Deer green scores 160 inches Boone & Crockett.
Hunters dream of that one defining hunt, when everything comes together and culminates in a wallhanger to make buddies jealous. Greg Krause’s day came on Nov. 13, but he almost passed the opportunity.
“When I stepped out the camp that morning, I was greeted by temperatures in the 60s, a howling wind and, worst of all, a big, bright full moon shining down on the area,” Krause said. “I thought to myself, ‘There’s no way I’m going to see any deer this morning with that big moon out,’ but then again you can’t kill them from the camp!”
Fortunately, the Mandeville hunter heading into the woods anyway. He left with a bragging buck that green scored about 160 inches Boone & Crockett.
Krause only made the hunt because he wanted to break in a new rifle bought to allow him to participation in the state’s early primitive-weapons deer season.
“I had just bought the gun, a .444 H&R, so I could get two more weeks of hunting in, so I figured I may as well hit the stand despite the conditions,” Krause said. “Had I not bought the gun, I’d have never been in the stand that morning.”
Not long after sunrise, Krause laid eyes on a deer he later realized was the one every hunter in the area was after.
“I was hunting one of our dried-up sloughs, which is planted in milo and millet on the edge of our club’s WRP land,” he said. “I first spotted the deer easing his way down a ditch along the WRP with another buck, a 9-point, and they eventually made it to the clearing on the edge of my slough.”
Krause thought at first that the deer seemed too narrow to be a shooter, but a closer look revealed the true mass of the brute.
“At first I saw that his rack was within his ears, but once he turned I could make out just how bulky and tall the rack was,” he said. “I had my bow in the stand with me, also, but there was no way I was letting the deer go any farther.”
Within five minutes of being spotted, the .444 rang out on an 80-yard shot and Krause had the big buck on the ground in his tracks by 6:50 a.m.
After hurrying to his trophy, the realization that he’d killed a buck that had all the hunters in the area in a frenzy.
“Once I got a hold of him, I realized that I’d finally put down the deer that everyone in our club and the neighboring club had been after for a couple of years now,” Krause said. “He was the only big man of our property, and everyone had been watching him.”
The Tensas Parish 10-point weighed in at 275 pounds, and was green scored at 160 inches Boone & Crockett. A close inspection of the deer’s jaw bone indicates that he was roughly 5.5 years old.
See another photo of the deer in our Deer Hunting Forum.
Krause said he believes the mass of the rack was due largely to the protein feeders on the property.
“The neighbor had been seeing this deer for a few years now, and we have a couple of sheds from him,” Krause said. “Our cameras showed that he had been hitting our protein feeders pretty hard almost every night for the last year or so.
“When we compared him to the last shed we had, we could tell he had really bulked up. You can barely get your hand around it.”
In fact, the last shed had a main beam circumference of about 4 1/2 inches, but the brute had bulked up to sport main beams of nearly 7 1/4 inches in circumference.
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