Had it not been for her older brother Chase's coaxing, 12-year-old Brit Looney would've gladly let the curtain drop on Missouri's late-October youth season without firing a shot.
Now the sixth-grader from Higginsville, Missouri, has one less bullet for her .243.
"She didn't even want to go hunting that day," said 17-year-old Chase, who was too old to take advantage of the special hunt. "I MADE her go."
"He's mean," she responded.
The 2016 season was Brit's second as a participant. She's now the only kid in the family who can do so. Her sister, Alexis, turned 16 prior to the October hunt, which made her ineligible.
Chase almost had to beg his sister to go out about 3:00 on Oct. 30, the final Sunday afternoon. They rarely hunt together, but he wanted to christen a new blind setup on a family friend's property in Lafayette County. He was willing to forget how "awful" it is to hunt with her, and she agreed to go despite his meanness and incessant talking.
By 3:15, brother and sister were sitting side by side in the popup blind he'd erected two weeks earlier. It was nestled beside a fence about 60 yards off a gravel road and only 45 yards from an abandoned house.
Their father's friend, "Uncle Ham" (Hamilton Little), suggested the hilltop spot because it was within shooting distance of a timbered draw that served as a corridor to a water source.
"I asked her if she was going to shoot the first deer she saw, and she said yes," Chase said. "We saw only one."
He actually saw it first.
"I was sleepy, so I told Chase to wake me up if he saw something," Brit said. "When he woke me, he said ‘That's the biggest deer I've seen in my life! Grab the gun, Brittany.'"
She most certainly did.
"Had we known there was a deer that big on the place, we might've put some stipulations on the youth season," her father Gregory laughed.
They believe the whitetail, Brit's first, was only 3 1/2 years old. Its BTR composite score is 224 6/8 inches.
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Deer ... Buck ... Shooter: Ryan Keeter / Grady, Arkansas