fields. Around 07:45 a doe came to the corner of the field and turned and ran back into the woods. Over the next few minutes a couple of does came to the corner of the field and walked down the drainage through the woods.

Then Jacob said to me, "There's a deer, it’s a buck” as he raised his Thompson Encore to his shoulder. He fired; the deer jumped about six feet in the air. The deer ran about 20 yards and fell.

14 pts, 255 pounds! Not bad for a first deer!