Hunter: Patrick Holton
Points: 9 (4L, 5R)
County: Lee
Season: 2018-2019
Hunt Story
This buck had been seen several times on a particular area of our farm over the past couple of years. This time of the season the rut gets kicked off very well in our area of the state, so I made sure I took some time off work to be able to hunt as many days as I could. Not having any trail-camera pictures of the deer since December 2017, it made it difficult to track down where he possibly could be. After the first several days of hunting being very uneventful for older age class buck sightings, I decided to go to a particular stand that had a history of seeing a lot of deer. At this point I was more excited to sit somewhere I could see a lot of deer more than anything, because my hopes of seeing an older buck to shoot was far in the back of my mind now. As it started to get daylight I saw a couple young bucks cruising through the planted pines I was sitting in and within 5 minutes this buck was trailing behind them. When he came out of the pines he was trying to get into a large block of hardwoods. He was out of range for a clear shot, so I grunted several times to him then snort wheezed. That's all it took for him to travel down the road towards my stand. He ultimately stopped only 50 yards from my stand. I made a solid quartering to shot in the shoulder and he ran only 40 yards into the woods.
