The 2009-10 deer season was marked by heavy rains and wildly fluctuating temperatures. These hunters overcame the elements to kill some absolute brutes.
Hunters had been waiting for a cool fall and winter for what seemed like forever, and judging from the number of big bucks that had hit the ground as of mid January, it was well worth the wait. This season’s monsters ranged all the way up to 200-inch beasts, and were killed in every part of the state.
Here are some of the top deer killed this year:
Granddaughter’s buck, almost
West Monroe’s L.E. Bower Jr. wasn’t planning to hunt when he headed to his Ouachita Parish lease Dec. 27 after church and lunch with the family.
“I was really preparing for Monday (Dec. 28) to take my granddaughters hunting,” Bower said. “I was going to put some corn out. I really didn’t have any real intention of hunting that afternoon.”
The original plan was to take 16-year-old granddaughter Brandi Bower with him and sit a few hours. But the youngster finally opted for a shopping trip instead.
So the elder Bower’s goal was to simply put the corn out and sit a stand to see what was moving about so he’d be prepared for the next day’s hunt.
On the way, however, things just started stacking up against him. It was almost as if fate just didn’t want him in the woods.
“I got stopped by a train, and that held me up 15 minutes,” Bower said.
So when he stopped to pick up a bag of corn, he was in a big hurry. Too much of a hurry, it turned out.
“I was in such a hurry being stopped by the train that I forgot the corn at the store,” Bower said. “I didn’t realize that I had forgotten it until I got to the club, so I had to go back to the store and get the corn because that was the reason to go out there to start with.”
Finally, he was ready to put the corn out and sit his stand at 3 p.m. So he jumped on his ATV and just ripped a hole in the corn sack, letting the kernels pour out along the shooting lane.
At the last minute, he decided to carry his rifle.
“Really and truly, I didn’t plan on taking my rifle in the stand,” Bower said. “I was just going to sit and watch, but I decided to take the gun in case a good buck came out.”
For the next two hours, the hunter kept a casual watch over the shooting lane. But when 5 p.m. arrived, Bower was ready for action.
“That’s what my granddaughters and I call the ‘magic time’ because that’s when our deer really move,” he explained.
Bower took off his glasses to clean them when he glanced down the shooting lane – and saw a buck standing right on the opening’s edge only about 85 yards out.
“I seen it was a good buck, but I didn’t have my glasses on so I couldn’t see it real good,” he said.
For some reason, Bower has never been able to see through his scope clearly with glasses on, so he put the spectacles down and pulled the rifle into place. When he peered through the scope, his heart went into overdrive.
“That’s when I seen horns everywhere,” Bower said. “I’ve never seen a deer like that.”
His heart slammed against his ribcage, and the hunter quickly took his eyes off the buck’s head.
“I didn’t want to look at the horns because I’d get really nervous, so I eased the crosshairs to the shoulder and squeezed off the shot,” Bower said.
The deer spun and ran back the way it had come, but soon Bower heard the gratifying sound of crashing.
After giving the deer a few minutes to die, Bower climbed down and headed down the shooting lane. There was just one problem.
“I couldn’t find blood nowhere,” he said. “I went about 20 or 30 yards too far. I still didn’t have my glasses on.”
Worried he had, in fact, missed, he headed back toward the stand and finally saw the blood trail heading into the thicket on the edge of the shooting lane. He veered off, and followed it even though his eyesight was hampered.
“I was squinting and trying to follow the blood trail, and walked right up on him,” Bower laughed. “He liked to have scared me to death; I almost stepped on him before I saw him.”
And he was stunned at the size of the rack.
“I looked over and saw all those horns, and that’s when I really got nervous,” Bower said.
The excited hunter snatched his cell phone out and called his wife, who didn’t believe a word the man said.
“Every time I counted the points I got a different number,” Bower said. “I told her it was between 20 and 25 points.
“She said, ‘We’ll just see it when you get home.’”
Indeed, the deer sported 27 scorable points that sprouted everywhere around 23-inch main beams that were separated by about 20 inches of air.
“It could have been bigger, but it had a cluster (of tines) broken off,” Bower said.
Even without that missing “cluster” of calcium, Bower’s deer was fantastic. While a Boone & Crockett score wasn’t available by Dec. 30, TP Outdoors meticulously ran a tape along the antlers to arrive at 241 Buckmaster inches.
And what about that granddaughter who chose shopping over hunting with granddad?
“She was about half sick because she almost came with me,” Bower chuckled.
Wet-butt buck
Jeremy Horner has killed a lot of deer in his 35 years, and he’s usually chasing the animals hard. But this season he just hasn’t had time.
