Andy Langlois came out of the woods in early January kicking himself for missing the deer of a lifetime while hunting a 110-acre piece of family property just outside of New Roads.
“It was a morning hunt, and about 6:50 (a.m.) what looked like a 4-point came out at about 100 yards,” the Jarreau hunter explained “I looked at the 4-point, and I put my gun down.”
That’s when a huge-racked deer appeared from the nearby cutover.
“He popped out on the right-of-way, and I could tell he was about 20 inches wide,” Langlois said. “I really don’t miss a lot of deer, but I just missed him.”
When he told the story to his buddies, he was roundly mocked.
“When I told about the deer, everybody laughed at me,” Langlois said. “You don’t find deer with racks that wide around here.”
Undeterred, he spent the next week camped out on that stand, hoping for redemption. But nothing happened. And then he made a decision to turn to bait – something to which he rarely resorts.
“I put rice bran out, and backed out of there for about four days,” Langlois said.
On Monday (Jan. 18) morning, however, he crawled into the stand before daylight to see if the buck would show up again.
There was only one problem: The rice bran was about 200 yards away, and fog obscured the hunter’s vision. But soon he saw a shape easing out into the lane.
“I was talking to a buddy on the cell phone, and I told him I had to go,” Langlois said. “I thought it was a hog.”
The hunter brought his rifle to his shoulder, and could tell it was a deer – but he couldn’t see much else through the wispy air.
“At first, I couldn’t see the horns, and then I cranked up the scope,” he said.
That revealed a big crown of antlers, which was all the hunter needed to see.
“I could tell it was wide, but that’s all I could see,” Langlois said.
He moved the crosshairs to the deer’s vitals and squeezed off a shot. The deer went down, tried to get up and then seemed to settle down.
Langlois clambered out of the stand. He retrieved his ATV, and made the trip through a couple of flooded areas to collect the buck.
That’s when he realized it was the same buck that he had missed two weeks earlier.
“When I got there, he was still trying to get up,” Langlois said, adding that another shot put the deer down for good.
The buck’s antlers were massive, with 10 tall tines atop heavy main beams.
“The bases were about 5 ½ inches, but the mass all the way to the end is just massive,” Langlois said. “The last (circumference) measurement was 4 ½ inches.”
And he got the last laugh on his buddies, who doubted Langlois’ story of a 20-inch buck. The inside spread measured out at a tad wider than 20 ½ inches.
Spillway Sportsman green scored the deer at 171 3/8, which marks it as a pending Pointe Coupee record. The current record rifle-killed buck for the parish was a 163 2/8-inch deer killed in 1950 by J. Clifton Ortis Sr.
“It took a while for it to sink in,” Langlois said of the kill. “I rode him around on the hood of my truck, like they did in the old days.”
