Jones County Bucks Fight To The Death

My name is Donna Simmons, and my fiancés name is Darren Carson. We both work at Robins Air Force Base and live in Gray. We both love to hunt and fish.

This past deer season started off very exciting for us. We set up a camera on my food plot back in August 2016 to see what we could be expecting for the 2016-2017 deer season. So we were very excited to see a large 11-pointer with nice brow tines and a split G2, but we were more excited to see that we had an exceptional 8-pointer that was really wide and thick mass for our area, and they also seemed to travel together.

We saw a lot of movement after the season started, but no Big Boys were showing up. Darren took off the week before Thanksgiving to hunt, but he only had one deer he wanted so anything else got a pass.

On Friday, Nov. 18, I took off and joined him. He texted me about 9:30 that the large 8-pointer was headed my way chasing a doe. It was disappointing when he never showed up.

We just were not seeing the big ones after that, and they were not on any cameras. The super moon was giving them the opportunity to travel and feed at night.

On Dec. 13, I went to my stand, and Darren headed to a ground blind at the other side of the property by the creek. All morning and still nothing was being seen, so he was going to walk the creek back to me. About 20 yards away he saw a coyote coming up the creek bed, so Darren sat down behind a tree and watched. It first Darren said it looked like the coyote had a baby deer in the creek. The coyote caught wind and took off, so Darren went to investigate.

Sadly, it was both of our big bucks. They had locked horns. The 11-pointer had broken the 8-pointer’s neck and couldn’t get loose. From the rub marks on the racks, it looks like the 11-pointer struggled to get loose for a few days before the coyotes finally got him. Needless to say, I was beyond sad. Not only for us not getting the big deer we had seen on my camera, but because they had to suffer.

We got them both, just not like we wanted to, but its still a cool story!

Like Darren said when he called me that day, “ you will probably never see something like this again, most people never will.”