All right, Gun Talk Lesson, there's Tom Gresham here.

It's time for another one of these special podcasts.

This word is not from my dad's Grits on Guns Book.

This is a little bit different one. It is an article written by

Dad, Grits Gresham, but it's, well it's personal. This is the story of my first

dear. I was 11 years old. The year was 1962 and the article was

published in the November 1964 issue of Outdoor Life.

Now, make a note, I got my first deer at the age of 11 shooting a semi-autau 308.

Now everybody's all a gog and excited about using 308 for hunting. And excited and a gog about using semi-autos these days.

And of course there's much controversy about semi-automatic rifles, this was 1962 that I'm shooting a semi-autau 308 and I'm 11 years old. So here is the story from the November 1964 issue of Outdoor Life.

The title of the article is A Deer of Thanksgiving. The shot came just as I was Easing into position by a dead oak snag. With head down and eyes scanning the ground on which I planned to sit, a precaution against disturbing a cotton mouth,

I had trouble coursing the sound.

In the open mountainous terrain of the west, the sound a heavy caliber rifle makes when fired is a sharp crack.

But in the sound smothering hardwood bottomlands of the south, where I was hunting. It becomes a surging boom.

This one reverberated long enough for me to make sure it had come from my son Tom's rifle. My watch showed 4 o'clock, just half an hour

after I had left my 11-year-old on his first deer stand. A mixture of parental pride, anxiety, and hope played with my emotions.

My first impulse was to return to Tom's stand to make sure he was all right and to find

out what had shot at. But I suppressed the

urge and went through the motions of hunting for another half an hour.

It was the day after Thanksgiving, 1962, opening day of the Louisiana deer season.

But this hunt had really begun two weeks earlier when Tom came into my office.

I'm ready to go deer hunting this year, he announced.

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