The temperature was warm and muggy on Friday, Nov. 8, and 32-year-old Klint White encountered a problem that had him on the verge of leaving his deer stand. His Thermacell mosquito repellent had stopped working and he was facing swarms of mosquitoes.
“I texted my friend hunting nearby at 8:45 a.m. and told him I was going to get down because I was miserable,” White said. “But before getting down, I decided to give my grunt call one more try, sort of a Hail Mary, and I’m sure glad I did.”
The reason White was reluctant to leave the stand had to do with the possibility that the big buck he had been after might respond to the grunt call.
White, who is a lineman for Entergy, lives in DeRidder and hunts on a 100-acre tract in Beauregard Parish, private property the owner gives him permission to hunt.
“I have had this buck on camera for the past three seasons and each year he seemed to get bigger with antlers growing more tines and more mass,” White said. “This season, however, I only had two pictures of him and a friend had him on camera three miles away, so I knew it would be a long shot for me to have a chance to even see him.”
The area where White hunts is a thicket and he finds a tree that allows him to use his climber to watch a few openings in the thicket. He had hunted the day before and all he saw was two small bucks.
One last grunt
White got on his stand long before daylight Friday morning, and for the first couple of hours after daylight he hadn’t seen anything, no doe or small bucks. Then the warm temperatures and mosquitoes had him on the verge of leaving the stand. Before he got down, he made the grunt with his call, then a few minutes later he saw something that made him forget about sweat and biting mosquitos for a minute.
“About five minutes after hitting the grunt call, I saw something move in the thicket and I could see it was a big bodied deer,” he said. “I watched it walk away through the thicket without me being able to get on it to be sure what it was.
“I decided what the heck; I’ll hit the grunt one more time. A couple of minutes later, I saw what I recognized as the big buck start walking my way. I was fortunate because the buck stopped to sniff the air and was standing in a small opening broadside to me at 120 yards. I got on him with my Browning .270, hit the trigger and he dropped.”
A special buck
Game over? Not quite, because as White was calling his buddy and telling him about his good fortune, he watched his prize buck begin crawling off through the thicket.
“I told him; I gotta go, my buck is crawling off!” said an excited White. He put down the phone, picked up his rifle and fired a shot toward the buck. A shot that missed.
Climbing down and heading to where he last saw the buck, he was relieved to see that his prize had crawled about 30 yards before expiring.
The buck was something special. It sported a rack of 20 points with an inside spread of 16 inches. The estimated weight was 240 pounds and the age was determined to be 6 ½ years old. Taking the buck to K & K Taxidermy in Reeves, the rack was measured with a rough score of 173 6/8 inches.
It’s amazing how not giving up despite mosquitoes and heat and giving a grunt call a last ditch effort can produce such eye-popping results.
“When I got to him,” White said, “I knew I had my buck of a lifetime.”
