Travis “T-Bone” Turner Involved In Button Buck Chase

On Thursday September 14, a Heard County button buck wandered into downtown Franklin and into the gate of the fenced parking lot at the public library. Though it was having a hard day, its luck was on the upswing — a meeting of hunters who are trying to bring Quality Deer Management regulations to Heard County was just letting out of the library.

Travis Turner, of Hogansville, said that he and three friends, Bryan Schmeck, Joe Metzger and David Haynes, had just come out of the meeting when Travis heard something banging against the chain-link fence surrounding the parking lot. They found the button buck.

“We were just going to try to corral him to where he’d go out the gate, but he wouldn’t have none of that,” said Travis. “He’d go up there near the gate and then he’d run between us. He ran around the back of the building, and to make a long story short, we circled him around the building about three times. Finally, he got caught in some bushes and Bryan leaped in there on him and caught him.”

The hunters took the button buck across the street to a large field by the high school. The deer was panting and exhausted, and the hunters fetched water in a cooler for it to drink.

“We sat there for about an hour with him until he perked up, and we were going to let him run off across the field,” Travis said. “Instead, he ran off a 10-foot embankment into a ditch and landed on his head. We got down there and worked with him for about another hour, and then we loaded him up in a truck and took him out of town.”

Down near the Chattahoochee River, the hunters set the buck in the weeds and stayed with it another hour, giving it more water, then left. One of the hunters checked in the morning and found the deer had gone.

“It could have been any type of meeting, and it wouldn’t have been nowhere near as ironic as it being a QDM meeting,” Travis said.

Obviously, these hunters are strongly committed to protecting young bucks.