LITTLE ROCK — Deer season always brings some great stories of big bucks, but some of our favorites involve youngsters killing their first deer.
We like them even better when they involve both.
Take the story of Deion Tidwell and Hunter Wallace of Sherwood, for example. They play football for North Little Rock High School and have been close friends for years.
Hunter, son of Carter Wallace, is aptly named. Tidwell said Wallace always talks about hunting and often encouraged Tidwell to accompany him. The Wallaces invited Tidwell to their hunting camp near East Camden, so Tidwell accepted. He completed his hunter education course Nov. 8. He bought his first hunting license Nov. 9 and killed his first deer Nov. 10.
It was a very nice buck. So nice, in fact, that Hunter Wallace woke him up to shoot it.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” Tidwell said. “I was asleep on my deer stand. I felt him pushing and shoving me. I aimed and shot. That’s all it was.”
There was more to it than that, actually. The buck was a monster 8-point with an inside spread of 21 inches. James Wallace, Hunter’s grandfather, said it was the biggest buck ever killed on that property. Nobody would have blamed Hunter for letting Tidwell sleep and killing it himself. Instead, he gave his friend the opportunity.
“I thought it was pretty special,” Tidwell said. “A big deer like that, and he’d be willing to give it up? I’m really thankful.”
Tidwell wasn’t as nonchalant about it as he lets on, either.
“I was really nervous,” Tidwell said. “I had that ‘buck fever.’ The first thing I thought was, ‘That’s a big buck!’ And, ‘He’s going to be a good first deer!’ I was scared to shoot because I never shot nothing before. I just closed my eyes and shot. It was my first time shooting a rifle.”
The rifle was a .30-06. Tidwell said it gave him a pretty good jolt, but if he were to buy a rifle for himself, he’d get one just like it.
A fullback for the Charging Wildcats, Tidwell scored a 65-yard touchdown in the state semifinal against eventual Class 7A champion Fayetteville. He said there are some similarities between hunting and football.
“In football, you’re always nervous at the first of the game until that first play,” he explained. “Hunting is kind of like that. You see that buck and take that first shot, and once that shot is gone, you’re just so relieved that all the tension and all blows away, and then you’re just riding smooth.”
The following week, Hunter Wallace killed a big 10-point buck.
Josh Hollinger is half Tidwell’s age but he has killed seven deer. He was just a day shy of his eighth birthday Nov. 22 when he got a story for the ages. He was hunting with his father Barry Hollinger on the PST Hunting Club near Prattsville. A buck with only one 4-point antler followed a doe into a shooting lane. Even with one antler it satisfied the requirements of the statewide 3-point rule, so Josh Hollinger dropped it with one shot. Barry Hollinger sent out a text message to the other hunters in camp to be on the lookout for the other antler.
It just so happened that another hunter had shot the missing antler off that buck a week before. He presented it to Josh when he arrived at camp with his buck.
Josh kept up the momentum. He started Dec. 8 by killing a doe at 7:11 a.m. and ended the day by killing another one at 5:41 p.m. He killed his first deer, a 5-point buck, at age 6 in 2011.
Sports, Pages 25 on 01/13/2013