It will be some time before Brian Smith forgets the day he bagged his first trophy buck.

Brian, 15, of 109 Wansack Road, Shenango Township, outdid the adults in his immediate hunting circle Monday on the first day of Pennsylvania's 2003 hunting season, in the process creating a memory of a lifetime.

In what is only his second year in the field, Brian, a son of Jerry Smith, Sharon, and Susan Smith, Shenango Township, was hunting across the street from his Wansack Road home.

"I was standing there and I looked over my shoulder," said Brian, who was hunting with Susan's boyfriend Keith Young, 37. "And it was just standing there staring at me."

Staring, he added, from a distance of about 20 yards. So Brian said he reached for his gun, aimed and started firing. The 7-point, 120-pound buck was felled after running only 20 or 30 yards.

Brian said he doesn't remember what his reaction was the moment he realized he had shot the buck, but his mother said when Brian first sighted it Young told him to "shoot it, because he was like in shock I think at first."

"I just told him to keep shooting at it until he got it," Young said, noting that Brian actually hit the deer on the second shot.

It was too early to estimate the number of deer taken in the county, but at least one deer processor, Pete Durman, of Pete and Jim's Processing, 593 Greenfield Road, Lackawannock Township, said he had gotten about 25 in Monday, which was fairly typical.

As for hunters and deer in the field, estimates ranged from normal to low depending on where in the county hunters were.

Young said he and Brian saw only two deer the entire day with the second, Brian's buck, being sighted about 4 p.m. He also noted sounds of gunfire were somewhat light for the area.

Jerry Smith hunted in Henderson and he said he "generally sees more guys on the first day."

"We saw 30 guys maybe," Smith said when he normally might see 50 or 60.

One area hunters were pretty much in agreement with was the mostly lousy weather.

"It got to the point where the high winds and snow" made the visibility poor, Smith said, noting he thought that "attributed to a lot of guys leaving early because they couldn't see. I stuck it out, though."

Smith said it cleared up by him about 1 p.m. and he killed a doe about an hour later.

"It was bad," said Durman, 43, who was hunting near his Greenfield Road home. "When it snowed, you couldn't see 50 feet. And then when it wasn't snowing, the wind was blowing so hard it just made everything move, which made everything harder to see."

Durman added that his sons, John and Rich, were hunting near Hadley where there was about 4-to-5-inches of snow, which made conditions slightly more favorable.

Kevin Thompson, a wildlife education supervisor with the Pennsylvania Game Commission based out of Franklin, agreed that "it would have been better if the snow had stayed."

Thompson said it was too early to determine if the number of deer being killed was comparable to past years, although an Associated Press story Monday noted that butcher shops in northeastern and western Pennsylvania said they had received about the same number or slightly fewer deer compared with last year. The Pennsylvania Game Commission estimates the state's deer herd at about 1.6 million.

Durman said he had seen "lots of hunters," which he said was fairly normal for the area, and "a few deer get dragged out," although none by him.

"I'd say it was a pretty typical year around the neighborhood," he said.

Of the 25 he and partner Jim Butterworth had processed Monday, Durman said the biggest was an 8-point with "about an 18-inch spread" taken in Venango County.

The AP reported there was at least one fatality when Melvin R. Hughes, 50, of Finleyville, Washington County, died of an apparent heart attack.

Thompson said late Monday afternoon the only unusual incident he was aware of in the northwest region, which encompasses in part Mercer County, involved a parked car being hit by gunfire, but wouldn't say where the shooting occurred.

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