The morning of Dec. 11 dawned balmy with a stout south wind. Forty-year-old Lee Greer of Rayville, who operates a track hoe, and his 15-year-old son, Braxton, headed for a 200-acre plot of land they have permission to hunt in Richland Parish.
“The stands we had decided to hunt would work best with a south wind; when the wind is wrong and we can’t hunt in favorable conditions, we don’t go that day,” Greer said. “On this day, even though the wind was strong it was from the right direction. I got in one stand and Braxton in another 200 yards away.”
After walking a mile to get to their stands and getting settled in that morning, Greer and his son were texting back and forth and Braxton began to become a bit discouraged because they had been on their stands since daylight and after several hours neither had seen a single deer.
“I told him just to sit tight and wait because I believed that something would eventually begin to move,” Greer said.
One particular buck was the object of Greer’s quest, a big buck he knew was somewhere on the area, one that hadn’t been seen on camera since last season. A few days before this hunt, the buck had shown up on Greer’s trail camera giving him hope that he might have a chance at the big buck.
“When I walked in to my stand, I hung a Tink’s 69 scent bomb on a low-hanging branch thinking that if the buck came out on my up-wind side, he might be smelling the scent bomb before he got a whiff of me,” he said.
Moment of truth
Greer’s thinking was right on the money because around 10 a.m., he decided to look behind him where he had hung the scent bomb and saw a deer back in the thicket some 160 yards away.
“The thicket was pretty dense where the deer was standing and when he began thrashing the brush, rubbing his scent glands on overhanging vegetation, I could see it was a buck,” Greer said. “I saw enough of him to know this was the big one I had been after. I’m thinking that he was smelling the scent bomb and was distracted by that rather than him smelling me.”
Faced with a dilemma, Greer knew if the buck stepped out of the thicket with a strong wind blowing from him toward the deer, he would catch his scent and be gone in a flash. He looked for a spot where he could make the shot before the buck came out onto a clearing.
“I had swiveled my chair around and got my rifle up and was watching the buck in my scope,” he said. “I saw a small opening and felt that I could get a good shot on him through that narrow window, so I shot.”
At the shot from his .357 Weatherby magnum, the deer hit the ground and disappeared from sight. Greer had no idea if the buck dropped right there or had taken off.
“There was standing water all in the area and after sitting for a few minutes, I got down and walked through the water to where the deer was standing,” he said. “I expected to see him lying there but he wasn’t, and because of the water there was no way I could see a track, blood or anything indicating a hit.”
Making a ‘brake’ for it
There is a fence nearby with a pasture on the other side and when Greer looked in that direction he saw the deer, obviously wounded, making its way across the pasture headed for a brake across the pasture.
“I got off another shot and dropped him about 200 yards away and just before he got to the brake,” he said.
The buck, weighing about 225 pounds and determined to be 6 ½ years old, was a main frame 12-point with one kicker giving him 13 points overall. Inside spread was 18 ½ inches and the rack was measured by Buckmaster official scorer, Cecil Reddick, with a gross of 162 6/8 inches.