By SHAWNE K. WICKHAM of New Hampshire Sunday News – Arianna Smith, a 15-year-old girl from Milan, was the first hunter to take a moose in this year’s much-anticipated hunt. And hunting season hadn’t even officially started.
Smith got her 625-pound bull moose on Oct. 7, downing the animal with one shot from her .308 Savage rifle.
Smith, a survivor of childhood leukemia, won a coveted moose hunt permit courtesy of the Hunt of a Lifetime, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that provides hunting and fishing adventures for youngsters with serious illnesses.
New Hampshire Fish and Game Department provides one permit each year to the program; the youngsters are allowed to hunt before the season opens.
Smith, who is 4-foot-11, said the chance to hunt moose was “one in a million.”
She had heard about Hunt of a Lifetime from a former teacher. Her parents decided that this year she was old enough, and responsible enough, to participate in the moose hunt, according to her mother, Wendy Stanton.
Smith spent three days in the woods with a guide before she got her shot. That Friday, she had brought along her cousin, Dallis Lacasse to hunt in Millsfield, just west of Errol. They were moving up a hill when “we heard some grunting noises,” she said.
Her guide, Keith Roberge from Northern New Hampshire Guide Services, lay down to stay out of the way and whispered to Smith that the moose was about 20 yards away.
At first, she couldn’t see the animal “because I’m tiny and the brush was so high.”
But when she moved to a higher bank, there it was. “It was honestly so breathtaking,” she said. “You could see the entire landscape of the body. It was perfect.”
She aimed, as she had been taught, behind the shoulder where the heart is, and she fired.
The moose took off.
“I was so disappointed in myself,” she said. “I honestly thought I missed it.”
But when her guide looked through his binoculars, he spotted something. That’s when Smith got nervous, she said: “Am I going to have to shoot this thing again?”
But the moose was lying dead. “Keith said, ‘This is the most humane shot I’ve ever seen,'” Smith said. “It didn’t suffer at all.”
She’s glad about that – and thrilled that the meat will feed her family this winter. “I love moose meat,” she said. “It’s my favorite.”
A local taxidermist is going to mount the moose head for her as a keepsake.
Both parents – her dad is Karl Couture – are really proud of their daughter, the youngest of their five kids, Stanton said.
“She’s now outdone her father,” she said. “He had a moose permit a few years back. He didn’t get one.”
Arianna, Stanton said, was always “the kind of kid that would not wear pink; she would get camo jackets.”
She was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia when she was just two-and-a-half years old, her mom said. “She went through chemotherapy, a few blood transfusions, and she did very well with all her treatments.”
Smith has been cancer-free for four years. She’s a three-sport athlete at Berlin High school, where she’s a sophomore this year.
How much does Smith remember about her battle with cancer? Quite a lot, she said.
“It was really hard but I honestly can say it was some of the best years of my life,” she said. “I don’t think I would be who I am without it.”
“It gives a whole new perspective on life: how many people take things for granted, and how amazing people are just to spend all their time taking care of other people.”
Her experience with the medical profession has inspired her to pursue a career as a forensic anthropologist.
And her success in her first-ever moose hunt has her excited about going deer and partridge hunting with her dad this fall.
Her father is “pretty jealous” of her moose, she said with a laugh. “He’s never shot a moose in his life.”
But she said, “He was more excited for me than anything. He’s one of my biggest supporters.”
swickham@unionleader.com