Ayden Maturin has spent nearly a decade with his father in the woods learning about deer hunting.

The 13-year-old Iberia Middle School student learned well. How else to explain a veteran deer hunter tactic he used to help him drop his first-ever buck, one with an impressively wide rack, on an afternoon deer hunt Dec. 19 alone in a box stand in Area 2? He knocked gently on the deer stand to make a soft noise that halted the buck as it made a beeline for a doe in the peak of the rut.

That pause was long enough for the young deer hunter to put the rifle ’scope’s crosshairs on a shoulder, pull the trigger and hit the deer at a distance of 70 yards. The deer ran 20-30 yards and, following a brief search, was found to start the celebration.

After all, it could be the biggest buck ever shot on the lease. The rack’s spread was 23 inches wide.

Ayden and his father, Chad Maturin of New Iberia, stayed last weekend at the 711 Hunting Club camp and hunted the 1,200-acre lease in Bienville Parish. The elder Maturin, a member of the hunting club, returned Sunday evening to New Iberia to start the work week Monday at Tomahawk Downhole.

“He’s really excited. He really wanted to shoot a buck like that. I wasn’t even there with him. He did it all by himself,” Maturin said. “I came back yesterday. He stayed there with my buddy, Ryan. I wasn’t expecting Ayden to kill a buck like that.”

Ryan Gaspard took the teen hunting in the afternoon. Ayden was carrying his father’s rifle, a Browning X-Bolt Composite Stalker .270 WSM Bolt Action Rifle, because he had only one bullet for his CVA Hunter 7mm-08 Remington Break-Action Rifle.

“I said, ‘Look, my gun’s a little bigger, but I think you can handle it,’” Maturin said he told Ayden before leaving Sunday.

Gaspard dropped off Ayden at a box stand usually manned by Irvin Guillotte, who killed a buck from that same box stand that morning. Ayden, an IMS baseball player who pitches and plays first base, settled in and started scanning the woods.

Three does ambled into view. His first reaction was to pick out one of those deer and wait for a good shot until, until he heard grunting that diverted his attention, at first thinking it was from one or more wild hogs.

Ayden, who had two does total before that memorable afternoon after so many years of deer hunting, looked and saw the large buck to the left of the does. The buck was traveling through some feed at a fast pace heading for a doe probably in heat.

Maturin saw the buck, too, 207 miles away. His trail cell cam alerted him and he texted his son, who said he already had a good look at the buck on the move.

That’s when Ayden knocked on the deer stand. The buck paused. Ayden took advantage, fired once and hit it in the liver.

“I was nervous. I didn’t want to miss because it was a big deer,” he said.

Via FaceTime on his cell phone, Maturin watched his son and others track the blood trail. He was relieved when he heard, “We got him.”

“I was hoping they would find it,” Ayden said.

Maturin is a proud and happy father. Less than a month after his daughter, Abigail Maturin, 18, shot her first buck on the lease during her first-ever hunting season, his young teen-age son harvested a buck that’s bragging-size material at any deer hunting camp. That’s a deer hunting season to remember.

“It feels good. In fact, last night, I teared up a little bit,” he said.

Maturin was with his daughter, Abigail, when she shot and killed an 8-point, 150-pound buck on Nov. 27 from another box stand on the lease. She used his rifle, the same one he gave his son to hunt with on Dec. 19.

Ayden said his sister was just as enthusiastic about his kill as she was about hers.

“She got excited. She was happy for me,” he said.

Ayden’s buck just might emerge as the biggest ever at the 711 Hunting Club. Tyler Landry, the youngest son of the hunting club’s president, Paul Landry, has two that currently are being scored.

Deer with big racks are out and about in that part of Area 2. And those are large-bodied deer.

“Yeah, they’ve got some nice deer over there (Bienville Parish). We’ve been getting big deer on cameras. You’ve just got to be in the right place at the right time,” said Maturin, who has been hunting on the lease since 2006.

Ayden was in the right place at the right time.

“I’m happy with that but I’m hoping to get a bigger one,” he said.