Riley Daniel, a 14-year-old hunter from Heflin, admits that he was targeting an 8-point buck on a tract of land in Webster Parish where he hunts.
He described the buck as sort of a “crazy 8.”
But the card game changed on Oct. 17, when a huge buck showed up on trail-camera photos belonging to Daniel and his father, Michael.
“He showed up, and I decided to hunt him,” Riley Daniel said. “We got him on a trail camera on Thursday and I killed him Saturday morning.”
When the Daniels boys walked up to the buck, dead in a 3-year-old cutover about 50 yards from where he was shot — aided by a blood-trailing dog – Riley had two thoughts.
“I was amazed, because I didn’t think we were going to find him – there was no blood trail – and then I was really excited when I saw how big he was,” he said.
The 10-point buck scored 153 2/8 at Simmons Sporting Goods in Bastrop. It carried a 5×5 rack with a tiny sticker point on its right beam, but it wasn’t a standard 5×5. The second and third tines on the left beam, both better than 8 inches long, shared a common base. It was scored a 4×5 with one of the tines counting as a sticker point, with a 16 ⅝-inch inside spread, main beams at 25 ⅞ and 24 4/8 inches, four tines at least 8 inches long and eight circumference measurements at 4 inches or more.
A mystery buck
Daniel, a freshman at Lakeside Junior/Senior High School in Sibley, who has killed two turkey gobblers and two banded drake wood ducks – along with being a member of the school’s bass-fishing team – shot the buck at 119 yards at 7:03 on Saturday morning. Two days before, no one knew he was even alive.
“I haven’t found anybody in the area who had seen him; he just showed up on our trail camera. I have no idea why or where he came from,” Michael Daniel said. “The acorns are falling, but there are no acorn trees anywhere around this area.”
The Daniels had trail cameras near a box blind along the edge of a thick, 3-year-old cutover, overlooking a couple of shooting lanes, one featuring a corn feeder and the other planted in whitetail food plots.
Getting to the blind
At 5:02 on Saturday morning, Michael Daniel got trail cam photos of the big buck, along with a smaller one, in the shooting lane with the feeder. As they got closer to hunting time, the buck showed up on camera again, this time in the lane with the food plots.
“We parked about 200 yards from the box and walked in as quiet as we could because we knew he was close by,” Michael Daniel said. “We were worried about the door to the box squeaking when we opened it.”
They got in just fine, and as the morning started to break, the big buck came in and went back out of the lane. Finally, it angled in from the right, at 7:03, and Riley Daniel wasted little time finding the buck in the crosshairs of his Vortex Viper scope, mounted on a Ruger American .308.
“He was coming in from the right, quartering to me, and I shot him in the chest,” he said. “I heard a pop (the bullet hitting). He buckled, then he sort of pushed himself along, going away, making crashing noises.”
Calling in the dogs
The buck ran into the cutover, and the Daniels stayed in their box for 35 or 40 minutes. When they got down, there was no blood on the ground anywhere near the shot site, so Michael Daniels headed to where the buck had entered the cutover and worked his way in about 20 yards. Seeing no sign, he circled back to his right, guessing the buck might have headed back in the general direction of the box.
“I talked to my father-in-law, and he asked if we were in the blood-trail network on Facebook,” Michael Daniel said. “I immediately went to the page, signed up and sent a message looking for anybody in the area. A lady called 10 minutes later; we told her where we were hunting, and about 10 minutes later, a guy named Eric Perry called. He had a dog trained to blood-trail.
“He got there in 30 minutes, and we showed him where the deer went. We stayed back, and he sent the dog in. He said the dog would bark when it found the deer, then he went in behind it.”
Riley Daniel heard a dog barking shortly thereafter, but it was another dog in Perry’s truck. Then, he heard another bark he thought came from the cutover. A few minutes later, Perry emerged with the good news: the buck was graveyard dead, about 50 yards back in the cutover.
“We didn’t go far enough in,” Michael Daniel said. “He’d gone 50 or 60 yards back in the cutover, and we only went in about 20 yards. We weren’t quite in the right area.”
