Trophy bucks from the 2008-09 season keep turning up.
Up-and-down temperatures drove some deer hunters crazy, but the weather didn’t seem to affect the big-buck kill. Here are the stories about how some hunters scored big.
Outdoing dad
Sixteen-year-old Austin Schexnaildre isn’t your typical young hunter, who simply sits where his elders tell him in the hopes that a deer walks by.
That was proven during the 2007-08 season when he climbed out of a stand and hung a climber on a new tree after watching several deer that were too far away to shoot.
“I moved the stand about 80 yards, and I killed my first doe there,” he said.
This year, Schexnaildre’s aim was a little higher. You see, his father Jason had seen a big-racked buck with a double-drop tine on his left side in the same area on Oct. 17. The deer was the same huge buck shown in a trail-cam picture in early September, and Jason Schexnaildre had it only yards from his stand.
“It was five steps from me, but I just couldn’t get a shot,” the elder Schexnaildre explained.
So as the rut kicked in on the West Baton Rouge lease, the younger Schexnaildre reclaimed the area and walked in with a climber. The tree from which he had killed his doe was broken, so the youngster simply picked the one right next to it, and climbed into the his stand.
Even though it was rifle season, Schexnaildre was determined to kill the buck with a bow.
The first hunt, he saw four does and a small buck. On Jan. 8, his third hunt from the stand, Schexnaildre hadn’t even climbed into his stand when he saw his first deer.
“When I was walking in, I had four does right there,” he said. “I kind of crouched down and watched them. They were walking slow, feeding. A decent buck was behind them.”
The deer weren’t far away, but Schexnaildre didn’t have a shot with his bow.
The now-excited hunter let the deer meander off, got into his climber and prepared to ease up his tree. He was just getting his feet into the straps, however, when his father called to check on him. The hunter whispered the news about the four deer, and then he saw something that sent his heart racing again.
“I saw a deer cross the slough (near the stand) about 60 or 70 yards away,” the he said. “It looked like a boat coming through that slough. I could just see the water moving.”
He hung up the phone, and carefully moved up the tree.
“I climbed up, and hit the rattle bag,” Schexnaildre explained.
It was about 5:15 p.m. by this point. The hunter watched the area where the deer should have exited the slough, but saw nothing.
Finally, he spotted the deer walking away.
“I reached in my bag and got the rattle bag,” Schexnaildre said. “I rattled and grunted a couple of times.”
The deer disappeared, but soon it showed up again.
“I couldn’t see him: All I saw was horns coming through the woods,” he said.
The deer continued walking toward the hunter, but Schexnaildre was on the wrong side of the tree. All he could do was wait and hope the buck walked close enough to get a shot.
At about 35 yards out, however, it appeared the opportunity would be missed.
“He turned completely around like he was going to walk away,” Schexnaildre said. “Then he looked back and started walking to me again.”
At 30 yards, he probably could have forced a shot, but Schexnaildre hesitated.
“I don’t even have a 30-yard pin,” he explained. “I gap shoot at 30 yards, but I didn’t want to take a chance on a buck like this.”
So he waited, and the deer came closer and closer. That presented a problem because it was coming straight at the concealed hunter, and Schexnailder didn’t know which side of the tree the deer would pass on and offer a shot at the vitals.
“At 5 to 8 yards out, he finally turned his head and walked on the side of the tree,” he said.
Of course, the young hunter had anticipated the buck would go to the opposite side, so he had to turn.
“I knew he was going to spook,” Schexnaildre said.
But the deer didn’t notice the movement, and the young hunter lined up his pin and let an arrow fly.
“I knew I had hit him,” Schexnaildre said. “I have fluorescent fletchings, and I watched that arrow sink perfectly right behind the shoulder.”
The deer ran 30 to 40 yards, tail in the air. It then stopped and let its tail fall as if nothing had happened.
“He was just standing there, and then he started leaning to the left,” Schexnaildre said. “He took a couple of steps to try and stay up, and then he started leaning to the right.”
The deer hit the ground, and thrashed around.
“I’m just thinking, ‘Please, no, don’t get up,’” Schexnaildre said.
He watched the deer until all movement stopped, and then he climbed down as quietly as possible and went to call his dad without checking on the deer.
“I ran through the woods,” he said. “I had to let (the deer) lay. I wasn’t going to push it up and lose it.”
His dad and another member, whose camera had actually captured the preseason image of the big deer, soon showed up and the group went to collect the deer.
It was a brute, boasting 12 points, a drop tine and a third main beam. The inside spread measured 17½ inches, and the rack later greenscored 174 inches Pope & Young.
“It would’ve been a 13-point, but he broke one of the drop tines off,” Schexnaildre said.
The grown men began hooting.
“They were going crazy,” Schaxneildre said.
