As seen in ESPN Outdoors Hunting October 21, 2009

Shot from the hip
First Lady of Hunting has gone on to carry more than first deer back to camp

By Tammy Sapp
Special to ESPNOutdoors.com

A professional portrait photographer was amazed Brenda hunted but was doubtful of her ability to shoot a deer since knowing someone who could claim that feat was unheard of then. So she hauled the puny little deer all the way to town just to show him.

Brenda Valentine, The First Lady of Hunting, said back in the day, you were lucky to see a track in her home state of Tennessee, much less a deer.

When she was about 12 years old and working in the tobacco field, Valentine saw her first whitetail. She said people came from all over to see the tracks, convinced Valentine had lost her mind. Some of the local folk had no clue what the tracks were, speculating a goat or calf had scampered off the farm.

With a paltry 2,000 deer left in the 1940s, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency began a restoration effort that stretched into the 1980s, releasing 9,000 deer during that time. With the herd approaching nearly a million deer now, 45 percent of Tennessee hunters bag at least one, a figure that would have made hunters from previous decades gasp in amazement.

TWRA had just opened limited parts of the state for deer hunting when Valentine joined the "red coats," the hue of choice before blaze orange. She hunted hard for three years without seeing so much as a tail twitch. Still brimming with determination, 18-year-old Valentine was hunting with a group of friends at Natchez Trace State Park near Lexington when her luck changed.

Valentine carried an open sight Model 94 Winchester .30-.30 on that cold, clear morning. She hiked a gas line to the highest point she could get to and sat down on the ground. After sitting on an oak ridge throughout the morning, Valentine began trudging back to camp to get a bite to eat with her fellow hunters. When she topped a hill, she saw a deer at the bottom.

"It surprised me so much I never shouldered the rifle and aimed but pulled up and shot the lever action from the hip by instinct. Guess I'd been watching too many "Rifleman" TV shows!"

After dropping the small buck in its tracks with a cartridge she had carried so long she had "worn the shiny off of it," Valentine did what she had seen successful hunters do in Outdoor Life and Field and Stream photos.

"They were always shown packing out their bucks over their shoulders, so I thought that was the only way to do it," she said. "I somehow got that deer wrapped around my neck where I could hold onto the feet and carry my rifle while walking the mile or so back to camp.

Click here to read the rest of the story on ESPN

Brenda became obsessed with this buck after getting a quick glance at him while bowhunting. Although she has had several Book qualifiers, he is the only one she has ever entered. It won every Big Buck contest around that year. Around 1980 in Tennessee. Early '80s Early '80s This buck field dressed 201 lbs making it the largest deer checked in from Brenda's county up until that time and very few since then. She shot him in November of 1986 on the family farm in Tennessee. The Mississippi buck was one Brenda shot at Timber View Lodge near Meridian in 1997 with her Browning bow in an early season hunt. This muzzleloader buck came from northern Missouri in 1998. The RedHead hunting team was hunting/filming in Iowa, but Brenda didn't have an Iowa tag. So each day she'd leave early and drive across the state line and hunt on another parcel of land. Brenda's birthday buck was shot in old Mexico around 2000. She hunted there several years during the week before Christmas. Often she'd get a nice buck there to celebrate her Dec. 19th birthday. Mexico 2005 Brenda shot this buck with a shotgun while hunting Illinois' Randolph County in December 2005. Brenda said photos hardly do this deer justice!