Holt Martin is an avid bowhunter and no stranger to harvesting trophy bucks, but he recently got the surprise of his life while hunting near Lake Providence.
“I had been watching a certain buck a couple of years, but he was nothing special last year,” Martin said. “He wasn’t big enough that I wanted to take him out. We usually like to let the bucks live to at least 6 ½ years to reach their full potential.”
Suddenly, they got their first game camera photos of the buck, and Martin’s younger brother saw him and wanted to shoot him.
“I went to the trail cam pictures and looked at him,” Martin said. “He looked like he would go 145 and weigh about 190 pounds, still not what we were looking for.”
A closer look
Martin decided to go and hunt a stand near the buck’s travel corridor, so he went to the woods on Oct. 21 and climbed up into his Millennium lock on tree stand. Martin’s stand was on the banks of a chute that came off the river and split their land into two sections.
“I snuck in there and got into the stand about 4:30 p.m.,” Martin said. “With a marginal wind I wasn’t sure that the conditions were right, but I hoped to get a look at him.”
Martin had been in the stand for about 35 minutes when deer started easing into his area. He surveyed the space looking for any sign of a buck following but not much happened for a while.
“The buck showed up at 5:55 with six or seven other bucks with him,” Martin said. “The deer got so close to my stand that I think he could lick the base of the stand. Suddenly, he turned around and started walking towards the other bucks while quartering slightly from my position.”
Martin slowly drew the Matthews bow back and let the arrow fly towards the buck.
“Thwack!” The rage broadhead plunged in just behind his backside shoulder and angled through the kill zone.
“I finally got a shot at 6:10 and the buck ran about 40 yards and stopped kind of hunched over,” Martin said. “He coughed and then ran out of sight.”
An unbelievable buck
While waiting in the stand, Martin called his father and told him that he had just killed the biggest deer of his life.
“Dad had been watching the game cameras also and he said that there must be a new one that moved in,” Martin said. “I told him no, it was that palmated 10-point, and he asked me why did I shoot that deer?
“I said that I’m telling you the trail cameras have lied to us big time! This is the biggest buck I’ve ever seen in my life!”
Martin got down from the stand and went home and ate dinner, then he joined his dad to search for the deer about 2 ½ hours later.
“The buck only went another 60 yards from where I last saw him,” Martin said. “He went straight into that thicket and bedded down. Come to find out, dad didn’t really believe I’d shot that buck until we walked up on him and he saw what a massive buck it really was.”
Amazingly, the buck had put on another 40 to 45 inches of antler in the last year. The 245-pound buck actually was a mainframe 10-point with 3 stickers on the bases and scored in the 170s. Several people measured it, and it scored in the 171 to 177 range. By any measure this was the buck of a lifetime.
