Hunter’s Journal – December 2021

By Justin Tucker Holland

Since I was little, I have always enjoyed taking my friends hunting and just being able to see the way they enjoy everything about it. Guiding hunts and teaching youth about how to hunt and respect nature has got me hooked on everything about it. And I have had some awesome mentors myself.

This season me and my friend Rylee Little had been hunting hogs and deer on his Papa’s land in Bleckley County. Rylee wasn’t able to drive yet, so me and him piled up all of our gear in my red Toyota truck, for what seemed like every day. Boy did we have some great times. 

Justin Tucker Holland, of Cochran, with his Bleckley County buck from Nov. 13.

I was a little disappointed in the season. I had hunted my butt off, putting out corn, checking cameras, checking the wind, setting up spots, making sure everything was right. It seemed like every time I turned around, I would see pictures of someone posting a big deer they had just killed. I am a hardcore bowhunter, and I had just missed my opportunity to kill a big buck. Of course, he was just out of my bow range. My mom told me I just needed to be patient and have faith in God, that good things would come. That God could see what good I had been doing taking all these young kids hunting and teaching them the right things to do.

Rylee kept insisting that I go hunt one of their blinds. I didn’t feel right about hunting their spots, but near the end of the season, they kept telling me I needed to go hunt this one blind. I almost didn’t go that evening, but something told me to go.

So Rylee insisted that I go hunt this spot with a gun instead of my bow. Boy am I glad I did. Mom was right. A buck of a lifetime showed up. 

I went to the blind and got set up, and the next thing I knew, there were deer all around me. For a couple of hours, I watched does walking around feeding. Suddenly, I saw a buck slipping through the woods. He was a decent 10-point but not big enough for me to shoot. He started chasing a doe around, so I started grunting at him trying to mess with him.  

After about 10 minutes of constant grunting at him, I heard something to my right. I thought it was an older buck that had gray on his face, but when he took a step to the right, I saw his big rack, and I could see white running down his neck to his shoulder, and I realized he was a piebald. I had just grunted in a piebald buck. 

I started freaking out, thinking oh my goodness, a piebald buck was walking straight toward me. He got about 40 yards from me and cut into a thicket. My heart was racing. I tried to holler at him “Hey, Hey” to get him to stop. By then, he was 50 yards away when he finally stopped. I could only see him from his shoulder up, so I leaned out of the blind to take a neck shot. I started saying in my head, “God please let me get this deer, please let me get this deer.” 

I took a deep breath, exhaled and when I shot, he dropped dead in his tracts. I dropped everything and I ran out of the blind. I was so excited, but then I started freaking out because I couldn’t find him. I turned around and looked back, and in my excitement, I had run right past him. I was videotaping the whole thing, so as I ran back to him, I was shaking uncontrollably, and you could hear the excitement in my voice. It finally hit me that I just killed a monster piebald. I started tearing up and saying “Thank you God, thank you for this amazing deer.”

A little while later my buddy Rylee came to pick me up on the 4-wheeler. He was so excited for me, he teared up and said you deserve this deer as hard as you have been hunting. It is so nice to have good friends who you can enjoy such good memories with and that get just as excited as you do. 

Thank you God for this buck of a lifetime.