Trophy Buck Defined

Barry Simmons with his muzzleloader buck from Ossabaw Island WMA, the only buck for the island that is listed on GON’s Triple-Digit WMA Bucks list.

It was cold. I mean really cold. Cold and dead calm that morning as I slipped through the pines. Every step on the soft needles slowly and carefully thought out to avoid the snap of a twig or the crunch of a dry leaf. My destination, a stand I had hung weeks prior in anticipation of this hunt. My “rut stand” was a climber just off an old roadbed near the property line, a funnel that I had hunted several times over the years with much success.

With the first hurdle overcome, I made it to my destination undetected. It was all lining up for  an epic hunt. Perfect weather; stealthy entry. Now just to get up the tree.

But wait, where is my stand? I know I’m at the right tree. It is always this tree. It still bares the scars from the climber from seasons past. I find myself scanning the area anyway, maybe I put it on another tree? No. It’s gone. Stolen! My favorite stand gone from my favorite spot! No trace! No note! Nothing, just gone.

So there I was, a perfect November morning to be in the woods and no stand to hunt. In frustration, I started  making my way back through the pines. The property had been cut roughly eight or nine years prior. The trees, at that time, stood around 15 feet tall, and it was thick.

Standing roughly midway through the pines was an old, half rotten, wooden, platform stand. It had been left behind from the previous hunters who had leased the land before me. The stand, which stood around 12 feet tall, was built out of rough-cut, sawmill slabs.

As I approached the structure, I took a notion to climb on top and contemplate my next move.

“Do I have time to make it to another stand? The sun is just starting to rise. Maybe I should go back to camp and hunt the powerline? Maybe I should just go back to bed? This morning is shot anyway.”

From the platform, I was able to see 20 yards at best. Certainly not where I want to be sitting during the peak of the rut. Nevertheless, while I was sitting there stewing over the events of the morning, legs dangling over the side, with my rifle in my lap, I heard something coming. It’s a doe 10 yards out. As soon as I heard her coming, she was already there. Not running, but definitely in a hurry.

Seconds later, BAM! The biggest buck I had ever seen was standing right in front me. This buck was massive! A real stud! I just saw antlers! Heavy horns!  More points than I had time to count! Instinctively, I shouldered my rifle, took aim and… I COULD NOT PULL THE TRIGGER!

Did I mention it was cold? You see I had put on a thick pair of gloves to wear out to the stand. So thick that they would not clear the trigger guard. I quickly raised my hand to my mouth, pulled the glove off with my teeth and repositioned, only to see his hindquarters vanish into the pines. That deer had to have been at least a 150 inches! No 160 inches!

I sat there for another two hours hoping, praying for another chance, a redo. No glove, fingers freezing, I’ll be ready next time, but I never got a second chance. That buck was long gone, never to be seen again.

This is a story I’ve heard my little brother tell many times over the years. You see, I’ve been fortunate enough to be on a hunting club in middle Georgia with my family and friends for more than 20 years now. I’ve spent a lot of evenings around the campfire swapping stories like this one. As these stories are shared year after year, often times, the ones that got away become legendary.

One of those legends was the buck with split brow tines that my uncle Johnny had an encounter with. I can remember sitting around the campfire, captivated as he recounted the events of the hunt when he shot that legendary, split-tine buck. He told how they tracked the deer, searching for hours but never found it. He always told the best stories.

It was some five years after my uncle shot the buck, when I was scouting an area of the club with my big brother. It was early March. The leaves were just starting to bud, so the view in the woods was still pretty open. As we were walking along a creek, my brother spotted something white glistening in the sun. It was tucked back deep in a thicket on the opposite side of the creek.

What he saw was the bleached-out bones of a large buck. The deer was a heavy-horned 8-pointer with split brow tines. He had found the deer my uncle shot five years earlier. Amazingly, the rack had very little damage.

