A buck for Thomas Mancuso

By the time Thomas Mancuso and his father Andrew got back to their truck this past Sunday, they still were shaking.
What had taken place less than an hour earlier had left them both on an emotional high as the younger Mancuso, who turned 9 that very day, harvested his first deer.
Approximately a half hour before sunrise, the two hunters climbed into their two-man stand and sat waiting. Deer are crepuscular animals, meaning they are more active during twilight periods, both dawn and dusk.
And it was during this period father and son hoped to see some movement.
The Area 7 Deer season had been open for more than a month.
Already two primitive weapon seasons and one regular firearm season had come and gone.
What’s more, the two of them had put their time in during those weeks fighting mosquitoes, getting caught in drenching rain and not seeing a whole lot.
Nonetheless, in spite of going through those hardships, they didn’t deter the younger Mancuso — weekends found him sitting next to his father making yet another hunt.
Mancuso, through the years, had been a patient father, never pushing Thomas with too long of stays in the stand nor making him use a firearm.
Up until this season, his son had been a bit gun shy and didn’t care for the report of firearms. Instead, he bought a crossbow for Thomas to use.
By putting a scope on it, the idea was to get his son comfortable aiming with cross hairs and pulling a trigger.
The elder Mancuso’s patience paid off. This season, after watching YouTube videos, his son was ready to shoot the rifle his dad had bought him the year prior — a Savage bolt action youth model chambered for the 7mm-08 Remington cartridge.
Around 6:35 a.m., the Mancusos heard some commotion in a thicket of palmettos and then spotted a doe moving along a trail in the marsh in front of their stand. Following behind her, at a distance, was a buck.
In the excitement of the moment, compounded by the fact both father and son were wearing hearing protection in trying to communicate, they alerted the doe. Spooked, the doe went one way and the buck went another.
For an instant, the buck had offered a broadside shot, but Thomas wasn’t ready and an opportunity was missed.
As fate would have it, the buck actively was pursuing does, and moments later, they heard more crashing in the palmettos. Another doe appeared from where the first one had previously walked out into the marsh.
“He pushes her out the same trail the first doe was on,” the elder Mancuso said. “We obviously learned our lesson from the first one, so we were being still. We wanted the buck to be able to come back out. Sure enough, he does. It comes out, and the doe ends up spotting us and comes back towards us. It was on the left side downwind from us. It smelled the air but realized the buck was on her tail, and she would rather come towards us than back towards the buck.”
According to Mancuso, the doe walked right under the two hunter’s stand.
When the buck got to the spot where the doe initially came out, it stopped. That’s when the third grader at Wyandotte Elementary School in Morgan City went into action.
“My first thought when I saw it was, ‘Am I gonna kill it?’ That’s when my daddy kind of tapped me on the shoulder and told me to shoot it,” Thomas said. “After that, I thought, ‘is it gonna get back up?’ If he did, I was ready to shoot again. I didn’t practice with the rifle at all. I knew that all I had to do was practice with my dad’s crossbow. With those cross hairs, I don’t have to worry about where the bullet goes. All I need to know is to put those cross hairs where I need it to go.”
The little Hornady 7mm-08 120 grain reduced recoil round had done its job. Thomas made a one-shot kill on a good fork horned marsh buck. Not bad for his first deer and on his birthday, to boot.
It took a while for the elder Mancuso to find the buck when he initially got down from the stand. But after a few anxious moments and with his son still up high in the stand pointing which way to go, he recovered the deer.
“It’s different in the marsh when you get down,” Mancuso said. “I went to what I thought was the bush it was behind. I thought it was more to the side, and as it turned out, it was behind the palmettos. With Thomas directing me, I took a few more steps back, and there it was.”
There’s always a bond that forms between a father and his children when they share experiences in the outdoors. They don’t always have to be hunting or fishing for that matter.
But, for the older Mancuso, this past Sunday’s hunt was special.
“Out of all the hunts I’ve made, there’s not one that even compares to that,” Mancuso said. “Seeing my son do that for the first time — the best hunts I’ve made, they all pale by comparison.”
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