Robert Chapman Jr. of Baker didn’t really want to have anything to do with the huge 13-point buck standing about five yards from his tree stand the evening of Oct. 3 in East Baton Rouge Parish.
He wanted his buddy, Damien Antoine, to make that buck the first of his hunting career. After all, it was land Antoine had gotten permission to hunt, and he had invited Chapman – a former Southern U football star and now an attorney in Baton Rouge – to help him “set the place up” in September.
Chapman had gone as far as hunting a stand the buck had never visited on trail camera, and his plans were to take a doe if the opportunity presented itself; a buck that scored 154 ⅛ points was not on his itinerary.
But sometimes, things don’t work out as planned. And that’s what brought Chapman to draw his Mathews Switchback bow at about 6:30 p.m., work hard to line up his peep sight with his lighted pen, and let fly.
Chapman had helped Antoine hang stands, put up feeders and trail cameras in late September on the 30-acre tract, which is about 15 miles from his home in Baker. The day they put cameras out, the morning of Sept. 23, they got a photo of the huge buck that afternoon, in full velvet. For another week, he showed up morning and night.
“I told him, ‘Here’s the deal. This is a phenomenal deer for anyplace in Louisiana, especially around Baton Rouge,’” Chapman said. “‘If you kill this deer, everybody is going to come around, and people are going to call you, and maybe somebody is going to want to write a story about it.’ I didn’t want to kill it; I wanted it to be his first deer.”
A father and son hunt
Antoine and Chapman hunted on Oct. 1, opening day of archery season in his neck of the woods. They saw nothing. The buck had been off camera for a couple of days, and Chapman had worried that with the buck shedding its velvet and bachelor groups certain to be breaking up, it might have moved off the small piece of land.
Neither could hunt the next day, Oct. 2. Chapman’s son, Robert Chapman III, aka “Little Rob,” had a high-school football game, and Antoine did too – he’s a referee. They passed on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 3, because of the weather, and when Chapman asked Antoine about a Saturday afternoon hunt, he declined, saying he was going to Southern U’s homecoming football game.
About 2 p.m., with the weather clearing, Chapman decided to take his son hunting. Just before 4 p.m., he got his son situated in one stand and took up residence in another stand, an old loc-on style stand about 12 feet off the ground, overlooking a logging road, wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt in the 90-degree weather.
“I told Damien that the stand where the big buck had been showing up, I wasn’t going to hunt it, because I wanted him to kill it,” Chapman said.
Those plans went haywire a few minutes before 6:30 p.m.
“I hear something coming through the woods, then I see something jump an old barbed-wire fence, and all I can see is this big body at 30 yards, then he steps out from behind a tree and I see him,” Chapman said. “I think, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s him.’”
Hard to pass up
The buck is upwind from the feeder, which is about 10 yards upwind from Chapman’s tree. In textbook fashion, the deer eases out of view and starts to circle downwind.
“There’s about a 10- to 12-mph east wind, and he’s upwind. He never sees me – because I’m 12 feet up in the tree – and he looks at the feeder and checks the wind,” Chapman said. “Then – you read all this stuff in magazines and see it on TV, but you never experience it in the woods – he circles back in the woods, and I can hear him, then he stops, and I hear him. He’s circling downwind of the feeder so he can check it.
“It’s starting to get dark, and I wanted it to get dark, so I didn’t have to kill him. I want my buddy to kill him, but I’m afraid we might never see him again.
“I’m hunting over a road, and I see a big body, and he steps out at 5 yards, but it’s not him. It’s a 130- or 140-inch 10-pointer we’ve never seen before. I’m about to shoot him, but something told me, don’t shoot him; you know what’s behind him. That buck starts eating, and then I hear something coming, and the big buck stops at 5 yards.”
Chapman said when he and Antoine hung that stand on Oct. 1, there were two trees 6 inches in diameter in front of his stand. He didn’t have a chainsaw, so he’d hooked a tow rope to the frame of his Ford F-250 pickup and pulled them down, so they weren’t in the way when the big buck stepped out.
However, a big muscadine vine was.
“I drew, but I needed him to take two steps, and it was like he heard me,” Chapman said. “He goes, step, step, and he had his head down. I couldn’t see the peep. I could see my lighted pin, so I put the pin on him and swung the bow around until I could tell the peep blocked the pin, and I shot.”
Tracking the buck
As you can imagine, things went kind of crazy, Chapman’s big buck bolted, the other 10-pointer bolted, and out of the woods came another buck, this one not as big as the original 10.
Chapman’s Bloodsport arrow, tipped with a Muzzy MX3, was on target, taking the buck high behind the shoulder and angling down and through the other side.
“I heard him running, then I heard him jump over something – because I heard his hooves hit the ground,” Chapman said. “Then it got quiet, and I heard some rustling.”
Almost immediately, he got a text message from his son: “You get him?” Chapman got out of the stand, found his arrow completely covered in blood – but not the bright red, frothy blood that signifies a good lung shot.
“My next-door neighbor, Noah Lachney, had killed an 8-pointer the night before, and he knew a guy who had some tracking dogs, so I asked him to give him a call. He told Noah to give him two hours. We went home, and then we left my driveway to go back at about 8:15.
Kirt Allen arrived with his tracking dogs, Allie and Bean, shortly thereafter, and he surveyed the scene.
“He told us, if they find him and don’t bark, the deer is dead. If they bark, he’s alive,” Chapman said. “He turned them loose, and after 5 minutes, they bark, then they all of the sudden stopped. We walked up to him, and Kirt said he must have just died, and that if we’d come looking for him before, we’d have pushed him out. Kirt said it was the biggest deer they’d ever trailed. All the pics we had, he was in velvet and looked enormous, but he looked even bigger on the ground.”
The tale of the tape
Chapman’s first call was to Antoine, sitting in the stands at the Southern U football game.
“We had named this buck Mike-Mike,” he said. “I don’t know why, but we did. So I called Damien and told him I was looking at Mike-Mike on the ground in front of me.”
Chapman tried to weigh him, but the hook hanging below the scales he used broke when it reached 215 pounds. Chapman took him to Rut’n and Strut’n Taxidermy in Zachary, where taxidermist Keelie Ebert scored him at 154 ⅛ inches.
The buck carried a typical 6×5 frame with a split brow tine on the left side and a sticker point at the base of the right beam. He had 22-inch main beams and a 20-inch inside spread.
“He’s wide enough that I can step inside his rack, and I’m 210 (pounds),” Chapman said. “Keelie and I looked at his teeth, and she said, ‘This is a young deer.’ She guessed that it was 4 ½ years old, so it probably had two more years to grow.”
Chapman said the arrow and broadhead had sliced downward through the buck’s body, leaving a huge exit hole.
“I shot him a little far back, but it clipped liver, lungs, everything going through,” he said. “We looked, and he had thrown blood everywhere – on the trees, everywhere. He only ran about 40 yards before falling.”