“I really haven’t been into hunting this year,” the Erwinville hunter told LouisianaSportsman.com. “I’m usually on them in July and August with cameras and doing a lot of scouting, but I just didn’t have time this year because of work.”
Horner accepted the realities of life, and had adopted a new philosophy.
“I said, ‘I’m not going to chase them. I’m not going to feed them,’” he said. “‘I’m just going hunting.’”
So he had made fewer than 10 hunts when he climbed into his West Baton Rouge tree stand the afternoon of Dec. 16, and he was running late for this hunt.
“I left my house about 10 minutes after 4 (p.m.), and I was on my stand by 4:30,” Horner said.
There was only one problem — his seat was wet from the torrential rains, and Horner was soon soaked.
“After about 45 minutes, I said, ‘I ain’t sitting here. Piss on it,’” he said. “I just didn’t feel right sitting there.”
So Horner climbed out of the stand and began walking back to his truck, his rifle slung on his shoulder and his cell phone in his hand.
“I was texting,” he admitted. “I was reading something and was fixing to type something back when I was 30 or 40 yards from the truck.”
As he contemplated what to text, Horner glanced up at his truck — and stopped dead in his tracks.
“The deer was standing behind the truck about 40 yards off to the left looking at me,” Horner said. “I’ve got my phone in one hand holding it up, and my rifle is on my shoulder.
“What do you do?”
Horner took a quick peek at the deer’s rack, and saw drop tines and lots of mass. But he quickly looked away from the deer’s head.
“I never make eye contact with a deer,” he explained. “I think that spooks them.”
He knew it was a big-antlered deer, and one he had never seen on camera, but he didn’t absorb much detail about the size of the rack.
After a few seconds, which seemed an eternity to Horner, he decided the deer wasn’t going to stand there forever.
“I let my phone go and it hit the ground, and I reached for my rifle,” he said.
The buck reacted instantly, but with less urgency than Horner expected.
“He took off, but he was kind of loping,” Horner said.
The frantic hunter moved to get in a better position to fire as he brought the rifle to bear, and then the unexpected happened.
“I took about five or six steps forward, and he stopped,” Horner said. “He stopped to look at me one last time, I guess.
“He should have never stopped.”
Horner quickly lined up the crosshairs and squeezed the trigger. The deer bolted.
“I knew I had hit him by the way he was running,” Horner said.
The deer quickly crossed the few yards remaining to the treeline and disappeared.
“I heard a crash,” Horner said. “I heard a sharp crack like a tree breaking.”
The man was shaking and didn’t want to push the buck, but he had to confirm the hit. So he put his rifle on the hood of his truck and eased over to where the deer was standing.
“There was blood everywhere,” Horner said.
He followed the trail a few more yards, and then backed off as darkness approached.
However, he could only stand a few-minute delay. Soon he had his rifle and a flashlight, and followed the blood trail to the woods.
“There was plenty of blood,” Horner said. “I went five steps in the woods, and he was laying right there.
“He was dead as a hammer, facing me.”
The flashlight glinted off a massive rack, with points seemingly protruding everywhere.
“I could see that drop tine sticking up,” Horner said. “I just kind of freaked out. I’ll tell the truth, I hollered.”
The 240-pound buck wore a truly impressive crown of antlers, with 17 points and thick mass.
“It had 7¼-inch bases,” Horner said.
As he knelt down to put his hands on the antlers, Horner said he was flooded with thoughts.
“Your whole life of hunting sort of flashing through your mind,” he said. “You have so many thoughts go through your head. You think of your loved ones — I have some uncles who have passed on — who would be proud of you. I thought of my dad.”
The deer later taped out at an incredible 197 inches Boone & Crockett, but Horner said it could have hit the 200-inch mark.
“I didn’t notice at the time that another drop tine was broke off,” he said. “He hit a damned tree when he ran into the woods, and it looked like he hit another one.
“I went back the next day and the (broken) tine was lying right there.”
Horner said he wasn’t surprised that there was a buck like that in this roughly 600-acre tract of land.
“I knew there were some big deer in there,” he said. “I’ve seen some big deer driving out, but I never thought I’d kill one.”
Nothing but the big bucks
Leesville’s Kade Mitchell is known for filling his six-deer limit each hunting season, but he decided it was time to focus when he arrived home from a work trip in October and saw pictures of a big buck on his lease.
“I’ve got pictures of him on Oct. 19 and Oct. 21,” Mitchell told LouisianaSportsman.com. “I’ve never had a picture of a deer like that.”
Each image was snapped during nighttime hours, so he couldn’t get a detailed look at the rack — but he knew it was a big one.
“In the pictures I could guesstimate that he was a 12-point,” Mitchell said. “I could tell he was pretty heavy.”
And that’s when he decided to quit worrying about filling his tags.
