ELKINS, W.Va.-– Young Olivia Keeler of Parsons, W.Va. loves the outdoors. It’s a passion planted in her by her grandfather Rodney Heckler. Olivia at age 11 had been trying to kill her first deer for several years. On the Youth Hunting day in September, it finally happened. She killed her first deer, a doe while hunting in Randolph County. It’s a great story of patience and desire, but the story behind Olivia’s first deer tugs at the heartstrings.
“Olivia has always been pappy’s little girl,” said her grandmother Bonnie Currence of Elkins. “He always wanted to take her hunting for her first hunting trip. So the weekend before Thanksgiving he got sick and we took him to the hospital. When they put him in the hospital, he didn’t get to take Olivia hunting.”
The year was 2009 and Olivia was 6 years old. As it turned out, pappy and Olivia never got to take that hunting trip they had always planned.
“That was the year the swine flu was bad and he ended up passing in January of 2010,” said Currence fighting back tears. “So he never really got to take her on this big hunting trip he was wanting to do.”
Olivia still hunted off and on for the next few years. But somehow, it wasn’t the same without her Pappy. But this year, she made a call to her grandmother ahead of the Youth Day and asked her grandmother, who is also a hunter, to take her.
“I figured since he was her husband, it would be fun for her to take me,” said Olivia.
“I was glad, because I was an avid hunter as well as my husband,” said Bonnie. “I felt honored that she wanted me to take her since her pappy couldn’t be there.”
So at daylight on the morning of the youth hunt, Olivia and Bonnie set off into the woods in Randolph County. Olivia clutched the .243 Muddy Girl rifle her grandmother had bought for her. They sat several yards apart and waited when Bonnie noticed Olivia from the short distance away acting odd.
“She looked like she was talking and I thought she was talking to me and all of a sudden she shot,” said Bonnie. “I thought,’What the heck is she doing?'”
“I looked down the hill and I saw it, I pulled the trigger, and it went down,” Olivia said recalling the moment. “My grandma turned around and said, ‘Did you just shoot a deer?'”
The two headed excitedly down the hill, stoked on the adrenalin of Olivia’s first deer. They field dressed the young doe and started dragging it out of the woods. It was in this calm after the rush Bonnie chose to quiz her granddaughter about the moments before she squeezed the trigger.
“I said, ‘Olivia what were you doing?'” Bonnie explained. “She told me, ‘Well Mammie didn’t you hear? I was talking to Pappy, he was with me.”
“He was telling me, ‘Wait for it, wait for it, get the right shot,'” Olivia explained. “He was telling me congratulations and good job on shooting it.”
Bonnie didn’t hear her late husband speaking in the woods that day, but she had no doubts about Olivia’s story.
“It was amazing. I was glad I was with her the day she got her first one,” said Bonnie. “I’m pretty sure he’d have been proud of her. I know he’d have been beaming from ear to ear. It wasn’t a huge monster buck, but to her it was probably the biggest deer she ever thought she would shoot.”