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15 – 17 Year Old Boy Group Winner
Student Name: Dylan Dunn
School: Inola High School
Grade: 11
Age: 17
Teacher: Craig Savage, Contact # 918/543-4248
Hunting Sharing the Heritage/Archery
When I joined the Inola Air Force ROTC, I found out that the
instructors also taught archery in the schools,
marksmanship and hunter education. Prior to the
introduction to these activities, I had never been exposed to
anything like this. My friends convinced me to take part,
telling me that this was the only class in school where you
could shoot guns and bows and get certified to hunt. Prior
to this, no one in my family ever hunted or even fished, so
as for having a hunting heritage, there wasn’t any.
I have come to love shooting, but archery has become my
favorite. To be honest, at first I didn’t see a need for hunting
or the need to protect the animals, much less the
environment. All of this changed since I completed the
hunter education course and was able to combine that with
archery. When Sergeant Savage and his son took me on a
hunt, we spent the weekend walking the woods and looking
for deer sign and learning about nature. I saw for myself
how each species affected the
other and how to tell which animals were in an area. At
night we sat around the camp fire and I listened while
Sergeant Savage and his son recounted stories of their
previous hunts together. I was saddened to learn that
Sergeant Savage had lost his oldest son Kenneth several
years before, but he and younger son Dillan brought him to
life again as they told stories, reliving their hunts in Alaska
and Texas, where the three of them had shared this
wonderful world together. I came to see that for them it
was not so much about the hunt, but about being together
and growing closer.
On our last day, we woke to a cool wet morning just before
dawn. The three of us went to the locations where we
found the deer had been crossing and feeding. Sergeant
Savage had me set by a very large oak tree and told me that
he would be no more than a hundred yards to my right. I
now held the bow in my hands that Sergeant Savage has
used to bring down a moose in Alaska. I had practiced with
it and learned how to use the sites, but I just hoped that I
would not freeze when the time came to shoot something
besides a target. I sat there in the darkness, listening to the
noises all around me, wondering what kind of creatures
were at play. When the sun rose, I saw that there were two
squirrels just above me and they seemed to be playing a
game of tag; jumping from branch to branch. As I sat there
being as quite as I could, it felt as if hours had gone by, my
legs were going to sleep and I was fighting to not do the
same. Just as I started to nod off I heard a noise to my left,
it was a doe with another smaller doe just behind her,
which later Sergeant Savage explained was probably her
fawn from a previous year. As they walked by, the first doe
stopped for just a moment and I could feel my heart rise
into my throat and my muscles tense. I remembered that
Dillan had told me to stay calm if this happened; if she
didn’t smell me she would move on and hopefully a buck
would come by following them. It was hard to let those two
do go by, but I did and just like he said, about fifteen
minutes later a six point buck came within thirty yards of
me. I brought the bow up, drew it back and lined up the
sites just as the back saw me I released the arrow and the
deer jumped into the air and ran off. I sat there and began
to cry, thinking I had missed or worse, wounded the deer.