“I told all my buddies I wasn’t killing a deer until I kill him,” the 33-year-old hunter said. “I was going to just sit and wait.”
So that’s exactly what he was doing when the sun chased away the darkness on Nov. 3. Mitchell was 30 feet up a pine tree overlooking a creek where he had killed 10 to 15 deer before.
The situation was perfect, with the creek cutting through a 2-year-old cutover.
“It was about 5 feet tall on both sides (of the creek),” Mitchell said.
In addition, there was a fresh cutover — made during the early bow season — a little more than 100 yards behind the hunter’s position. He really didn’t pay much attention to that because it was so wide open.
Fortunately, Mitchell snuck a peak toward the new cutover about 6:50 a.m.
“I kind of turned and looked behind me, and he was just going across that clearcut,” Mitchell said. “He acted like he owned the place.”
The deer was about 220 yards out, but there was no doubt it was the buck Mitchell was hunting.
“I could see his horns well from that distance,” the hunter said.
Mitchell swiveled around and shouldered his .300 short mag, working to get a shot through the scattered trees between him and the clearcut.
“There were trees coming up and limbs in the way, so I was kind of concerned,” he admitted.
Finally, he picked an opening and waited for the buck to appear. When he did, Mitchell squeezed the trigger.
“I whistled, and he wouldn’t even put his head up, so I had to shoot him walking,” he said. “I could tell I hit him. I heard the hit, and I could tell the way he was moving that I had hit him.”
What Mitchell couldn’t see from his perspective was that the deer was quartering slightly. He only discovered that potential problem when he climbed down about 15 minutes later and hurried to where the deer had been standing when shot.
“I gut shot him just as plain as day,” Mitchell said. “There was no blood. None. I was getting sick.”
The deer had left clear hoof impressions, however, so Mitchell eased along the deer’s trail.
“My dad called because he heard me shoot, and I told him I had shot a monster,” he said. “I followed the trail about 150 yards, and I was just about ready to turn around, and I found a pin-drop of blood.”
That quickened his pulse, and Mitchell continued trailing the deer. Another 75 yards on, a spot of blood about as big as the bottom of a cold-drink can was found.
And then the deer’s trail disappeared into a thick part of the old cutover.
“I got my wife to run my shotgun to me on my 4-wheeler,” Mitchell said. “When I had the shotgun and some buckshot, I slipped into that thicket, and I heard him get up.”
The buck escaped into a clearcut, where Mitchell caught up with it.
“He had his tail down and was barely getting along,” Mitchell said. “I shot him twice with buckshot at 80 yards.”
The deer disappeared on the other side of the clearcut, and Mitchell backed out to let the deer lay.
On the way out, Mitchell checked where the deer had been laid up, and confirmed his errant rifle shot.
“There was blood everywhere,” he said. “There was corn in the blood, so I could tell what had happened.”
About two hours later, he returned with a buddy and a tracking dog. The two hit the thicket with the dog tugging at the leash.
“After I shot him with the buckshot, there was plenty of blood,” he said.
Mitchell admitted he probably should have waited longer to track the deer, but was nervous because “I had messed up and got a good look at his horns.”
It didn’t take long for the dog to track the deer down, and the buck was critically wounded but had yet to expire.
“The deer was crawling, trying to get up,” Mitchell said, adding that a shotgun blast put the deer down for good.
And then the celebration started.
“The mass on him was just unreal,” Mitchell said. “I’ve never seen anything like that around here.”
The 27-inch main beams sprouted 14 scorable points, and were thick along the entire length of the beams.
“There’s 7 inches of mass between the G2 and G3 on the right side,” Mitchell said. “I was thinking he was in the high 150s, maybe on up to the 160s.”
The deer was greenscored by retired Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologist Czerny Newland at 189 inches, with Simmons adding 4/8 of an inch to that.
It’s been hard for Mitchell to hit the woods again.
“I told a buddy of mine who called the other day and asked if I was going hunting, ‘I’m retired,’” Mitchell laughed.
Prison bruiser
Ray Vitorrio isn’t a big-time deer hunter. Not by a long shot. The Louisiana State Penitentiary colonel freely admits that.
“I’ve only killed two bucks in my life,” Vitorrio told LouisianaSportsman.com. “I don’t go out in the woods in the summertime like everybody else and look for sign or nothing.”
But the 54-year-old is one of the lucky Angola prison employees granted permission to hunt on the 18,000-acre property. So the first hint of sunlight on Dec. 5 found Vittorio sitting in a stand near a ridge in the beautiful Tunica Hills.
He was huddled in the 28-degree temperatures, with his old Winchester Model 1200 pump shotgun loaded with slugs and ready for action.
