Cater’s monster green-scores 185 3/8 inches
Jacob Cater was engrossed in a game of smart phone Scrabble with his wife when a huge Catahoula Parish buck interrupted the fun.
“My wife likes to deer hunt and I have taken her with me several times and she has killed several deer,” said Cater, 22, a senior majoring in agri-business at the University of Louisiana-Monroe. “On the afternoon of Dec. 22, we had planned a hunt to my stand where we have to cross a bayou in a boat to get to there. She wasn’t feeling well, so we decided to stay home instead of doing all that had to be done to hunt that afternoon.”
The area they hunt is the family’s 2,500-acre farm in Catahoula Parish. As the afternoon wore on, his wife Tiffany started feeling better, so they decided to go sit in a shed on the farm rather than make the long trek to the stand across the bayou.
“We left home around 4:30, stopped by a store for snacks and got set up in the shed, eating chips and playing Scrabble. Just before dark, we saw some does come out of the 800-acre block of woods next to the field,” he said. “A few minutes later, a group of 10 does came to the field. I used my rangefinder to determine the distance: 536 yards.”
Deciding to click the scope on his custom-built 6.5 Winchester Short Mag to allow for that distance, he had just finished his adjustments when he saw a big-bodied buck step out into the field. His rangefinder read 500 yards from where he sat in the shed out to the buck.
“I told Tiffany that I was looking at a nice buck and if she wanted to shoot it, she could. She didn’t feel comfortable with the 500-yard distance and passed on the chance to shoot. I got my rifle up, got the scope on him and fired,” he said. “The buck hit the ground, obviously broken down in the back end.”
There was a 15 mph cross wind blowing, and the next two shots were off the mark; Cater didn’t allow for the effect of the wind at that distance.
“I told her I was going to go to the deer to finish him off before he got away, so I walked to within 75 yards of him and shot, killing the buck. As I walked up to him, I had no idea that this was such an amazing animal; I knew I had killed a giant,” he said. “Nobody on our farm or on neighboring lands had ever seen this deer, nor had trail cam photos of him. He just came out of nowhere, apparently attracted by the does.”
The buck carried a rack of 14 symmetrical points featuring long main beams and tines. The main beams were around 24 inches each, G2s and G3s were 12 and 13 inches each, with bases at 5 ½ inches. The deer weighed 220 pounds.
Cecil Reddick, official scorer for Buckmaster, put the tape on the buck and gave it a green score of 185 3/8 inches. The buck was no older than 4 ½ years, with the taxidermist thinking it may have only been 3 ½.
“My dad has hunted deer for 45 years and has killed some good ones,” Cater said. “But he told me this deer I killed beat his biggest buck by at least 20 inches. And incidentally, Tiffany claims she won the game of Scrabble — but I didn’t mind one bit.”