A friend called David Booth about two weeks ago and invited him to his hunting club in Claiborne Parish.
“He told me, ‘They’re in full rut,’” Booth said. “I told myself, ‘I can’t miss this.’”
So Booth, a 49-year-old ROV oil-field supervisor from Ponchatoula, packed up and headed away for a couple of days. His vehicle was a heckuva lot heavier when he returned, having killed a 105-pound doe and a 155-pound buck – the latter sporting a main-frame 11-point rack with 6 sticker points that will score around 150.
The hunt club had one trail-camera photo of the big buck, from Nov. 2. That was the only evidence of the buck’s presence before Booth dropped him at 140 yards with his Remington Model 7 in .308 on Nov. 16 at 8:30 a.m.
“They were congratulating me, but probably cursing under their breath,” Booth said, chuckling about the welcome he got back at the camp when he returned that morning with the big buck on the back of his 4-wheeler.
“I hunted that stand the evening before and shot a huge doe,” he said. “The guys were asking, ‘Are you gonna hunt that stand again?’ and I said, ‘Yes sir.’”
Right on time
But even Booth had to admit his timing had to be perfect to tag the buck, which paired 21-inch main beams with a 15½-inch inside spread and 7-inch brow tines. Had the buck showed up just a little earlier, Booth would have never seen him.
“The stand where I was sitting was more than a thousand yards from the trail-camera that got the only photo of him,” Booth said. “I was actually hunting a nice 8-pointer that I had seen. I was hunting a camp stand that nobody had hunted in 3 years. It was really foggy that morning, and at 140 yards, if he’d come out a half-hour earlier, I’d have never seen him. But the fog lifted, and he came out of the cutover.”
Booth was hunting in a box blind looking down a shooting lane with a young cutover on both sides.
“Around 8:30, he just came out of the cutover at 140 yards,” Booth said, “When I shot him, I didn’t think he was that big. I could see his horns and see he was big, but really big? I didn’t think he was that size.”
Big buck glow up
The buck dropped in his tracks, and when Booth got to him, he realized he was experiencing the opposite of what many deer hunters call “ground shrinkage” – when a dead buck on the ground looks a lot smaller than he did in the crosshairs.
When Booth got home, he showed the buck to a friend who raises deer, and he said the friend “had goosebumps” when he examined the buck and later scored it.
The buck had a 6×5 main-frame rack with three sticker points on each beam, all between 1 and 1 ½ inches long. Its brow tines were 7 and 6 ½ inches long, the second points on each beam 7 ½ and 8 inches long, with 5 and 5 ¼-inch bases. The buck’s gross typical score was 150 ½ inches.
“I’m just glad when he came out, with his head down, that he stopped in the middle of the lane,” Booth said.
