What do you do when you’re hoping to get a crack at a decent buck and then this freak of a buck shows up?
That is what happened to Ronnie Meyers, a 51-year-old truck driver from Livingston, on Jan. 3 as he sat in his climbing stand at high noon on the Richard K. Yancey Wildlife Management Area in Concordia Parish.
“I have been hunting this area for the past three or four years thanks to friend, Percy Edler, who invited me to give the area a try,” Meyers said.
Hunting with his friend that morning, Meyers arrived at the area before daylight and mounted his climbing stand.
“I was getting a bit bored because I had sat there all morning without seeing a thing until I got a text from my friend who had seen a buck chasing a doe and they were headed in my direction,” he said. “Just before noon, I was eating a snack when I looked to my left and saw two deer, one being a doe with another following. I couldn’t tell what it was at first but felt it might be a buck since it was chasing a doe. I got my Browning BAR 7 mag up just in case.”
Getting a closer look
Meyers could make out antlers of the deer behind the doe so he followed the way the deer was walking, saw a small opening and when the buck hit the opening, he fired, dropping the buck in its tracks with a shot to the neck. He still had no idea what he had just shot, only it was a nice buck.
“I got down and started walking toward the fallen deer, and the closer I got the more confused I got because I had no idea what I was looking at,” Meyers said. “It looked like it had a mess of something on its head, and it was not until I walked up to him when I saw a rack like nothing I had ever seen.”
What Meyers was looking at is what is known as a “cactus” buck, one where the velvet has remained on the rack rather than giving way to hardened antlers as the year progressed. This rare condition is caused when a buck is missing its testicles either from injury or they just never developed.
The buck was at least 7 ½ years old and weighed in at 230 pounds. What was amazing was the statistics on the buck. A taxidermist measured the rack which came up with 19 points, an inside spread of 19 inches, bases that were 11 ½ inches each with a total mass of 165 inches. The antlers themselves weighed almost 10 pounds.
“I’m getting the rack treated so once it is mounted it will retain the velvet,” Meyers said. “Folks are coming in from all over just to have a look at the rack of this amazing cactus buck.”
