In a stand still

BAYOU CHICOT -- For years, Wesley “Bubba” King would wake up in the wee hours of the morning during hunting season and pack up the essentials for that day’s hunt -- his high-powered rifle, box of ammo, camouflage jacket and of course lunch.
Bubba would also pack up a sleeping bag, coloring books, crayons and a pocket full of candy. That’s because the avid hunter has always had someone join him in the deer stand, his baby girl Sydia, whom he first took to his squirrel camp when she was only two months old.
“She started begging me to go around four years old,” Bubba remembered. “When I woke up in the morning to go hunting, she was crying that she wanted to go. But I didn’t take her because it was usually too cold, but when she was about five I said the hell with it and brought her with me.”
In those early years, when Sydia was too small to hunt or even look out the window in the stand, Sydia would sit on Bubba’s lap to look through the morning fog for deer. When he did take one down he would always tell his daughter to put on her “ear muffs” to help muffle the loudness of his rifle.
“I just always wanted to go,” Sydia said. “We always laughed a lot. I always had a pack of candy in my coat pocket. It was fun hunting with my daddy.”
After a few years, Bubba thought his daughter would get bored with getting up at the crack of dawn to spend time with her dad but she never did.
“Every day I would ask her if she was coming with me and she said yep,” Bubba said.
That desire to hang out with her dad only intensified after she bagged her first doe at the age of seven. The following year she killed two more and now at the age of 13, Sydia has seven kills under her belt.
Her father, a lifelong hunter, didn’t bag his first deer until he was nine, a full two years later than his daughter.
“I was so excited,” Sydia said. “I just wanted to shoot another and another and another. Anytime we would go hunting and we didn’t see anything I would get pretty mad.”
“She is still that way,” laughed Bubba.
For Bubba, an accomplished hunter himself, nothing fills his heart with more pride than watching his daughter look through her scope and proceed to take down a deer with her 22-250 magnum rifle from 40-50 yards away.
“I went crazy that first time and still do,” Bubba said. “Every time she kills one it is the same kind of excitement for me. The last two years I have killed a 7, 8 and two 10 point and that’s nothing compared to what she has killed.”
Unlike some hunters, both old and young, Sydia has been taught and has fully embraced the entire responsibility of being a hunter. Her father taught her how to fully process the deer at the age of eight and the young girl doesn’t shy away from cutting up her kill.
“This one here isn’t afraid of blood,” Bubba’s fiancé Kristi Perrodin said. “One time she chased me around the house with a deer heart in hand. I got in my truck and left.”
“I have taught her all of her life that you don’t kill anything that you’re not going to eat,” dad said. “There is nothing that is wasted on a deer here at our house.”
Sydia’s prowess at deer hunting has come in handy while dealing with boys at Bayou Chicot Elementary, where she is currently an 8th grader.
“If it comes up in conversation they will sometimes go on about how they killed three or four deer and I just say yeah ‘I only have killed seven. Good luck.’”
This deer season Sydia will be trying her hand at bowhunting at Cypress Creek. Bubba has been training his daughter on the bow for the past year, including hours of shooting at a dummy deer in the backyard.
“I find that hunting with a rifle is not as challenging as it was before since she has already killed seven,” Bubba said. “I think using a bow is the next challenge for her. She is the type of person that has to be challenged.”
For both father and daughter, the time spent in a stand is something both revel in. Sydia loves the quiet of sitting in a stand waiting on deer to reveal themselves, while her father loves the fact of spending time with his daughter without the distractions of cell phones, video games and of course boys.
That time will likely become less and less over the next few years. Sydia is already involved in a slew of extracurricular activities such as playing on two softball teams, as well as basketball, cheer leading and track and field. Not to mention that she starts high school next year, and boyfriends and then college lurks on the horizon.
The days of his baby girl coloring next to him in a stand may be over, so Bubba is relishing the time he does have left.
“I would like to spend more time with her,” Bubba said. “So anytime we get to spend with her is just great.”