Every now and then you hear about a huge buck that just shows up and haunts the hunters in the area and then just up and disappears. well, we had one of those bucks on our farm this past deer season. This particular buck that we called “Bullwinkle” just appeared on the farm out of nowhere. I first saw while riding around with my wife and daughter last July and just about put my truck in the ditch trying to stop and get a good look at him. I couldn’t believe how he had just as much antler going down as he had going up. I immediately started putting out feed and cameras up in the area to get some pictures of him. Well it turns out he really liked the feed and getting his picture taken. Over the next two and a half months I ended up getting around 1200 pictures of him and saw him in person about fifteen times. He turned into a deer celebrity around work cause everybody wanted to see his pictures and how his rack was progressing along. He definitely progressed over the next two months and he ended up having eight points going up with seven drop tines going down. The more I saw him the more obsessed I became with wanting to shoot this particular deer.
I started planning on when and where I was going to try and hunt him. Luckily there was a huge persimmon tree close to the same area he was hanging out in and it was dropping fruit. I started getting pictures of him several times a day at the tree so I put up a stand overlooking the tree and anxiously awaited the opening of bow season.When Oct 15 arrived I was perched up in my stand ready for action. After an uneventful morning hunt I was back in the stand that evening. I had seen a few does and small bucks and then about an hour before dark he just magically appeared out of the thick brush. So here I am with the buck of my dreams at twenty five yards and all that’s left to do is put an arrow threw him.
Well up until this point everything I had done to get to this moment had worked perfectly. But as it sometimes happens there has to be some kind of hiccup thrown into the mix. The buck walked out, ate a few persimmons off the ground, and then stood there broadside for me at twenty yards. I drew my Elite and settled the pin on his shoulder. I then released the arrow that I unbelievably watched sail right over the top of his shoulder and stick right into his antler. As I watched him running off with my arrow still attached to his antler I just stood there with what I’m pretty sure was a very disgusted look on my face.I was completely sick. All of the work and effort I had put into getting to that point with that particular buck was just thrown right out the window. The crazy thing is that even after all that, I still managed to have a couple more encounters with Bullwinkle over the next couple of weeks but none of them fared any better than the first encounter. I also even managed to get a few more trail camera pictures of him and one of them was even taken where you can see my muzzy broad head stuck in his antlers. I never got another chance at him after all that and only heard of one other person seeing him about a month after my fiasco with him. So hopefully this ghost that haunted me last season will show back up this coming season and give me another shot at him.
