Alex Paul
Cody Kent loves the outdoors and he’s had a good year as a hunter and angler.
Although he’s just 15 years of age, he’s had a good year. He caught a beautiful 18 inch cutthroat at Round Lake last spring.
This fall, he bagged a nice cow elk and on a youth bird hunt at the E.E. Wilson game refuge near Corvallis, took some nice pheasants.
But perhaps the one kill he had this year that he’ll never forget came accidentally. After a 70-pound female cougar decided to wander in his path and then crouch and move toward the young hunter.
“It was Monday morning, about 7:30,” recounted the son of Duane and Helen Kent of Sweet Home. “I was hunting with my dad, but he wasn’t right with me.”
Kent said he was coming down a hill and saw something moving nearby in some ferns.
“I stopped walking and kept looking over there,” he said. “It came through the ferns, turned and looked at me and then crouched down, you know, like a pet cat will do, and it started creeping along toward me. That’s when I shot it.”
The young sportsman fired the first round from his .270 caliber Remington and it hit the cat in the neck, breaking it’s back.
“I took another shot and missed and then I walked about 15 yards to where it had moved and shot it again,” he said.
The batteries in Kent’s two-way radio system quickly died after he put out a garbled message to his father.
“My dad didn’t know I’d shot the cougar first,” Kent said.
Because he didn’t have a cougar tag, the Kents took the animal to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife office near Corvallis.
“They told me I did a good job,” Kent said. They also kept the cougar.
The shot was face-on at 10 yards, Kent estimates.
The cat weighed 70 pounds and was six feet long from tail to nose.
The 15-year-old is home schooled and says his friends were pleased by his kill.
The Kent family enjoys being together in the outdoors. Twin daughters, Haley and Courtney, 8, share the fun.
“I was scared,” his mother Helen said when she learned of the incident. “At fist, I told him he was never going to hunt again. But, our whole family hunts, so we’ll be back out there.”
If there was one major lesson the young hunter learned, it was “to watch my back” he said without hesitation.