Vittorio was ready for a deer, but really he was just out enjoying nature. And he hasn’t shown a lot of discrimination in his hunting, as proven by his bowhunting earlier this season after a two-year hiatus following an accident.
“The first day back hunting, I shot two coons with my bow,” he laughed. “I shot a squirrel with my bow. I shot an armadillo with my bow.
“People joke, ‘You just shoot any damn thing you see.’”
But at 6:30 a.m., a deer appeared in the dissipating gloom of dawn.
“I just caught a glimpse of something sneaking down this ridge,” Vittorio said.
The deer, which the hunter only knew was a buck, reached a spot where Vittorio had felled one of his other two bucks, and the shotgun barked.
“The way it jumped, I could tell I hit it,” Vittorio said. “I watched the direction it went.”
When he climbed from the stand, however, worry set in because there wasn’t much blood.
“I thought I had gut shot it,” he said.
Vittorio decided to go back to his house and give the deer time to bleed out — still with no clue how big the buck was.
“It just looked like a good 8-point deer,” he said.
After getting stuck, he realized he had left his cell phone at his house. So he started walking. Another employee happened by, and took him home.
He and son Chad returned to the stand, and began looking for blood.
“We found a few drops here and there, but not much,” the elder Vittorio said. “Basically we went in the direction I saw it run.”
The deer was piled up only about 70 yards away.
“When I got it, I’m, like, ‘Oh my God!’” Vittorio said.
The deer was massive in all respects. The 275-pound body was the first thing to catch his attention — but it didn’t take long for Vittorio to realize he had killed a real brute.
“I really didn’t realize until I walked around to the front and saw all those points,” he said.
Fifteen points were arrayed around a massive frame that encircled 22½ inches of air. The main beams stretched 25 and 26 inches, and sprouted from 6-inch bases.
“It’s massive all the way out,” Vittorio said.
The deer greenscored at 187½ inches.
“I’ve seen deer like that on TV, but never thought I’d kill one,” Vittorio said.
He said friends have given him a hard time because of his lackadaisical attitude toward deer hunting.
“I’ve got everybody mad at me because they’ve got all this sophisticated equipment, and I go out like an old farm boy and kill this deer,” Vittorio chuckled.
Community deer
Everyone around Winnfield knew there was a big buck in the area, at least that’s the way it seemed to John F. Lovell III.
“I had him on a game camera, but people had spotted him as far as five miles off,” Lovell said. “I was talking to a neighbor, and I showed him the pictures. He started laughing, and showed me the same deer.”
Only one of the photos Lovell had of the monster was taken during daylight hours, so the Winnfield hunter didn’t know if he’d really get a shot.
On Thanksgiving morning, however, he wanted to spend some time in the woods, so he grabbed the “sorriest gun I had,” and headed off for a few hours.
“My wife told me I better not be late for Thanksgiving dinner,” Lovell laughed.
The hunter climbed in his stand with the old 7.92x57mm Mauser, and settled into a stand. After getting a heater started, Lovell sat back and relaxed.
“I put my reading glasses on and got my book out,” he said.
About 7:15 a.m., a couple of does eased out, and the hunter got his rifle ready. However, he lost interest after about 15 minutes.
“I put my gun on the wall, and filled up my coffee mug,” Lovell said.
With mug in one hand and book in another, the man was completely unprepared for what happened next.
“That buck stepped out 35 steps from the stand,” Lovell said. “I started trying to discard all that stuff in my hands.”
The buck was magnificent, and it was just standing there, as if waiting for the panicked hunter to get himself composed.
Lovell finally freed his hands and brought the rifle to bear, but couldn’t make the deer out clearly through the scope.
“Everything was blurry,” he said. “I still had my reading glasses on.”
So Lovell had to snatch the glasses off his face and resettle on the rifle.
During all of this activity in the stand, the deer hadn’t moved.
“He stood right there until I could shoot,” Lovell chuckled.
Finally, with everything now in place, Lovell squeezed the trigger, and the deer bolted.
It ran less than 100 yards before hitting the ground, and Lovell had difficulty dialing the phone to call his son and grandson — both of whom were hunting in another stand.
When the hunters reached the big buck, they were stunned. The typical 10-point was incredible, with thick main beams that stretched to 21 inches inside.
The deer eventually was roughed out at 179 3/8 inches.
Lovell said he was blessed to have killed the deer, especially with all the commotion in the stand.
“He wanted to die,” Lovell laughed.
The surprise buck
Mikiel Porter doesn’t use trail cams because he likes his hunts to be surprises, and he couldn’t have been more surprised Nov. 18 when a huge buck stepped out on his 18 acres in Madison Parish.
“I was just sitting there in a box stand looking over a food plot,” Porter said. “He was just sauntering along.”
