Experienced, and even highly effective, hunters could go their whole lives without killing two deer with one bow shot. For Hartwell resident MaKenzie Clark, that achievement incredibly came on her first shot in the wild.
Clark, 22, had only previously shot a crossbow during one practice occasion — a week before her first hunt Sept. 18. Clark and her boyfriend, an avid hunter, recently set up a deer stand outside their Reed Creek area house, where Clark posted up alone that morning.
Clark was told to text her boyfriend for help tracking a kill if she happened to hit one.
“He told me, ‘I don’t want to get a text saying that you see one. I want to get a text saying that you hit one,’” Clark remembered.
“About 30 minutes later, three does and a little baby walk out. Two does were lined up side-by-side eating in the corn and I shot one arrow. At first, I kind of thought I shot two of them. I wasn’t sure. I was kind of skeptical, like I didn’t want to be too hopeful.”
Clark texted for help tracking and the pair found what turned out to be the second deer she struck. The doe only made it about 34 yards from the shot after being pierced through the heart.
The couple was loading Clark’s prize into their pickup truck when they spotted a second blood trail.
“He just said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Clark said.
It didn’t take long to track the doe that was struck first, which was shot through the lungs and died near a pond. Clark noticed the arrow pierced in half after her impeccable shot — each deer ending up with one side on an arrow protruding from its body.
“I couldn’t believe it. It was the best day of my life. When I found that second arrow, I was amazed,” she said. “My boyfriend had been hunting for 30 years and he had never done that. I was on cloud nine. It was probably the best feeling in the world.”
Not surprisingly, Clark became instantly hooked on hunting after killing a pair of roughly 75-pound deer with one shot. She plans to spend a large chunk of the near future enjoying the activity and looks forward to “getting me a buck and getting me some spikes.”
“Last year towards the end of the year, when it became hunting season, I was really wanting to kind of learn and feel the experience but I just never got the opportunity,” she said.
“And when I got with my boyfriend back in January — hunting is all he’s done for 30 years — and he was warning me that, ‘Hey, during deer season, this is all I’m gonna be doing. And if you find the passion in it, like I have the passion in it, I would love to have you out there.’”
Clark, a Gwinnett County native who has been coming to Lake Hartwell her whole life, moved permanently to the area a couple years ago and is currently a manager at Chicago Steakhouse.
She said she knows the majority of her hunts will likely take longer than the hour she put into her first trip.
“It was definitely a learning experience and definitely something that I will carry on doing for multiple years,” she said. “You sit out there in the deer stand. You may be out there for five hours and may not see anything or may sit out there in the morning and see 15 deer.
“It’s definitely a relaxing experience and an eye-opening experience to just be out there with nature and be there by yourself and see different things and connect with nature and stuff like that.”
Clark said she’s mounting the now-legendary arrow in her house.
