It wasn’t sibling rivalry. Actually it was siblings celebrating.
Darcie (Campbell) Ingraham, 25, and her brother Skyler Campbell, 21, both got their hunting grand slams this year, all while working full time.
Ingraham works for a veterinarian practice, and Campbell works on the family’s sixth-generation multi-purpose farm. The two, along with their 16-year-old sister Natalee, have hunted most of their lives with their father and grandfather.
Ingraham put a little sibling pressure on her brother when she finished her grand slam on Nov. 2, but Campbell finished on Nov. 13 with plenty of time to spare in the season.
“It was a friendly competition, but we really wanted each other to get it,” Ingraham said.
Campbell decided to go for his grand slam when they both got moose permits and his sister was into the idea of doing one.
They hunted for moose in separate zones — Ingraham in Zone 2 and Campbell in Zone 6 — but got their moose on the same day within an hour of each other. They also got their animals in the same order — moose, bear, turkey and deer.
“We had a lot of friendly jokes about the grand slams, but she beat me for the most part,” Campbell said.
Ingraham, her Maine guide husband Randy Ingraham and a friend rode into the North Maine Woods about an hour and a half to some old logging trails on Oct. 9, the first day of their moose hunting week.
They saw a cow and calf at first, but then the bull came out of hiding. She shot him with a .308 rifle and the hunt was done within an hour. She texted her brother, who messaged back that he had shot his moose too.
Her bull weighed 507 pounds and had a 33-inch spread on its antlers, she said.
Maine guide Randy Ingraham used his trained dogs to help find and tree a bear for his wife the same week that she shot the moose. She shot her bear out of the tree using .308. The bear weighed 123 pounds, Darcie Ingraham said.
Getting her turkey was a lot harder than she thought it would be because it was fall, and the turkeys don’t respond to calls like they do when they are mating in the spring, she said.
She started carrying her 12-gauge shotgun around everywhere in case she saw a turkey.
One day on her way to her grandparents’ house after work, she saw a turkey in their field. She still had her purple scrubs on, so she threw on some orange clothing and sneaked up on the Tom turkey and shot him.
The deer was more work. She went out early mornings before work and until the last legal hunting light after. Her angst was compounded by plans she and her new husband had to leave soon for their honeymoon.
On Nov. 2, she and her husband were sitting in their treestand when does and their lambs came out of the woods. Suddenly, there were two bucks right behind them.
The Ingrahams each shot one. Her 6-point buck weighed in at 122 pounds. His 3-point buck weighed in at 159.
Who got the biggest buck?
“It depends on how you define ‘bigger one’,” she said. “He got the biggest weight and I got the biggest rack.”
The Ingrahams plan to mount their two bucks together in a fighting pose since they came out of the woods and were shot at the same time.
Ingraham is having a piece of all four of her animals mounted. The moose will be a traditional head and shoulders mount; the bear a backpack-style mount — a backpack frame typically with the head mounted on or above the rolled hide; the turkey a small mount with the beard and a few feathers she could salvage; and the deer a head and shoulder mount.
Meanwhile, her brother Skyler Campbell hunted with his grandfather for a bull moose in Zone 6. A couple of hours into the first day, they were heading toward camp when they saw a bull.
Campbell shot it with his .270 Remington. He wasn’t sure he had hit it because the fog was quite thick, so he shot it again. They saw blood in the area where Campbell had shot it, then found the dead moose about 10 feet away.
They had a little trouble getting it out of the clearcut, but eventually managed, Campbell said. The moose weighed 630 pounds. The antlers had a 33-inch spread, just like his sister’s moose.
He then turned his attention to getting his bear. Randy Ingraham’s bear dogs found a bear that wanted to run but not climb into a tree on Oct. 14.
Campbell killed it with his .270 Remington when the bear crossed a twitch trail in front of him in the woods. The bear weighed 120 pounds.
Campbell’s turkey was the most difficult for the same reason Ingraham had trouble. The birds were not responsive to calls. He saw one on the farm but couldn’t get close enough to it.
He then saw some go over an embankment, so he sneaked up with his 12-gauge shotgun, peered over the bank, chose one and fired. He killed a hen turkey on Oct. 2 with only about a week left in the season.
Campbell got his deer on Nov. 13, 11 days after his sister shot hers. He had spent a lot of time on foot hunting for deer. He saw a few big ones but didn’t have any shots at them.
Then on Nov. 13, he saw a buck on the treeline. The animal spotted him and it looked like it was starting to walk toward him, Campbell said.
Campbell was sitting on the ground and the wind was northwest, so the buck had no inkling of a human shape or smell. The hunter dropped him with the first shot from his .270 Remington. The spike-horn buck weighed 130 pounds.
Campbell will mount his moose antlers on a plaque; do a head and shoulder mount of the bear; and a European or bare skull mount of the deer, with a feather from the hen turkey hung through the eye of the deer.
Campbell said he saw a couple of nice deer the first day of the season but passed on them because he didn’t want to be done hunting. He said it’s difficult to hunt around the potato harvest, but he would go for another grand slam sometime — just focus on getting bigger animals.
Ingraham said she would do it again too.
“My grand slam meant a lot more because my brother was doing it too,” Ingraham said.
