The night before, Joey Kotfer, 16, was the last person to pick up his hunting license before the store closed. He was up at 5:30 a.m. and shot the deer by 8 a.m.
Joey was shaking when he saw the buck through the thick, morning-lit woods. It came to a halt when it heard the clicking noise as Joey pulled the hammer back on his great-grandfather's Winchester 32 Special Model 1894 rifle.
With a little adjustment in the blind he fashioned out of sticks and leaves, Joey took the shot, quickly reloaded and took another. He did it so fast that his dad, Terry, heard the time between shots and thought it was a different hunter, one more experienced. The deer came to rest a few hundred yards away near Terry.
Opening Day for New Hampshire's firearm season was Joey's third year as a licensed hunter. Until now, he had always left the Salisbury woods empty-handed.
By late morning, hunters and customers gathered at Marshall Firearms Inc. in Boscawen. Their truck beds held their season's harvest. Joey sat on the bed of his truck, holding his 8-point buck.
"It's boring for most of the time, sitting out there a couple hours," Joey noted, after the buck was weighed. It was a trophy deer at 208 pounds.
"This is a dream, getting one like this," Dave Merwin said, the family friend whose Salisbury land the Kotfers hunt year after year. Several years ago, his father shot a 209-pound buck in the same woods, weighed at the same scale.
According to Bradford Marshall of Marshall Firearms, six deer were registered on Opening Day of firearm season this year. The store, which was closed on Opening Day in 2009, registered 10 deer on the second day of the season last year.
From New Hampshire Fish and Game Department harvested deer totals of the last decade, an average of 10,974 deer were killed per year between 2000 and 2009.
1 comment:
good luck with the photo column, john! you got a great start. i love the photo and the story behind it, and the way you wrote it.
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