A Wyoming bowhunter recently stalked and shot a tall-tined 5X5 mule deer buck while toting a sleeping 1-year-old in a backpack. Wheatland resident Ryder Seely notched the memorable tag on Wednesday, September 11. He tells F&S that he brought his daughter Lainey along on the hunt because he'd forgotten to sign her up for daycare the night before.
The hunt began on the evening of September 10. Seely was bowhunting by himself on a familiar piece of state land when he spotted and shot the buck right before last light. "I had really good blood and found half of my arrow with blood all the way up to the fletchings," Seely recalls. "But I decided to back out when it got too dark to track him."
The following morning, when he found out that Lainey wasn't on the day's daycare roster, Seely decided to bring her along in a kiddie pack for what he thought would be a simple recovery and pack-out mission. "We got out there at 8 a.m. after I dropped my five-year-old off at kindergarten," Seely says. "We hiked in about three miles, following the blood trail until it went dead, and then ended up jumping the buck out of his bed."
The deer was clearly wounded in the shoulder area, but Seely didn't have his bow and had to backtrack to the truck to retrieve it. While he was doing that, Lainey fell asleep in her pack.
"When we got back with the bow, I could still see this deer, but I knew I'd have to crawl up quietly to get a good shot—and I figured Lainey would only sleep for about 20 more minutes," he says. Seely says he shifted Lainey's weight in a way that wouldn't jostle and wake her up as he crawled. Somehow, he managed to crawl that way through minimal cover until he was just 40 yards from the bedded buck he'd shot the night before.
"When I got to within 40 yards, he saw me and jumped up," Seely says. "I jumped up at the same time, and drew my bow. Lainey woke up right before I squeezed the shot off. She got to see the whole thing."
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Seely says the buck dropped about 100 yards from a two-track OHV trail. He snapped a few photos of Lainey in her pack behind the buck's impressive rack then dragged it to the road before driving back in with a 4-wheeler to retrieve it. "My other daughter was with me when I killed one with a rifle a few years back, but this was Lainey's first time out on a successful hunt," he says. "It'll be hard to top this one."
