12-Point Randolph County Mega Buck

Before deer season opened this year, Jeff Hill, of Tucker, had been hoping that he would be lucky enough to take a mountable buck this season. He succeeded in a way far beyond his dreams. His Nov. 23 hunt turned out to be his ultimate deer-hunting fantasy.

The 1991-92 deer hunting season hadn’t started out with so much promise, says Jeff. Up to Nov. 23, he was 0 for 2 shooting at bucks.

“I had sat in a stand many a time dreaming about taking a really big buck,” said Jeff. “But I never believed it would actually happen.” His deer-hunting fantasy came true on Nov. 23 with this 12-point Randolph Co buck.”

Jeff hunts his uncle’s 200-acre farm in Randolph County. Centerpiece to the tract is an irregularly shaped peanut field that’s about twice as long as it is wide. There is a cotton field to one side and a hardwood bottom below the field and good cover around it.

Jeff had been hunting the field all year and had not seen a huge buck. He had seen some large deer tracks and he had found a big shed the year before. He had seen plenty of deer, but they were mostly does. In fact, one day during the second week of the season, he had counted 19 deer in the field, does and small bucks. He had also missed a chance at an 8-point buck in the field on opening weekend. The buck had offered a broadside shot at about 130 yards, but Jeff had missed the offhand shot—three times.

Then his luck went from bad to bizarre. On the third weekend of the season he shot at another buck and the deer dropped in the field.

“That’s more like it,” he thought.

Jeff didn’t go straight to the buck but started out of the field to get his truck. As he walked away, the “dead” buck jumped up and ran off—leaving no blood trail to follow.

“I was about to give up,” said Jeff. “I was thinking, ‘what else could happen?'”

Jeff’s luck turned around Nov. 23. That afternoon Jeff and his wife Suzie headed to the woods to check for activity at some scrapes. The skies were cloudless blue, and there was no wind. But they didn’t quite make it to the woods. They were stopped by quail. When a covey of quail flushed, the Hills hurried back to the house for their bird dog and went quail hunting. Deer hunting, at least for the moment, was forgotten.

Then at about a quarter to 5, Jeff noticed the afternoon shadows getting long.

“Come on,” he said, “We’ve got to hurry.”

They dropped the bird dog off at the house and headed for the peanut field to hunt the last hour of daylight.

Jeff put Suzie in a ladder stand on one side of the field and walked 150 yards across the field and went up a tree in his climber. Suzie doesn’t hunt deer, but Jeff had asked her to go along that afternoon to watch.

“Jeff had told me that I had to be quiet, or the deer would hear me,” Suzie said.

The husband and wife team were settled in and quiet by about 5:05 p.m.

By 5:30 they had not seen a deer. Then Suzie had to cough.

“When I coughed, I thought, ‘Jeff’s going to kill me for making noise,'” said Suzie. “But then I heard some rustling in the woods that sounded like something getting up behind me, and then I could hear branches breaking like something was walking toward the field. I looked down the field for several minutes and didn’t see anything, then I looked back and saw the deer.”

Jeff had already seen the deer and had picked up his Remington 742 .30-06 and was lining up on the buck.

“I saw the rack and knew it was good enough to mount,” said Jeff. “But I had no idea it was as big as it was.”

He pulled the trigger at about the same moment Suzie first saw the buck.

At the shot, the deer bucked and took off across the field. Jeff fired three more rounds at the running deer before it disappeared into a hardwood head across the field.

“The rack didn’t seem to fit the deer,” said Jeff. “It was so wide and massive it looked like an illusion.”

He knew he had been shooting at a big one.

“Can I get down now?” Suzie called from across the field.

She did and walked halfway out into the field.

“Boy, it’s going to be a shame if you missed that one!” she yelled.

She had seen the deer well enough to know that it carried a spectacular rack.

Jeff, who had bad luck twice before, was fuming because he thought he had missed. He and Suzie found the buck’s tracks in the field and started to trail the deer. About 75 yards later, Jeff started feeling a little better when they found the first drop of blood on a field road at the edge of the field. Jeff had only one bullet left, and it was starting to get dark. He decided to send Suzie back to his uncle’s house for bullets, his uncle and his bird dog to help find the deer.

Jeff’s uncle was leaving for work and didn’t have time to come help, so Suzie headed back to the peanut field with more bullets and the dog. It turned out that they wouldn’t be necessary.

“When I drove back, Jeff was standing at the edge of the field jumping up and down and yelling,” she said.

“I said, ‘Did you find him?'”

He said, “Yes! It’s a 12-pointer!”

After Suzie had left, Jeff had been too excited to wait at the edge of the field. He had walked into the woods, one step at a time, trying to follow the blood trail before he lost daylight. When he finally lost the trail 50 yards into the woods, he looked up and saw massive antlers standing more than 2 feet tall above the ground. Jeff’s first shot had hit the buck in the neck.

Jeff and Suzie took pictures of the buck in the woods, then tagged the deer and dragged it to the truck—Jeff pulling tail first with Suzie holding the antlers up to protect them. It took both of them to horse the 194-lb. live-weight buck into the pickup.

They drove to the house and called Jeff’s uncle, then took the deer into Cuthbert, straight to their uncle’s restaurant, the “Pig-it,” to show off the buck.

“It was amazing how much attention that deer attracted,” said Suzie. “People driving by would see the antlers sticking up over the truck bed, and they would turn around to follow us.”

They took the deer from the restaurant to a nearby service station parking lot where a crowd of 10 people formed around the buck with the spectacular antlers. When the owner of the service station showed up, he took one look at the rack and told Jeff, “I think you’ve got a Boone & Crockett there!”

Jeff, who wasn’t able to sleep much the night after taking his trophy buck has been amazed at all the hoopla surrounding the buck.

“For me, it’s been a privilege to just see such a big buck, much less to actually shoot one!”

Jeff likely does have Georgia’s second Boone & Crockett of the season. The rack was rough-scored in the mid 170s. After the required 60-day drying period, the rack should score above the 170 B&C minimum—and Jeff will finally have his mountable buck.

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