However, it took a while for the enormity of the kill to sink into the young hunter.
“I just had a hard time thinking I killed something that large,” he said.
And what did his father think of his son killing the very deer that had been so close a few months earlier?
“I was as excited with him killing the deer as I would be if I killed the deer,” Jason Schexnaildre said.
Right place, right time
Craig Crawford had never hunted Duckpond Plantation before. In fact, he’s not even a member. Crawford was a guest of brother and first-year member Scott Crawford on Nov. 15.
By 8:15 a.m., the Rayville hunter had become the man who killed the biggest deer to come from the Tensas Parish club.
“Most of the members of the club duck hunt, so they had slept in that morning,” Craig Crawford said. “I went (hunting) with my brother and nephew, and we just picked the first three stands next to the camp.
“We didn’t want to mess up anybody else.”
The stands were situated on a narrow right-of-way bordered on one side by a canal and the other by a narrow strip of woods that served as a boundary to a field.
Crawford was looking down the right of way about 8:10 a.m. when he saw a deer step out of the woods about 60 yards away.
“If I hadn’t been looking that way, I probably wouldn’t have seen him,” he said. “He crossed the opening in about 15 seconds.”
What caught his eye was a massive crown of antlers, but Crawford honestly didn’t have a clue just how big the animal was.
“All I saw was that he had real tall tines,” he admitted. “It had to be 8 points (or better), and I saw four points and I said, ‘The heck with it: He’s a shooter.’”
By this time, the buck had reached the edge of the canal.
“He went up and down it deciding where to cross,” Crawford said.
That provided just enough time for the now-excited hunter to draw a bead on the deer.
“I shot him about the time he hit the water,” Crawford said.
The deer quickly made it to the other side of the canal, and bolted over the spoil bank.
Crawford’s young nephew, Austin Crawford, heard the shot and hurried to the stand.
“My nephew shinnied across a log (over the canal) and walked over the levee, and said, ‘There he is,’” Craig Crawford said.
By this time, Scott Crawford had arrived. When Austin Crawford returned from over the spoil bank, he looked at his father and declared the buck to be massive.
“He said, ‘It’s a 160-class buck, Dad,’” Craig Crawford said.
The men hurried back to the camp, retrieved a Ranger ATV and drove around the canal.
What they found after arriving at the deer made both men’s mouths drop.
The deer, which later weighed in at 255 pounds, was a mainframe 10-pointer with a G4 that split to provide an 11th point. The main beams stretched around almost 20 inches of air, and the bases measured 5 inches around.
The tines soared from the beams. The G2s each measured longer than 11 inches, while the G3s surpassed10 ½ inches.
The only weakness was in the G4s. The right G4 measured 7 1/8 inch, but the left split tine was only 2 inches.
Two scorers put the deer at just more than 170 inches.
“It was a good one,” Craig Crawford understated.
He admitted that there was no skill to the kill, and that luck played a huge factor.
“I wish I could say I hunted a scrape line and all that, but really it was just luck,” Crawford said. “Maybe I should have gone to the (casino) boat that afternoon. Maybe I’d have won some money.”
The all-day buck
Jason Childres didn’t have any idea there was a big buck on his West Feliciana lease, but he did know January was prime time and that he needed to spend as much time on the stand as possible.
That was confirmed on Jan. 12, when he saw a “big, fine” 8-point about 11:30 a.m.
“I knew I was going to stay all day when I hunted,” Childres said. “That kind of told me I needed to be in the woods.”
The following morning, the Greenwell Springs hunter hit the woods early. The wind was howling, so instead of sitting a stand, Childres decided it was a perfect day for slipping through the woods.
He began working his way through a particularly tough patch of ground, typified by ridges leading into a series of steep bluffs.
“I would sit in a spot for a coupe of hours and then move a little,” Childres said.
About 12:30 p.m., he made one such move and eased up to the top of another ridge.
“I looked down into the ravine, and there he was at the bottom, eating acorns,” Childres said. “When I saw that buck, I just hit the deck.”
The sight caught the hunter off guard, since he didn’t expect to see a buck standing in one spot munching away.
“It’s the middle of the rut, and this deer is just standing there eating,” Childres chuckled.
He didn’t spend much time looking at the deer, preferring to ease back over the ridge to catch his breath and try to control his now-hammering heart rate. Finally, Childress decided to take another look.
“I just eased my head over the top of the ridge,” he said. “I wasn’t worried about him smelling me because the wind was blowing right in my face.”
At this point, all the hunter knew was that it was a huge-bodied deer. Childres really didn’t know how big the animal’s antlers were, but that changed as he glanced into the bottom.
“The second time I peaked over the ridge, he lifted his head and looked straight at me,” Childres explained. “That’s when I knew what I had.”
