Sterlington hunter takes 150-class Union Parish buck

Big deer walks out behind does, hunter says.

Some deer-kill stories come under wild circumstances — bucks that are bagged during storms, kills that precede a search that lasts more than a day or ones that conclude a decades-long drought of not even seeing a buck.

Then there are stories like Lee Taylor’s that don’t come with extraordinary details. In a case like this, the extraordinary thing is the buck itself.

And that’s good enough for Taylor.

The 34-year old Sterlington resident downed a 10-point buck on Nov. 15 on a 4,000-acre private lease in northern Union Parish. The buck green scored 156 6/8 Boone & Crockett and had 25-inch main beams. Its inside spread measured 19 5/8 inches, and there was a 1-inch sticker on the right main beam. The deer weighed 200 pounds.

Taylor said there wasn’t much remarkable about the hunt, other than the outcome, of course. The weather that day was cool, but warmed quickly by the time a few does made their presence known at about 8 a.m.

A few moments later, the big buck appeared behind them with his nose close to the ground. He was approximately 150 yards from where Taylor was perched, but the hunter automatically sensed the importance of the moment.

“I looked at him no more than three seconds,” Taylor said. “He was about 155 yards, I guess, and he was looking right at me. His horns were so dark and the sun really hadn’t come up that much, so it was hard to see.

“But I could tell he was a shooter; I wasn’t going to let him get out of there.”

At that moment, the deer began a retreat into the woods, but Taylor pulled the trigger on his Remington Model  700 7mm Magnum, and the shot hit the buck in his shoulder.

“I knocked the front end out of him, but he was getting up to go so I put a second one in him, in pretty much the same place,” Taylor said. “There was no chase. He went down right there.”

The buck was the biggest Taylor has killed in a lifetime of hunting, and he said he believes it’s the biggest taken on the land in recent years — at least the biggest he’s seen since he started hunting the tract in 2007.

“I didn’t have time to think of how big of a deer it was,” Taylor said. “It’s just a reaction-type deal at that point. I knew I wanted to shoot him, and it all falls into place. By that point, you pretty much have the safety off of the gun before you get the gun to your shoulder. It gets to be instinct.”

Taylor said he’ll soon be reminded of the hunt every time he looks at the wall.

“Hopefully, I’ll have it back and ready to hang on the wall in March,” he said. “I’ve got a spot picked out for him.”

Click here to read about other big bucks.

And don’t forget to post photos of your kills in the Nikon Big Buck Contest, which is free to all registered users. Not a member of the site yet? It’s free, so click here to get started today!