Disabled Son Takes Trophy 10-Pointer Thanks to Father’s Efforts

In December, a Kansas teenager with cerebral palsy harvested a buck of a lifetime thanks to his dedicated father, who raffled guns and organized fundraisers to pay for an all-terrain wheelchair and a modified gun mount so that he could take him hunting.

The Kansas City Star reported on the story in late January, noting that Brayden Hugunin can’t talk or walk but can communicate using sign language. Not long ago, he told his dad, Jerame Hugunin, that he wanted to go hunting. “I’ve always loved to hunt, and Brayden would always get excited when I would bring home a nice buck,” Jerame told the _City Sta_r. “I kept thinking, if only there was some way I could get him out there with me.”

Jerame found a solution—an all-terrain wheelchair called TracFab, which is designed to cover rough ground and to help people with disabilities access the outdoors. Unfortunately, the cost of the chair was beyond Jerame’s budget. But he didn’t give up. To raise money, he held a gun raffle at the state’s Monster Buck Classic, and friends and family members helped with fundraisers until they had enough money to buy the chair. “He just loved it from the start,” Jerame said.

The big father–son moment came in December, when Jerame took Brayden hunting on a friend’s property. Thanks to the wheelchair, the two were able to ascend a hill together and spy does in a field. Jerame told reporters that he had planned to let Brayden take the first deer that stepped out, that it didn’t need to be a buck.

But the does spooked, and neither Jerame nor Brayden thought that they’d see anything else that day. Amazingly, though, at about that time a 10-point trophy walked out of the woods. With the rifle propped on the modified brace, connected to two buttons that would fire the gun, Jerame was able to help Brayden get into position for a shot. And when the moment came, Brayden fired and dropped the deer in its tracks.

Brayden was so excited that he took the antlers to school to show his friends, and later had the deer mounted, the City Star reports. But the story came full circle in January when the Hugunins returned to the Kansas Monster Buck Classic—where their quest to raise money for Brayden’s wheelchair had started a year before—to have the deer scored. The final green tally was 156; Brayden received an award for harvesting one of the the event’s biggest bucks. “I would have been happy if he would have shot a small doe,” Jerame was quoted saying. “To take a big buck like that, that was unbelievable.”

Photograph via Jerame Hugunin/Facebook