Gonna' have a hard time beating this one.
I was experience probably the toughest hunting season ever until last Thursday when this big boy came into my life
On November 13th in Knox County Illinois...hunting with Illinois Whitetails, I found myself sitting on the edge of a freshly picked cornfield with the Spoon River winding through the bottoms below me.
When we arrived at camp, we quickly unpacked so we could get a short sit in that evening. I wasn't very excited about rushing to the stand just to sit in a cold, strong wind but you can't kill'em sitting back at camp.
The first hour was slow until my cameraman whispered "basket". A small 6 point was working his way through the woods behind us and I was excited to see some movement.
Just over an hour later I spotted a large bodied deer rounding a corner at our 2 o'clock position and I couldn't get my bino's on him fast enough to check out the head gear. The first thing I saw was his browtines and that was all I needed to see.
The buck worked a scrape at the corner and then headed towards the corner of the field to our right. He then turned right, continuing along the edge of the field but now on a collision course with a 100 gr Hellrazor. When he was about 40 yards from the stand, he turned into the woods. I reached for my grunt call but couldn't find it in the "panic" (turned out to be a good thing)
He stopped to rub his head on some branches before turning around and heading back our way. I grabbed the Katera XL and quickly came to full draw as things were fixin' to get interesting.
Once at full draw I mouth grunted twice to get him to stop as Joe gave me the OK and I drilled him right behind the crease at 22 yards. My first reaction was that I may have hit him a bit low but, as the buck ran out to 60 yards and stopped, Joe advised me that he was "pumping" out bigtime!!!!
The buck looked around for a few seconds and began the "tippy" dance before going down for the count.
This 174" 9pt tipped the scales at 288 (live weight) and is by far my best buck ever...bow or gun....and the entire hunt was captured on film!!!!!