The Delhi hunter had seen a couple of does before catching the initial sight of the big buck about 8 a.m.
“The first time I saw him, he was about 60 or 70 yards away,” Porter said. “I just got a glimpse of his G2s and G3s.
“I said, ‘Well, this might be a shooter.’”
That was an understatement. When the animal finally stepped out from the edge of the plot, it was carrying a massive rack.
“He was walking toward me, so I just waited and let him keep coming,” Porter said. “I shot him at 30 yards.”
The buck hit the ground, but Porter still didn’t recognize just how huge the 13-point was until it was back at the cleaning shed.
“I didn’t realize he was that big until we caped him out,” he said.
TP Outdoors greenscored it at 173 inches, while Simmons Sporting Goods set the mark at 169 4/8.
Picture buck
The buck was no stranger to the hunters on the 200-acre property in West Carroll Parish. The big animal had, in fact, been captured hundreds of times on trail cams.
“Last year, we thought he probably weighed close to 300 pounds, and would score in the high 140s or maybe the 150s,” Oak Grove’s James “Moe” Taylor said. “When we saw him this year, though, we couldn’t believe it. There was no doubting it was the same deer, but the mass was just amazing.”
So the problem wasn’t knowing where the deer was hanging out. It was getting a shot at it.
“All of the pictures were at night,” Taylor said. “We thought we saw it once during the rut last year, but it was for about 2½ seconds crossing this road.”
So both Taylor and his brother-in-law, the only hunters on the property, were hunting hard all season to get a shot.
When the two hit the woods on Dec. 30, however, rain was falling — and there was a problem.
“We only have one stand that will keep the rain off of you,” Taylor said.
His brother-in-law claimed that stand, so Taylor decided to throw up a ground blind so he could watch the road where the trail cams had captured a lot of the photos of the monster deer.
“I sat all afternoon, from 1:30 until dark, and didn’t see a thing,” he said of the Dec. 30 hunt. “But I decided to get back in the ground blind the next afternoon.”
It looked like that New Year’s Eve hunt was going to end uneventfully.
“I was five or six minutes from getting out the blind, and then he stepped out into the road,” Taylor said.
The deer standing only 90 yards away was huge, although the hunter had no idea it was the same deer he had been coveting.
“I’ve never seen a deer like this,” Taylor said. “This deer looked like his horns were growing (larger) on top of his head. The rack just kept getting bigger and bigger.”
The excited hunter didn’t waste any time staring at the antlers, however.
“When I got my crosshairs on his shoulder, I let the bullet go,” Taylor said.
The deer disappeared into the thick cover on the edge of the logging road, and Taylor hurried down the lane after a few minutes to check for blood.
“There was no blood or hair, but I could hear him on the ground kicking around,” he said. “So I backed out and waited on my brother-in-law, who was hunting with his son.”
When they returned, Taylor quickly went to where the deer entered the thicket, and found blood.
“I stepped another five or six steps, and he was laying there,” he said.
The animal was huge, and tangled up in the thicket to such a degree that it was hard to see anything. In fact, it had to be gutted to get it free from the thicket.
And then Taylor realized he had killed the picture deer.
“He was just massive,” he said.
The deer’s rack was only 16 4/8 inches wide, but the main beams were longer than 26 inches, and thick.
“He had major mass,” Taylor said.
The deer had 10 scoreable points, with another couple of “redneck” points.
The deer grossed out at 166 3/8 inches, with a tentative net of 155 5/8.
Staredown
The tract of land near Natchitoches has been very productive for Juddy Hamous, producing a 15-point for the Robeline hunter several years ago.
The stand Hamous climbed into Nov. 25 was really the sweet spot of the land, giving up a velvet-covered 8-point to Hamous and a 130-inch 8-point to his 14-year-old son.
“You never have a problem dozing off because it looks like at any time something’s going to roll out in there,” Hamous said.
The stand overlooks a couple-acre food plot surrounded by pine trees, and just is “a special place.” The early season had been even more exciting than usual because the nearby bottoms had been flooded, forcing all the deer to the higher ground.
And Hamous already was pumped, having watched a couple of young bucks chasing does that morning.
So he climbed in the stand at 3 p.m. amped up.
“I wanted to get in there and settle in,” Hamous said. “I knew the deer were moving.”
And nothing happened. As sunlight began to fade, Hamous still hadn’t seen a single deer. But he wasn’t ready to give up.
“I was alert and thinking I was fixing to see something,” he said.
And then just before 5 p.m., his mind wandered a bit.
“I said to myself, ‘Where am I going to hunt tomorrow morning?’” Hamous admitted.
The hunter glanced back into the food plot as the options rolled through his mind, and froze.
