Fourteen-year-old Coen Mullins has loved spending time outside for as long as he can remember. His parents had him on skis when he was a toddler, sliding around their yard in Morrisville, Vermont. A few years later he went on his first hunt with his father. He still loves skiing and hunting, as well as mountain biking, skating on the pond behind his house in winter, and fishing the local lakes in the summer. Last spring, when his school moved to remote instruction, Coen found himself with extra time on his hands; he spent lots of it building bike trails behind his house in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he moved with his family when he was 6.
A lot of what I like about being outside is just kind of a feeling, I guess. You can see things that maybe other people don’t get to see, like wild animals and sunrises over mountains. What I like to do outside definitely depends on the day. I ski a lot in the winter, and I’ve raced since I was 6 years old. One thing I love about skiing is the speed, the adrenaline. And there’s kind of a sensation of going from edge to edge down a hill.
I do like that adrenaline rush. I’d rather do downhill mountain biking than cross-country. I like it for the speed, the jumps, not having to pedal uphill. Last spring, I was so bored when we went to remote school – and into the summer when we couldn’t really go anywhere or see anyone. I had been getting into downhill mountain biking, with the jumps and that kind of thing, and I’d made some short trails in our woods. I built one trail two or three years ago. It was a little drop, into a berm, and then it was done.
I got walking around our property, and I found another spot and built another trail and threw in a much bigger drop. So biking was basically what I did the whole summer. When my mom would kick me out of the house, I would usually get on my bike. There are some trails in Bethlehem I like to ride, or I would go into Franconia and ride the trails there.
I think I was around 5 or 6 when I started hunting. My dad stuck me in a tree stand gave me a doe bleat that you use to attract bucks way later in the season. So I was sitting up there, and every 5 minutes I would blow on it as hard as I could, and it would sound like something was dying. Somehow, within half an hour after we sat down, a doe walked out, and my dad was able to get it. And that first experience is what got me hooked. I knew we weren’t going out there just to kill something, we were going out there to get food. I think I was more excited than anything.
After that first experience with my dad in that tree stand, I didn’t see a deer out in the woods until last year. I was with my grandfather near Barre, Vermont, during youth weekend, and I got my first deer. I was ecstatic. We’d been hunting all day for two days. We were actually walking back to the truck at the end of the second day, and my grandfather saw the doe standing on the hillside.
This year I got one deer with my grandfather and one with my mom. With my grandfather, we hunted two days again, over youth weekend. The first day we didn’t see anything all day, and it was raining, and it was miserable. The second day, early morning, that first deer walked out. The second deer was a four-point buck near my house, around the Gale River. We were walking in there every morning. I had cameras up from the beginning of September. And I was in there a lot.
Every day after school I would go out and try to figure out what the deer were doing, where they were walking through. My mom had never hunted before. She got her license so she could take me down there after school while my dad was working. That weekend, my mom came down, we walked around and sat down, and about 20 minutes before dark, the deer walked out. My mom never saw the deer, because she was sitting behind me and reading a book, I think. The way the deer came in, it was really hugging this knoll. I couldn’t see it until it was right there. The deer was 15 yards away from us when I saw it.
I’ve learned a lot from my dad and grandfather – how to hunt, how to read what a deer’s thinking, in a way. We do both bow hunting and rifle hunting. Bow hunting is a lot more technical. With rifle, you can sit at the edge of a field and see 500 yards and shoot a deer if it’s 500 yards away. With a bow, the deer has to be within 30 yards. With a rifle you can walk around through the woods. With a bow, you have to sit still, because the deer has to walk up to you, basically. Bow hunting is a lot more challenging.
None of my friends hunt, so you can’t really talk to anyone about it, because no one really understands it. If I were to go up to one of my friends and show him a trail cam picture of a big buck, he wouldn’t really care. Someone who hunts could be excited about seeing something like that.
I’ve also fished since I was little. I like to fish for pike and bass. Pike are just really fun to catch, because they fight a lot. They’re harder to reel in than other fish. And bass are just good to eat. So we go for those. We fish at the Moore Reservoir in Littleton and a couple lakes in Vermont.
It’s nice to be successful when you’re hunting, but there’s a lot of it that’s really fun to me – trying to track the animal, that adrenaline rush when you see it off in the distance. There’s a lot of ups, and there’s a whole lot of downs. You could go all day in the woods and see nothing. Or you could be out there for 10 minutes and have a deer on the ground.