Opening day of the 2022 archery season will be one that Jason Lamm of Crowley remembers for a long time. He experienced the highs and lows of deer hunting, all in a 12 hour period. But persistence paid off with a trophy of a lifetime.
A huge buck showed up on camera early morning about 4 a.m. on Oct. 1 on his family’s hunting club near Lake Providence on the Mississippi River, but nobody saw him after daylight. Lamm and his brother headed back out to the area for an afternoon hunt, hoping to encounter the huge deer or another one like it.
The right choice
Jason’s brother picked one stand and Jason went to the other. It was the right choice. He got a shot at a monster 167 2/8 trophy buck at 41 yards, hit him broadside and later found the big deer in the edge of the water on a chute that separates two clubs along the big river.
But it wasn’t that easy.
“When I shot, I knew I made a good shot and I had high hopes,” Lamm, a crawfish and rice farmer, said. “I began tracking him and found a good trail. I watched him down in the bottom and saw him lay down for about two minutes after I shot him and I thought he was dying. But he just gets up and walks off.”
He shot the deer in a hardwood river bottom where they had just harvested some timber. Long story short, he tracked the deer to the edge of a chute that separates two clubs. He couldn’t find him and thought he had either backtracked or gone in the water. After looking up and down the area, he backed off until morning when he was joined by his family. Again they looked everywhere, finally calling for a boat and going to the other side of the 80-yard wide chute to see if the deer swam back to his regular bedding grounds.
“The bank is real steep and we just couldn’t find him,” he said. “I had been so high, but I about made up my mind I’d have to keep coming back every day until I found a big old floating deer.”
Great management
Then it happened. His neighbor spotted the deer in shallow water by the bank where he had swam across the chute, but couldn’t make it up the steep bank. They were exhausted and Lamm had gone from the high of shooting the buck to the low of thinking he might never find him, then to the extreme high of posing for photos with the monster.
“We all got back to the little landing where we launched the boat and had a little celebration,” he said. “Managing the deer like we do, it pays off. We’ve got some great deer hunting in Louisiana and this proves it.”
The stand where Lamm shot the big buck has been great the past two years, he said. They killed a 153 and a 154 there last year and now the 167.
“We manage the area real hard and our neighbors do, too,” he said. “We hadn’t seen the deer but a couple of times, but our neighbor had seen him for a couple of years and let him pass. Last year he was in the upper 140’s, but they let him pass and he just kept growing. He just blossomed this year and added weight and antlers. We estimated he was 6 ½ years old. My neighbor was happy for me, but he was also bummed that he didn’t get to hunt him again. That’s understandable.”
Finding the deer not only took persistence, but a little bit of luck. Lamm said they had seen several big alligators in the chute and one of them could have easily claimed his trophy before he found it.
Don’t give up
One thing Lamm reinforced with this kill was that when you shoot a big buck, you never give up until you exhaust all possibilities. And they learned something else, too.
“Now, nobody wants to go first picking the stands, because it seems like it never goes right,” he said. “Everybody wants to let somebody else pick and then go to the woods so they won’t pick wrong.”
Lamm shot the deer with a Mathews Halon and an Easton Axis 250 Arrow 250 with a Rage Trypan, no collar, broadhead.