My Greatest Memory by Brayden Anderson

Last November I was still trying to fill out my first buck deer tag for Western Oregon. This was my third year hunting and I was determined to get a buck. My hunting season started back in September, on an early rifle-controlled buck hunt in the McKenzie unit in the Three Sisters Wilderness. This is a very tough hunt. You have to pack in on horseback and mules. It's eleven miles into camp.

The number of deer is low for the amount of country. The previous two years I had only seen one buck at a dead sprint, over 100 yards away. But I had gained valuable experience that I could use to my advantage.

The first three days of the hunt I only saw a couple of does. But the morning of the fourth day, my grandpa and his friend Dave and I got close to a forked horn muley in full velvet. My heart was pounding as I grabbed the wooden stock of my Winchester model 64 30-30 and my hand was numb from the cold when I went to pull the hammer back. I saw the young buck and tried to get to the nearest tree while he was focused on the horses. But beginner's luck was no longer on my side. As I pulled up to get him in my open sights, he and the two other does spooked and ran up a small bank.

I was going about a mile a minute hot on the chase. They stopped to get another look at me, when they made it up the ravine. This was my chance, so I pulled the hammer back and put my sights on the bucks shoulder, when I squeezed the trigger I was shaking with buck fever and shot over his back. I quickly worked the lever-action and jacked in another shell, but they were too far-gone, and my second shot wasn’t close. After going up to where the bucks were standing when I shot we found no sign of blood. Now, I knew I had just missed my first buck. As the hunt went on, I never got a crack at another mule deer. I still had a chance at the general season back home for black tail.

The general season is a lot longer, but with school and football I could hardly find the time for hunting. With the last few weeks of the season closing in, my friend Lane and I hit the woods looking for a black tail that would fill the freezer. We went into the field a handful of times but didn't get a chance for a buck. With the general season winding down we went out one final time on the last weekend.

Though that Friday was the last day of the general season, youth hunters are allowed two extra days. Sunday evening, we ventured out to a spot we had visited earlier in the season. We took Lane's Browning A-Bolt .270 WSM, because my 30-30 doesn’t have the distance of his bolt action, and we knew more than likely a long shot would take place. We set up and started to glass down the canyon and up the other side in search of black tail. Fifteen minutes later, Lane spotted a deer in his binoculars. I turned the scope up to 9x power and found the deer. It had a swollen neck from rut and was big-bodied. Its antlers looked small in the scope. I set up prone to take the shot. I held the crosshairs on the top of his back where neck meets body. When I pulled the trigger, the scope jumped back and I didn’t see if I got a clean hit. The buck ran toward the bottom of the canyon. I passed Lane his gun and he added a follow-up shot, just to be sure. The buck went down, and we started high fivin’. When we got to him and I grabbed the antlers, I was running on pure adrenaline. It was the greatest feeling ever. Lane gutted the buck and we dragged him up the steep canyon walls. By this time it was dark. We knew it was going to be a long couple of hours. When we finally got back to the Four Wheeler and to Lane's house, my dad was waiting. We hung the buck and skinned him out, then went home to get some sleep before school the next day.

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