“He was standing there 80 yards from me, looking dead at me,” Hamous said.
The big-racked buck obviously knew something wasn’t right.
“I’m sitting there and I’m looking at him, and he’s looking at me,” Hamous said.
Hamous finally won the staring contest.
“I’m sitting there staring at him, and all of a sudden he licked his lips and put his head down,” he said.
Hamous quickly reached for his gun, and then froze again.
“When I got my gun, I looked back and he’s looking dead at me again,” Hamous said. “At that time I can see the split G2s. I can see that 14-inch G2.
“I think, ‘That’s a nice animal, but I’m busted.’”
But the deer inexplicably broke off contact again, putting its head down. But the nervous hunter could tell the buck wasn’t settled.
“He knows he’s in a bad place,” Hamous said.
The buck didn’t run, but headed toward the edge of the plot, apparently intent on making a quick escape. Hamous was scared to move, but knew he would have a shot when the deer walked behind a shrub in the middle of the field.
“He walked up there to that shrub and put his head behind it and stopped,” Hamous said. “Apparently he thought I couldn’t see him, but his front shoulder was exposed.”
He shouldered the rifle, planted the crosshairs just forward of the quartering deer’s shoulder and squeezed the trigger.
“Bam, and he hits the ground,” Hamous said.
After calling a couple of friends to tell them about the beast, Hamous climbed out of the stand and couldn’t believe just how big the deer was.
The 210-pound animal wore 12 heavy points spread around an 18¼-inch-wide frame that sprouted from bases topping 5 inches.
Taping the deer out yielded a greenscore of 162 7/8, and even though he knows there are bigger deer killed, Hamous said he couldn’t be happier.
“It’s kind of like a dream deer, to be honest with you,” Hamous said. “I love animals with splits on their rack, and this one has splits on the G2 and G3.
“It’s just unbelievable.”
St. Helena Parish freak
Robert Polito has spent years on the Kenner police force learning how to bring his weapon to bear in a pinch, and all of that training came together Nov. 21 when he saw a huge buck pop out of the woods on his St. Helena Parish lease.
“I was sitting (a box stand) just inside the woods of a food plot, and he came out at a little trot right by my bow stand,” said Polito, known at LouisianaSportsman.com as ROB213. “I probably had a window of about 40 yards to get a shot.”
Polito knew the buck was in the area, having caught glimpses of the deer last season.
“I saw him twice last year during bow season,” he said. “I didn’t get a good look at him, but I knew he was a big buck.”
So he spent the entire early bow season this year trying to ambush the animal, but never saw it until it trotted onto the 40-yard-wide food plot during the opening morning of rifle season.
“He came out in a light trot like he was on a mission,” Polito said. “I was lucky to get a shot. I guess you go back to that police training.”
Everything happened so fast that the hunter didn’t even have time to try and stop the deer.
“I probably didn’t have more than 5 seconds to get a shot,” he said. “I didn’t have time to get nervous.”
Polito simply grabbed his rifle, jammed the barrel out the stand’s window and picked a hole in the trees on the far side of the plot.
“When it hit that space in the trees, I shot,” he said. “When I shot, it just disappeared.
“I thought, ‘Lord, did I miss him?’”
He waited a few minutes, and then climbed out of the stand to go check for blood.
“When I got over there, he was laying right where I shot him,” Polito said.
He was stunned with what the piney woods around Pine Grove had produced.
“I’ve heard of ground shrinkage, but this was ground growage,” Polito said. “It was almost like it had been dropped from an alien ship.”
The 12-point was monstrous, later weighing 230 pounds at a nearby feed store. However, the body size wasn’t the only impressive thing — the rack also was huge.
“I was dumbfounded,” Polito said.
The buck has yet to be greenscored, but Polito said the taxidermist working on the mount said it should top 160 inches Boone & Crockett.
“I’m 50 years old, and I told my wife I was going to Illinois and kill one of those big bucks, but with the economy like it is, I can’t afford to go up there,” Polito said. “And then I kill a deer like that in a place it wasn’t supposed to be.
“Sometimes the good Lord smiles on you.”
The video buck
Tyler Sembera was just hunting on Tangipahoa Parish’s Dixie Plantation, with no real expectation for the opening afternoon of rifle season.
“I didn’t expect to get a buck that early in the year,” the Covington hunter said.
He had seen a big buck on camera, but figured the best chances of waylaying the deer were in January when the rut kicked in.
So he climbed in his stand about 3 p.m, and started watching the food plot.
It wasn’t long before he was looking at that buck he had eyed on his trail camera.
“He came out by himself,” Sembera said. “He came to the feeder.”
The buck fed around, and Sembera began getting things in order to shoot the kill on video.
While he fumbled with the video camera, the feeder went off — and Sembera thought his hunt was ruined.
