Vern Evans
In December, Colton Adams, of West Monroe, Louisiana, took his girlfriend, Karley Koger, deer hunting on some family land. After spending a few hours in a chilly box blind, they stepped outside, where Adams dropped to one knee and popped the question. Within seconds of Koger saying, “Yes,” Adams made a crackerjack freehand shot on a doe at 100 yards. And he caught it all on a video that he shared to Instagram on Jan. 24.
The video, which has since garnered over 63,000 likes, begins with Adams down on one knee in front of Koger. As he stands up and slips the ring on Koger’s finger, you can see a doe step out of the trees behind them and make its way across the shooting lane. As the couple hugs, Koger spots the deer standing broadside.
Adams, who looks incredibly calm and collected for someone who just asked for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage, smoothly swings the rifle off his shoulder and raises it to his cheek as Koger steps back and covers her ears with her hands. The doe crumples in her tracks just as Adams pulls the trigger.
“I didn’t have it perfectly planned out in my head,” says Adams, who met Koger through a mutual friend a year ago. “I didn’t want her to have any idea that this wasn’t just a normal trip to the stand. I wanted her to be completely blindsided, so I made like it was just a Saturday like any other time we would go. We got up early and got out there when it was dark.”
Adams didn’t want to share the location of his family’s hunting camp, where the video was filmed. But he says the two of them had been sitting together in the box blind for several hours without seeing a deer.
“She was being a good sport, but I figured she was probably cold and tired. I was nervous and kind of wanting to get it over with.”
So he decided to get out of the shooting house and propose in the shooting lane. He had his phone propped up in the blind and pointing down the cleared lane like he was going to record the hunt. He came out of the blind behind Koger, who had no idea she was being recorded.
“When we got down out of the stand, I was trying to get my words out, but I’m not too good at it,” Adams tells Outdoor Life. “She told me I was acting weird and I just reached into my bibs pocket and pulled out the box. I couldn’t say anything. I just looked at her.”
That’s when Adams says Koger let out an excited gasp, which he thinks spooked the deer and got it moving out into the lane.
“She was the one who pointed it out. After she hugged me, she said, ‘Oh my gosh, Colton. There’s a deer right there.’ She knew what to do. She stepped back and covered her ears.”
Adams says the two hunt together often. And although Koger doesn’t really like to do the killing part, she loves to tag along with him in the woods.
“She’s my partner,” Adams says. “We do pretty much everything together. There’s not much that I go and do alone.”
Adams says it was a good thing he had gotten the proposal out of the way before the deer showed up. Because if it had happened the other way around, he probably would have been too nervous to make that kind of shot.
“I wasn’t even out there to really hunt. I was out there to propose. That’s where my mind was. The fact that the deer showed up at that time was just a miracle. I wish I could say I was that good. I was very glad that the deer folded and dropped where it stood because I don’t think anyone would have believed it happened that way if I didn’t get it on video.”
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Koger wasn’t at all disturbed about the couple’s special moment being interrupted by the deer.
“She wasn’t mad that I shot a deer 10 seconds after I asked her to marry me,” Adams says. “I feel like that’s a telltale. Any girl that’s okay with her proposal being interrupted by a shot at a deer, well, that’s about as big a green flag as you can get.”
The couple also processed the deer together, which is probably another green flag. Adams says they hope to honeymoon in Tennessee (the couple is registered at Honeyfund) after tying the knot in May, which means it should be safe for any deer that might decide to crash the wedding.
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