We later measured the rack and estimated he would have had a gross measurement somewhere in the neighborhood of 132 to 134 inches. It was, and still is, the largest buck harvested on our club, but when we presented the deer to our uncle, he was reluctant to believe that it was the deer he had shot. In the five years that had transpired since the hunt, the legend had outgrown the deer. Which brings me to my thought; recently some of our club members began to suggest that we should find another lease and give up the one we have. Their reasoning, “The quality of the deer on our property are not what they once were.”

Having been blessed to hunt that little piece of middle Georgia paradise over the past 30 years, it’s not an observation I concur with. I have observed that a mature buck generally has a gross score between 120 to 130 inches. Outside of a slim few counties, I believe that is true for most of the state. So I’m left wondering where this “not the quality they once were” idea is coming from.

Over the years some of our members have been hunting more out of state. Could this have altered their expectations? Could it be the pictures of Georgia giants that grace the pages of the GON every fall? How I do enjoy flipping through the pictures and reading the stories while dreaming of a giant Georgia monarch of my own some day. I have to keep in perspective that I’m looking at probably the top 2% of 120,000 bucks harvested.

Maybe it’s the images we see of the unnatural mutations that are being created on some of these deer farms? Could these images of deer with antlers so heavy they can’t hold their head up be creating some confusion when judging a trophy? Or, could it be “the one that got away,” the buck that gets a little bigger ever time the story is told. The stories of those legendary deer we have heard around the campfire for years, the ones that a possible encounter with gets us a little more excited every time we step in to the woods. Is that distorting reality?

I believe as hunters we sometimes can become overly obsessed with inches of bone. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all about a challenge, but if the only buck that will do for you is the next Georgia state record, you could be setting yourself up for a lot of heartache. I would be lying if I didn’t say every time I go in the woods that I am looking for that buck of a lifetime, but I also believe that sometimes we get so obsessed with antler size that we can’t recognize a trophy when it’s right in front of us. Context matters.

We are not all hunting row crops in south Georgia or the Fulton County suburbs. A trophy buck may look a little different from one property to the next. A trophy could also vary from hunt to hunt. Your first buck. The first buck killed with Papa’s old muzzleloader. Or a first deer taken with a recurve bow is a real trophy.

A friend of mine once made a longbow from a tree. He harvested cane from the creek bottom to make an arrow shaft. He fletched it with turkey feathers and attached it to the arrowhead he had carved from a deer bone. He then went hunting and successfully harvested a deer with it. Now that’s a trophy in my book! My wife would say that a trophy is the delicious venison that fills the freezer. She would also be quick to point out how I did a poor job of accomplishing that task last year.

However, there was one deer harvest on the club last season that nearly filled a freezer on his on, Elliott. I don’t often name deer, but this one was unique. He was a big-bodied deer with one antler on the right side that had four short points and a spike on the left. Not much for head gear, but he had been around a long, long time. He had rarely been seen in person but was captured by lots of trail-cam photos over the years; most of which were at night.

This past season, my son in-law, Blade, had an encounter with Elliott and was able to get the deal done. Elliott was aged at 7 1/2 years old. He was Blade’s first buck off the club. I dare say not many of us have matched wits with a 7 1/2-year-old buck and came out the victor? Trophy.

This past season I was blessed with my biggest trophy buck yet. He was  6 1/2-year-old and  field-dressed 120 pounds with a gross score of 108 inch and a net score of 103 1/8. Not exactly a Boone and Crockett, but a record nevertheless for the particular WMA I was hunting.

The real trophies are not just the deer that adorn our walls. It’s not the numbers on a Boone and Crockett score card. It is the memories that we have made. The stories we tell while sitting around a campfire as hunters have done from the beginning of time. Sharing the events of the evening hunt. Making a plan for tomorrow. Telling the tales of “the one that got away.” I sure wish I could hear my uncle Johnny tell the story of the split brow-tine buck one more time. Did I mention he was a great story teller?