“The feeder went off, and he ran off,” the hunter said. “I was thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have been messing with that camera.’”
Sembera was crushed, but remained hyper-alert in hopes that the deer would return.
And sure enough, five minutes later, the buck eased back into the field.
“This time the video camera was ready,” Sembera chuckled.
The hunter started the camera, zoomed it in on the feeding deer and turned his attention to his .243 rifle. After putting the crosshairs on the deer, he squeezed the trigger.
The deer bolted, and the hunter worried.
“I thought I missed, but I looked at the video, and saw his leg was messed up and saw the blood coming out,” Sembera said.
The buck ran only about 60 yards before hitting the ground dead.
“He was bigger than I thought he was,” Sembera said. “He was 235 pounds, and was a main-frame 9-point with an extra point on the right side.
“He has a lot of mass and tine length.”
The deer roughed out at 154 1/8 inches.
Retirement shot
After his father died at a hunting camp in 2007, George Patterson returned to the lease to gather all the belongings. He didn’t find his father’s gun until he walked into the woods.
“I found his stand with his gun in it,” Patterson said. “It had an umbrella, so everything was just sitting there under that umbrella.”
That gun has been weighing on Patterson since.
“I’ve been wanting to kill one more deer with this gun,” George Patterson said.
He finally retired the gun after a Dec. 4 hunt, when Patterson knocked down a 14-point on his Lacombe lease.
The hunt began when he climbed into a stand overlooking a food plot on Dixie Hunting Club.
The Folsom hunter was carefully glassing the food plot with his binoculars, and happened to look behind him.
“I looked back, and there he was,” Patterson said. “I could see the top end of his horns.”
The buck was munching on corn with his head pointed straight at the box stand, so the now-adrenaline-filled hunter was forced to hope and wait.
“I had no shot, and I had to sit there and wait for him to turn,” Patterson said.
What seemed like an eternity passed, and the buck finally offered a quartering shot. The hunter quickly lined up the crosshairs and squeezed the trigger.
“He went sideways off the food plot,” Patterson said.
Cousin and club president Jeremy Patterson heard the shot, and texted George one question: “Did you get him?”
George Patterson just called him.
“I told him, ‘Yeah, I got the big 8,’” Patterson said.
When he reached the area where the buck was standing in the plot, there was little doubt the deer had suffered a solid lick.
“I saw blood all over,” Patterson said. “I could see the blood in the food plot, but I couldn’t see where he went.”
The grass on the edge of the green patch was about 8 feet, and there wasn’t any clear blood trail entering that cover.
And then it started raining.
His cousin Jeremy quickly ran to the camp, picked up a lab and found the downed buck just as the bottom dropped out of the sky.
“Jeremy went to hollering,” George said. “I thought he was going to find the 8-point, and when I got to it, I counted 13 points the first time.
“The second time, I counted 14 points.”
The discrepancy came because there were stickers all over the brow tines.
When taped, the rack roughed out at 145 inches, and that was enough to satisfy the hunter that his father’s .300-magnum Ruger had fulfilled its destiny.
“That’s it for that gun,” Patterson said. “I’m putting it up.”
Third time’s the charm
Deer hunting wasn’t new to 11-year-old Zachary Waguespack: He had already killed a 7-point and a doe when he climbed into a ladder stand Dec. 6 with his Uncle Glenn Vicknair.
However, nothing prepared either of the Gramercy hunters for what happened next.
“We heard a little disturbance and looked, and we could see him right there,” Vicknair said. “I could see from about his mid neck up to his horns in the thicket.”
The buck was just 30 yards or so from the stand, moving through a tangle of cover on the Iberville Parish property — and Vicknair knew it was a dandy.
“I told Zachary, ‘There’s a buck,’” Vicknair said. “I didn’t want to tell Zachary his size because I didn’t want his adrenaline to be worse than it normally would be.”
However, the young hunter already figured out he was looking at a nice deer.
“I just said, ‘Oh, that’s a good one,’” Waguespack said.
As he was maneuvering his .243 into position, however, the buck seemed to sense something.
“He ran off about 15 to 20 yards in the thicket where we couldn’t see him, and then he blew twice,” Vicknair said.
There were five does in the food plot over which the hunters were positioned, and they responded to the buck.
“The does looked in the direction of the buck and they blew,” Vicknair explained. “They stayed where they were, but were blowing.”
By this time, it was nearing 5 p.m., and Waguespack said he was nervously confident.
“When he ran off, I thought, ‘Oh, come on. You’ve got to be kidding,’” he said. “But I had a feeling he’d come back because there were some does around.”
Sure enough, the buck showed up again about 10 minutes later. This time, it stepped out about 150 yards away on the far end of the food plot.
