Broussard drills nice 10-point in Columbia County from 50 yards
Jennifer Broussard was pretty pleased with how her morning hunt had gone on Nov. 13 — less than two hours in, and she had already taken down a nice doe that would tip the scales at 110 pounds.
The New Iberia hunter was on a private lease with her husband in Columbia County, Ark., just north from their camp in Haynesville. She was alone in a box stand overlooking a food plot, and had seen several deer before she dropped the big doe at about 8:50 a.m.
But less than 30 minutes later, things would get even better.
“I thought that was it, because that was a lot of action for the morning — it’s traditionally a nighttime stand,” Broussard said. “So I just hung back and waited — and this big boy walked out.”
The ‘big boy’ was a 200-pound 10-point, and Broussard went from being happy with her doe to focused on filling her one remaining tag for the trip.
“He was looking at that dead deer in the food plot. He was curious,” she said. “But he didn’t go out in the open. He stayed along the wood line and he just kept creeping. When he walked out, I tried to hold my breath and be as quiet as I could.
“But he wasn’t stopping. He was cruising, so I just took the shot and luckily I hit him in the right spot.”
Broussard fired her .243, and the big buck jumped up and kicked out its back legs, then tore off into the woods.
“Then my husband starts calling me right away. My phone was vibrating, and I was trying to listen for the deer running and crashing,” she said.
She thought she heard the deer go down, and informed her husband Wayne on the phone that it wasn’t a second doe she had just shot.
“I said, ‘No, it’s a big deer,’” Broussard said. “It’s big, big, big, big, big, big.
“I couldn’t even talk.”
Wayne told her to stay put, and that he was heading her way.
“But I’m not a patient person, so I waited about 10 minutes,” Broussard said with a chuckle. “I went down and started looking for blood and hair, and then he showed up.”
They eventually found hair but no blood, and headed into the woods where the buck had bolted.
“We followed the broken sticks and roughed up leaves,” she said. “He found it before I did – it was through a bunch of thickets and thorns.
“He looked like he was sleeping with his eyes open …. I just couldn’t believe I got that deer. I couldn’t believe he presented himself to me like that.”
The 5½-year-old buck had an inside spread of 19 ½ inches, tipped the scales at 200 pounds and stretched the tape to 142 ⅜ inches of bone.
“My husband’s very happy for me,” Broussard said. “He’s very proud of me, and happy the deer is going to be on our wall up in the living room.”
Don’t forget to enter photos of your bucks in the Nikon Big Buck Photo Contest to be eligible for monthly giveaways and the rand drawing for Nikon optics at the end of the contest.
Read other stories about big bucks killed this season by clicking here.