The hunter’s heart kicked into a new, faster beat as the deer put its head back down to suck up more acorns. Childres was almost incapacitated with adrenaline.
“That’s when I had to give myself a little pep talk,” he said. “I told myself, ‘Don’t mess this up. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’”
To get a better angle, Childres eased to the left a bit before venturing a third look.
“When I looked again, the buck was about 60 yards into the bottom,” he said.
Childres eased his rifle into position, carefully placed the crosshairs on the deer’s chest and squeezed off a shot.
“He went down right there,” he said.
The adrenaline finally exploded, and Childres jumped up.
“I ran down there and got right on top of him,” he said.
Ground shrinkage wasn’t a problem, either.
“He was everything I thought he was and more,” he said.
The antlers were impressive, with 10 main-frame points, 5-inch bases, bladed brow tines and a sticker off the G3. Childres’ knees went weak when he saw the enormous rack.
“I went into hyperventilation for a while,” he said.
However, that’s when the work really began because he was so far into the roughest country on the property.
“It took me an hour to walk out from where I was,” Childres said. “It took eight hours to get the deer out.”
After making his way out of the difficult hills, Childres gathered two buddies, and headed back to collect the deer.
“We had to drag it about a mile to a creek where we could get to it with a four-wheeler,” Childres said. “And it wasn’t a flat mile. Without those two guys, I wouldn’t have gotten the deer out.”
The deer scored 149 B&C inches.
That made all the work worthwhile.
“At the moment (the men labored to drag the deer out) I was wondering, but it was definitely worth it when I got it out,” Childres said. “The next couple of days I couldn’t move, but it was a deer of a lifetime.”
Public-land trophy
Davie McCann didn’t have a complicated plan when he arrived Jan. 8 at the Avoyelles Parish school-board property for an afternoon hunt.
“I just went (in the woods) and sat by a tree,” the Brouillette hunter said.
The land is one of the many pieces of property owned by school boards across the state, but not developed. McCann said it’s just open property, and he’d taken advantage of that many times.
“You can come up here and hunt it any time you want,” he said.
On this day, McCann settled down against a tree bordering a slough about 2 p.m. A couple of well-used game trails were nearby, but that really didn’t play a huge part in the hunter’s decision.
“There’s deer sign all over the place,” he explained.
For the first few hours, it was quiet. But about 5:15 p.m., McCann caught sight of a doe easing out of a buttonwood thicket and heading his way.
While waiting for that deer to get in range of his 12-gauge shotgun, McCann glanced into the nearby thicket and saw another deer. He didn’t think a whole lot about it, however.
“It appeared to be a cow-horned spike,” he said. “That’s what it looked like to me.”
The buck was following the same path as the doe, but neither deer was in a hurry.
“They were kind of easing along, grazing, browsing,” McCann said.
He was starting to think about taking the doe for some table meat, but decided to wait since the deer didn’t appear in a hurry.
About five or 10 minutes later, the buck finally made its way out of the thicket, and McCann’s jaw dropped as he looked at the deer that was only 50 yards away.
“That’s when I realized I wasn’t shooting a doe: I was shooting that buck,” he said.
The deer was huge, and the crown of antlers it wore was proportionate to its body size.
“I thought, ‘Holy crap,’” he said. “I kind of ducked in behind the tree. He looked right at me, so I don’t know how he didn’t see me.”
The hunter’s heart was pounding as he watched the biggest deer he’d ever seen ease toward him. With a rifle, the buck would have been downed quickly. As it was, McCann was determined to let it get close enough to take full advantage of his 000 buckshot.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the buck was only 15 yards away.
“I put the whole load in him,” McCann said.
Amazingly, the deer didn’t bolt.
“He fell right there in his tracks,” McCann said. “I didn’t have to track him or nothing.”
The hunter didn’t move for a few minutes as he tried to keep his heart from bursting.
“I was sitting there, and the adrenaline was pumping,” McCann said.
Finally, he was able to stand up and walk to the brute.
The buck was even larger than he thought.
“I knew he was a big deer, but I didn’t realize how enormous he was until I put my hands on him,” McCann said. “I’ve killed some nice bucks the past five or six years, and this one beats them all.”
That was an understatement.
Thirteen scorable points adorned the 245-pound buck’s head. Main beams sprouted from bases measuring more than 5 inches around and stretched 22 inches. The inside spread taped out at more than 23 inches, and the G2s tallied 9½ inches long.
Simmons Sporting Goods greenscored the deer at 190 1/8 typical Boone & Crockett points.
McCann said he called his brother-in-law to help drag the deer out, but he laughed that the man at first didn’t believe his big-buck story.
“He called me a damned liar,” McCann laughed. “When he got there, he told me, ‘I ain’t ever going hunting with you
again.’”
