Big 15-point scores 208 3/8 inches Buckmasters
If you know Teri and Dick Brown of Tallulah, then you know just how serious they are about hunting – especially deer hunting.
In October of 2010, Teri killed a huge 182 3/8-inch buck on Dick’s 3,000-acre farm and ranch in Madison Parish, and she’s been trying to top it ever since.
On Christmas Eve, she got her wish.
“It’s mostly CRP & WRP now. We mainly farm it for wildlife, but we do have a few horses and cattle on it,” Brown said.
In October, she started to get trail cam pictures of a monster deer she had never seen before. She began to hunt the buck hard, but things didn’t go as planned.
“I was doing my part but he wasn’t cooperating,” she said. “He just wouldn’t show up in the daytime.”
She hunted several different spots and stand setups, steadily getting pictures of the brute, but never had any luck.
Finally, the day before Christmas, her persistence paid off big time with an early present.
“I was going to go bowhunting that day but Dick suggested that I go hunt this certain box stand and maybe he’d show up, so I told him to drop me off,” she said.
That afternoon, Teri saw action right off. She watched a few does feeding in her food plot when something caught her attention nearly 300 yards away.
“There was an 8-point that came out chasing a doe and when that happened, all the other does came running toward me,” she said.
As she cautiously watched the does running, she saw horns coming out of the CRP about 75 yards away from her.
“At first I thought it was the 8-point and that he had circled around, but when I got my binoculars I looked, and lo and behold, it was the deer,” she said.
Seemingly in one motion, she tossed her eyeglasses into one corner of the box stand, her binoculars into her backpack, and went for her rifle. By the time she got squared away on the deer, he was in a full trot, hot after a doe headed dead away from her.
“I kind of grunted at him and he stopped and turned his head in my direction but then he started trotting, again so I hollered again,” she said.
But the buck kept on moving.
Knowing the deer needed to be stopped before she took a shot, Brown tried for a third time to get it to stop, and this time the buck made a fatal move.
“I hollered a third time and this time he didn’t turn, he kind of curled around,” she said.
At that point the deer had put nearly 200 yards between them, and Brown knew this was probably going to be the best shot she’d get.
She aimed her 7 mm at his front shoulder and squeezed off a shot, and the deer immediately went down but got up and ran off. She watched the buck and noticed that the front shoulder was hit, a clear indication of a vitals shot.
The 6 ½-year-old deer, which weighed 255 pounds, had 15 points and scored 208 3/8 inches irregular (non-typical) in the Buckmasters scoring system. The main beams were truly amazing, with the left one measuring more than 29 inches.
“We’re on a DMAP program and we get 60 doe tags a year, and I bust my tail trying to fill those tags,” she said. “This is our third or fourth year shooting that many does, and I can really tell the difference in the better and older bucks that we get.”
Don’t forget to enter photos of your bucks in the Nikon Big Buck Photo Contest to be eligible for monthly giveaways and the random drawing for Nikon Monarch binoculars at the end of the contest.
Read other stories about big bucks killed this season by clicking here.
