Nathan Pierot, who lives in Calhoun and is vice president of commercial lending for b1Bank, hunts on 205 acres in Bossier Parish that he and his buddy Chris Johnson jointly own. After purchasing the property a few years ago, they have improved the habitat for the purpose of prohibiting feral hogs from taking advantage of their food plots and feeding stations.
“We constructed fencing around our plots that deer have no trouble hopping over, but keeps hogs out,” Pierot said.
Although there were several target bucks on the property, there was one particular buck that he and Johnson were most interested in.
“This buck has been on our cameras for the past few years, and at first he was a 4-year-old that would have measured 135 inches,” Pierot said. “The next year he had improved to an 8-point that would be pushing 150 inches, while this year he was improved quite a bit.”
As the buck had been showing up on cameras during daylight hours, Pierot took off work at noon on Friday, Nov. 15, and hunted that afternoon and all day Saturday without seeing a buck. However, after leaving the stand Saturday, his trail camera showed the buck at 5:40 p.m., shortly after Pierot had vacated his stand.
Back at it
The following day, Nov. 17, it was raining off and on and Pierot headed for his stand around 2 p.m. He hunts out of a box stand that overlooks a food plot, while another attractant is a stand of oaks that have started dropping acorns. For the first three hours, he only saw a single deer.
The weather was warm that day and Pierot was harassed by wasps that were trying to get in the stand, so he opened the window only enough for his rifle barrel to protrude. Then at the far end of the lane, some 250 yards, he saw a buck that was looking in his direction. When the buck finally turned broadside, Pierot wasn’t comfortable with his set-up because of the narrow window opening. He took a shot with his Browning .300 Win mag and missed. The buck disappeared.
“Chris, on his stand 600 yards away, texted and said he heard the shot and it sounded like a miss,” Pierot said. “I thought that I had shot at one of our target bucks but not the big one.”
Pierot gets his trophy
Five minutes after shooting at the buck, two does came running along the road from the opposite direction the buck Pierot missed had come from. He was on the phone with Chris when the does appeared, so he hung up the phone. As soon as he did, the big buck he was after came out on the trail of the does. The buck stopped and was quartering away when Pierot took the shot.
“My wife was hunting on another stand so I went to get her while Chris began looking for sign where the buck was standing,” Pierot said. “At first he went down to the first buck I had shot at to confirm that there was no evidence I had hit him. Coming back to where I had shot at the second buck, Chris found good blood and we found the buck piled up 80 yards away.”
The buck carried a rack of 10 points with an inside spread of 18 ½ inches and main beams 24 and 26 inches with 5 ½ inch bases. The buck weighed 230 pounds and was determined to be 6 ½ years old. Taking the buck to Simmons Sporting Goods in Bastrop to enter him in that store’s big buck contest, the tape came to 163 6/8 inches.
