St. Francisville hunter downs big West Feliciana Parish buck

Chris Brown was hunting on family land in West Feliciana Parish on Dec. 19 when he shot this trophy buck.

Huge buck shows up when swirling winds forced hunter to abandon deer for hogs

When Chris Brown of St. Francisville took to the woods on Friday afternoon, Dec. 19, he didn’t trust the swirling winds enough to hunt a huge whitetail buck at his favorite spot. He figured he’d hunt a more pedestrian spot and try to rid his family property of a wild hog or two.

Instead, and totally unexpected, his huge target buck, nicknamed Hercules by his 11-year-old nephew, showed up on the scene and made Brown’s day, all 175 inches of him.

“I had no clue; he was the last thing I ever expected to walk out,” said Brown, 31, who works for Exxon. “We’ve never had a daytime (trail-camera) photo of him. I went to that spot to shoot a hog, and at 5:22, he stepped out. I didn’t know it was him, but I got my binoculars up and said, ‘Oh crap, that’s a good deer.’ I had a split second to realize he was a shooter – not time to look at him real good. I put the crosshairs on his shoulder and dropped him. The whole thing lasted 30 seconds.”

Brown didn’t know he’d killed the buck called Hercules until a trail-camera photo snapped just before he shot pinged on his cell phone. What he saw was a 6 ½-year-old West Feliciana Parish monster, 220 pounds, with a huge 5×5 rack with a single sticker point. The buck carried an inside spread of 22 ½ inches, main beams measuring 25 ½ and 27 inches, and tines as long as 12 inches. Brown, who called the buck “a true, Louisiana giant,” expects it to score 167 to 168 net inches.

A regular visitor

Hercules had been a regular on trail cameras near Brown’s hunting land this fall, but always at night. Brown said he was an everyday visitor, normally at 7 p.m., then 10 p.m., then maybe 2 or 3 a.m.

“But each day, he got a little later or a little earlier,” he said. “He was hard to pattern. The night before I killed him, he showed up at 10 p.m., then 2 and 3 the 5:44 on Thursday morning. We had some warm weather that week, and I said that if we were gonna kill him, it would be in the morning when he was on the way back to his bed.”

Brown left work early on Friday, Dec. 19, to begin his Christmas break.

“I was talking with my brother-in-law, Caleb Coarsey (whose son, Bradlee had given the big buck the Hercules moniker), while I was burning some stuff, and the smoke out of the fire pit was swirling,” he said. “I wanted to bowhunt (Hercules), but I told him I didn’t want to risk that with the wind being wrong, so I was going to sit on a power line and shoot a pig.

“We’re not too far from the Mississippi River,” he said. “My grandad bought the property when I was 10, and I told my dad it would be real cool to shoot pigs all year. Now, we shoot more pigs than anything. So I went to a shooting house.”

A mature buck

Brown saw a couple of deer and a few turkeys between 3:40 and 4:15, then things calmed down. The big buck stepped out at 120 yards (he had a feed and trail camera in place at that range), and after recognizing the buck as a shooter, he dropped him with a single shot from his Howa .300 Mag.

“I called my girlfriend and my brother-in-law, then another buck came out and trotted over to Hercules, then ran off.”

Brown estimated that the buck was 6 ½ years old based on tooth wear on its lower jawbone. He had some photos of the buck from the 2023 season, and he said that “a lot of the neighbors came out of the woodwork with photos from previous years.

“I figured that he was 5 ½ last year, and he got a lot bigger this year.”

Brown said his family has really gotten into active management of its deer herd over the past 10 years, restricting the annual harvest only to big bucks, cull bucks and does, except allowing younger or female hunters to take an occasional small buck.