“He was looking straight at us, with the does in between us,” Vicknair said.
The elder hunter was a bit skeptical about Waguespack shooting the little .243 at that yardage, so he told the young hunter to get ready but not to shoot.
Unfortunately, the buck didn’t hang around long. Soon, it turned and stepped back in the woods.
“I was like, ‘He’s not coming back again,’” Waguespack said.
However, he didn’t want to just give up, so he asked Vicknair to use his grunt call.
“I grunted about three times, and a little while later, the deer came back out right where the does had come out,” Vicknair said.
The buck was still sort of facing the stand, so Waguespack held off as the big deer walked straight to the does. However, he was nervous.
“I thought, ‘He’s too big to do this to me again,’” he said.
His uncle was trying to keep the youngster calm.
“I told (Waguespack) to wait for a broadside shot,” Vicknair said. “When he reached the does, he picked his head up and turned.
“I told him to shoot him right behind the shoulder,” Vicknair said.
Waguespack was ready.
“When he told me to shoot, I put my crosshairs on him and shot,” Waguespack said.
The deer flinched, wheeled and ran right back into the woods. However, it soon hit the ground.
“I heard that little crash,” Vicknair said.
Waguespack could barely sit in the stand.
“He started shaking — I mean, tremendously shaking,” Vicknair chuckled. “He said, ‘Uncle Glenn, Uncle Glenn, I hit him.”
The pair high-fived and hugged, but stayed in the stand for another 10 minutes.
Not a drop of blood was in the field or on the trail the buck took into the cover, but Vicknair said he sent the 11-year-old down the trail to look.
“He saw him, and just started yelling,” Vicknair said.
Waguespack couldn’t believe the size of the antlers.
“They were huge,” he said. “Way bigger than I thought they were.”
Vicknair knew the deer was carrying a lot of calcium, but even he wasn’t prepared for the 150 2/8-inch Boone & Crockett score.
“I figured he was a 130- to 140-inch deer,” he said.
The 13 points sprang from thick main beams enveloping just more than 20 inches of air and supported by 5-inch bases.
While most hunters never kill a deer of that caliber, Waguespack said he’s ready for his next kill.
“The guy who lives next to (this property) feeds rice bran, and he said there are 30 or 40 deer coming in his backyard every night,” he said. “They said they’ve got three more big ones coming out.
“I’m heading out there.”
Drag-rag trophy
Shreveport’s Jim Rinaudo knew there was a big buck on the 1,000-acre DeSoto Parish lease from pictures of the 10-point captured last season.
So he and the other hunters on the property kept their eyes peeled. What Rinaudo likes to do, however, is sneak in mid-week hunts.
“The deer get used to you going on the weekends, so I like to go when no one else is there,” he said.
So on Nov. 18, a Wednesday, Rinaudo was sitting a box stand watching four plots radiating out from his position.
“I’m kind of scanning around, looking at the food plots,” he said.
The hunter had pulled a drag rag into the stand on his way, and that had proved to be successful.
“The Saturday before, I had a good-sized deer walk right down my trail, and I didn’t get a shot at him because he came up on me so fast,” Rinaudo said.
That experience had him alert on this hunt.
About 7:30 a.m., a turkey walked out on the end of one of the shooting lanes, and Rinaudo spent some time watching it peck around. He then scanned the other plots before turning his attention back to the turkey.
“I happened to be looking to see what the turkey was doing, and it flared and flew up into a tree,” he said.
Interested, Rinaudo kept his eyes down the lane — and a few minutes later a big deer walked out.
“He came out like he was marching,” Rinaudo said. “He would look at the turkey, and then put his nose down where my drag rag was.”
The deer quickly walked across the lane, following the trail the hunter had used, and Rinaudo hauled his rifle into position.
“He made it across in probably two to three seconds,” Rinaudo said. “I had to get a shot off pretty quick.”
The rifle bucked as soon as the crosshairs touched the animal’s neck, and the deer dropped.
At that point, Rinaudo only knew one thing.
“I knew he was a shooter when I first saw the deer, but I couldn’t tell he was a 10-point,” he said. “I thought he might be a big 8.”
So the hunter was anxious to get out of the stand and get to the downed deer. But his hunt wasn’t over.
“I was getting my gear together, and a doe walked out about 30 yards away,” Rinaudo said. “So I shot her.”
He then climbed down, and found a monstrous 12-point laying in the plot.
The buck had a 19½-inch inside spread, and heavy main beams that grew from 5½-inch bases and almost touched at the tips.
“When I grabbed his horns, I thought, ‘Man, this is a beautiful deer,’” Rinaudo said. “I was just kind of numb.”
The buck eventually greenscored 179
inches.
