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15 – 17 Year Old Boy Group Winner
Student Name: Dylan Dunn
School: Inola High School
Grade: 11
Age: 17
Address: 18205 E 620 Rd
Inola OK 74036
Phone: 918/833-2262
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