Andy Anderson’s hunting season began tragically when his home caught fire Oct. 7, burning to the ground and taking all Anderson’s hunting gear with it.
“Everything in my gun safe melted,” Anderson said. “The gun safe was fireproof to 1,800 degrees, but everything melted except some Leupold scopes. They were ruined, but they fared better than everything else.”
A cousin came to the rescue, dropping off a Browning A-Bolt completed with a Redfield scope and a Bennelli shotgun.
Exactly a month later, Anderson used that rifle to take a monster buck that later green scored more than 230-inches.
Amazingly, Anderson had seen the 26-point deer two seasons ago and missed it at a mere 75 yards.
“He was the same size two years ago,” said Anderson, who goes by the screen name “GrandBayouLabs” on the LouisianaSportsman.com reports forum. “The problem was I had a 14-power Leupold scope on my rifle, and I could see his head too good.
“That’s what messed me up: I looked at his horns and missed him.”
On Nov. 7 of this year, after working until midnight the evening before, Anderson headed back to the 600-acre Red River Parish lease of which he’s been a member for three decades.
“I slept late that morning,” he said. “I got up and turned on my computer and watched the LSU highlights, and I told my wife I was going to sit on the stand for about an hour.”
He never made it to his stand when he reached the lease about 8 a.m.
“About 50 feet from the stand, I saw he had just walked out (on the pipeline),” Anderson said. “He turned and walked away from me.”
The deer was about 150 yards away, and all Anderson knew was that it was a really good deer. But all he really knew is that it was a shooter.
“I ran the last 50 feet to the stand and propped up on it,” he said.
The scope on the rifle his cousin gave him wasn’t a high-end model, so it wasn’t nearly as clear as Anderson’s scope that was destroyed in the house fire. So he had problems picking the deer up, which turned out to be a good thing.
“When I finally found him, I couldn’t see him that good,” Anderson said. “He was walking away from me, and then he turned broadside and stopped.”
The hunter never peeked at the buck’s rack; instead, he placed the crosshairs on the deer’s vitals, squeezed the trigger and dropped it in its tracks.
That’s when Anderson got his first really good look at the rack.
“He fell backwards, and I could tell he had better horns than I thought,” Anderson said. “I was thinking 10 to 12 points.”
The shot broke the deer’s back, and the 230-pounder was trying to crawl away with its front legs when Anderson reached it. After dispatching it, the hunter stood gaping at the calcium build-up on the animal’s head.
“I thought, ‘I ain’t never going to kill one like this one again,’” Anderson said.
Antlers literally sprouted from atop the deer, with most of the points growing from two paddles that replaced the normal main beams. But the right brow tine also ended in a number of points.
Simmons Sporting Goods roughed the deer out at 234 1/8 Boone & Crockett inches, and it currently leads the non-typical category of that store’s big-buck contest.
Anderson’s taxidermist aged the deer at 6 ½ years old or older.
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