Raccoon treed by our bluetick coon dogs when I was 8. Shot him with a Ruger 10/22. I loved running coon dogs when I was a kid.

First sought-after big game animal was a Columbia blacktail buck on the Bear River in far northwest California, with a Marlin 336 in .30-30, my high school handload of 3031 under a Sierra 150.

I had an old Winchester single shot bolt action rifle that was 100 years old, at somewhere around 7 or 8 I killed a cottontail with it near Alcova, Wyoming.

A few years later when I was 14 or so I shot a pronghorn antelope with a 30-06 Ruger.

I don't shoot rabbits at all anymore, but I do enjoy pronghorn hunting more than anything else.

When I was 16, I owned a Marlin Glenfield M60, purchased for about $30 new. On weekends my cousin & I would drive from NJ to a large dump just across the stateline in NY state. Usually went thru a brick of LRs while terrorizing the rats on each trip.

Then in Augut 1960, I bought a Marlin 336 Texan 30/30. That fall I killed a big bodied whitetail with 14" spikes in the Catskills in NY State.

I didn't hunt again until my wife & I moved to AZ in Jan. 1962. The next fall I killed my first mule deer buck. The one below was the 3rd one. I killed it on the North Kaibab in 1965 with my newly acquired Mod70, .264 WM. It would be the first of dozens of victims of that rifle over the next 50+ years.

The first was a Fox Squirrel with a NEF 410 single shot loaded with 3 inch No5. I was 4.

That gun and my adopted father are gone.

I remember when we cleaned them asking, “Does my heart look like that?”

Rabbit with a pellet gun.

When I was 9 or 10 I got a Daisy Red Rider BB Gun. I practiced religiously with it on targets in my basement. Growing up in rural Massachusetts, we had tons of stone walls, and there were hundreds of chipmunks living in them. I discovered early on that a torso shot on a chipmunk was not immediately lethal, but a sideways shot directly in the eye dropped them DRT. I became a regular chipmunk assassin. I would skin every chipmunk out and stretch and salt their hides. I told my baby sister Melinda I was going to make a coat for her out of the hides. I soon realized that it would take hundreds of hides to make a coat, plus the cost of tanning hundreds of tiny hides. My sister, who is now 65, still keeps asking me where her chipmunk skin coat is.

Cottontail, 10/22.

My first game animal was a 5 point Whitetail buck when I was 7 years old....shot with a Ruger M77 Carbine in 250 Savage.

One day I was watching a movie called "Quigley down under",I had never shot a rifle before,I was so enamored with the Sharps model 1874 that I went out & got one in 45-70,then a 45-90 & a little later a 45-110 ,
My first game animal was a bison in South Dakota,gun used was of course a Shilo Sharps 45-110,the farmer was kinda skeptical of my set up when I got there,actually offered me his 270,his eyes nearly jumped outta his skull when the bison dropped in a cloud of dust where he stood at the shot

quote:

Originally posted by Bill73:
One day I was watching a movie called "Quigley down under",I had never shot a rifle before,I was so enamored with the Sharps model 1874 that I went out & got one in 45-70,then a 45-90 & a little later a 45-110 ,
My first game animal was a bison in South Dakota,gun used was of course a Shilo Sharps 45-110,the farmer was kinda skeptical of my set up when I got there,actually offered me his 270,his eyes nearly jumped outta his skull when the bison dropped in a cloud of dust where he stood at the shot

Nice!

Elk. Weatherby Vanguard 30-06 and 180 grain Nosler Ballistic Tips.

Mule deer with my Uncle's .300 Savage.

A pheasant with a sawed off 12 gauge. I was 12. My cousin had stuffed the muzzle into a ditch bank and split the barrel. It was cut off enough that there was no choke on it. With a 12 year old's reflexes I was deadly with that gun. still have it. For big game it was a spike buck at 19 with a 270 Rem. 721 I bought at a pawn shop. I wish I still had that one for sentimental reasons. DW