Hunter: Brian Helmey
Points: 19 (8L, 11R)
County: Effingham
Season: 2024-2025
Hunt Story
The history of this buck started 3 years ago when a deer showed up on camera with high hopes of being a good deer for the area we hunt, which is a small family farm. We had watched this deer turn into a nice buck in 2023 with 6 tines on his left side and 4 on his right. We — me and my middle son — made a decision to let him walk, so he was off limits for any of the family to shoot. Going into 2024 summer we started getting pictures of what we thought was the same deer, so we kept watching him and eventually realized it was him, but this time he had matching sides of a main frame 12 with a lot of extra points. We then decided that If we could get a chance we would take this deer this year, but we had never really where able to put our eyes on him until 11/3/2024 my oldest son and grandson where hunting and the buck crossed the back of a food plot right at dark and didn’t get a shot. One week later I was hunting over the same food plot and was watching two young does feeding. Started getting late and they were feeding away and was looking like the day would end with no bucks being seen, so I made the decision to slip over to another field. When I got to the other field I slipped in and spotted the buck chasing a doe straight toward me. Deer stopped about 75 yards away, so I was able to get a shot off hitting him in the front shoulder, the deer wheeled around and ran away to about 150 yards and stopped so I was able to get the second shot off trying to keep him from going to the woods. Deer ran again but I couldn’t tell which way, so it was getting late so decided to come home and get some lights and my son. Took about 30 minutes but my son found the deer just inside the wood line.
