Mildred Bryant killed her first deer when she was nine years old. 81 years later, the hardworking woman from New Plymouth, Idaho, is still going strong. She notched her tag this fall on a 3\u00d74 mule deer buck, according to Idaho Fish and Game<\/a>, and she did it wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt. At 90 years of age, Bryant is living proof that for deer hunters, age is just a number.<\/p>\n Bryant tells IDFG that she was raised near Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast. She grew up doing most of the same things that her brother Buster did, including riding horses and the occasional bucking bull. But when it came to spending time outdoors, there weren\u2019t many fathers taking their nine-year-old daughters deer hunting back in 1941.<\/p>\n So, one day in the fall of that year, when her dad told her to stay at home while he and Buster went into town, the young girl and a friend decided they\u2019d go hunting on their own. Bryant took her dad\u2019s rifle off the wall, and they hiked into the nearby woods. She ended up shooting her first blacktail buck that afternoon. The only problem was the two kids weren\u2019t big enough to pack out the deer on their own.<\/p>\n \u201cI went and got a rope and hung it by its horns, up in a tree,\u201d she told IDFG. \u201cI gutted it out and hung it up so it would drain good.\u201d<\/p>\n When Bryant\u2019s dad got home and she told him about her buck, he refused to believe his daughter at first. She was persistent, though, and he finally agreed to help her out. And even though she says that he shared some choice words when he found the buck, it\u2019s hard to imagine a father from a hunting family (in this era or any other) that wouldn\u2019t be proud to see his nine-year-old daughter go out and shoot a buck.<\/p>\nBucking Tradition and Showing Up the Menfolk<\/h2>\n
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