Deer of the Year

2010 was another top season for North Carolina trophy bucks.

From the season’s beginning in September through November’s rut, it quickly became apparent that North Carolina deer hunters experiencing a special year in 2010.

Trophy bucks began falling almost as soon as the green flag fell for archery season on Sept. 11. Muzzleloader and gun hunters continued to bag big deer during the primary rut in early November and continued through the secondary rut in December.

Some observers had predicted a big season for trophy bucks because of the first season of unrestricted crossbow hunting and the addition of an extra week of muzzleloading season. Others pointed to the success of the “2-buck” limit in piedmont and western counties as a key reason for stockpiling large bucks.

The effect of increased crossbow and muzzleloader effort can’t be confirmed or dismissed until this spring, when the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s deer biologist, Evin Stanford, finishes his statistical study of the statewide deer harvest of 2010-11.

But certainly since 2000, when the 2-buck limit was imposed, hunters have bagged more large bucks each year. Even in the eastern half of the state, where dog-hunting reigns, a lot of hunters have opted for quality deer management.

North Carolina Sportsman attempts to find the top bucks taken and presents them in our “Deer of the Year” issue. Here are some of the best bucks we found, showing the Tarheel State’s deer herd is indeed healthy and perhaps even more balanced than any time in recent history.

Person youth pops 10-pointer

Jeremy Martin received a Thanksgiving prize not many hunters of any age can claim.

Hunting near his home in the Person County town of Rougemont, Martin, a 17-year-old high-school senior, dropped a nearly-perfect 10-pointer that’s been green-scored at 166 6/8 gross and 153 net Boone-and-Crockett inches.

“I was out of school on a Wednesday and went on my lunch break to check a (trail) camera,” he said. “As I was going through the photos, I saw this buck on three or four (pictures).

“I told my stepdaddy, Scott Morris, I had a 160-class buck on the trail cam and he said, ‘Nah, you don’t,’” Martin said.

Determined to kill the buck, Martin hunted him for 14 days before getting his chance.

“I was in a tree stand on the edge of a planted pine field and had cutover all around me,” said Martin, who had killed an 8-pointer during blackpowder season on a cornpile near the same stand. “Behind me was a creek and hardwoods.”

Rising early on Thanksgiving, he was in place by 5:45 a.m.

“I heard three or four bucks fighting in the woods behind me, then two 3-pointers came out of the woods and started eating corn,” he said.

After a doe walked to the corn pile, the bucks walked away, and Martin began using a Mad Call grunt call.

“I was using the call about every 10 minutes, then at 7:05, I looked up, and the big buck walked out from underneath a tree,” he said. “All I could see was those horns. My legs started jumping; I was shaking all over.”

The buck stood looking directly at the young hunter, trying to see the buck that had made the grunting noises, then it turned and started walking.

“I just hollered ‘Hey!’ He stopped, and I shot him at 75 yards with my Remington .270,” Martin said. “He jumped in the air and took off, and I shot again, then he was standing at the edge of the cutover.”

While preparing to shoot a third time, the youngster watched the buck topple. The buck’s rack measures 19 inches inside with a left main beam of 23 6/8 inches and a right side main beam of 24 4/8 inches.

Beanfield buck

Most successful bowhunters use tree stands, but Tony Norman of Mount Gilead ignored that tactic to bag the biggest buck of his life.

On Sept. 12, the first legal Sunday for bowhunting in North Carolina, he was on the ground between two unharvested soybean fields when he arrowed what may be the widest-racked whitetail killed in the state last season.

“A friend from Louisiana, Regan Martin, was hunting with me in Richmond County, along with another buddy, Jay Jordan,” said Norman, 45, a building contractor who was on the ground at the corner of the soybean food plot that joined a bigger soybean field with a woods strip between them. His two friends were at other spots along the edges.

“I had a folding chair, but I had to sit up to see over the soybeans,” he said. “I basically wanted to watch the smaller food plot, but I could see 300 yards down the side of the (larger) field. At the edge of the field where it met the woods, the deer had browsed the beans to about a foot (tall), and I had about a 30-yard shot if a deer came into that area.”

Norman, who used Primos Silver scent-control spray, received a text message from Jordan, who said six does were moving along the edge of the food plot.

“I eased up and looked and saw two nice bucks about 100 yards north of me, then they fed back into the field,” he said. “One was really wide, and the other was tall. The tall-racked buck was in velvet, but the other wasn’t and appeared to be the bigger deer.”

The two bucks repeated their movements twice, appearing at 80 yards, then a third time at 25 to 30 yards. Norman kept easing his head up over the beans to check out their position.

When he looked the last time, the two bucks were in the field but behind him.

“I had to turn my chair around,” Norman said.

But when he moved the chair, it clanked.

“I was looking at the bucks when the chair clanked, and the bigger one picked up his head and started walking toward me,” Norman said.

The startled hunter eased down on his knees, hoping the buck would enter the cropped-down section of the soybean field.

“I noticed a little grassy strip between us, and I said to myself if he takes four or five more steps, I’ll have about a 25-yard shot,” Norman said.

Sure enough, the big wide-racked buck cooperated and stepped into the opening at 5:45 p.m.

“I had already drawn my bow, so I eased up and saw (the buck’s) shoulder and released,” said Norman, who was shooting a Hoyt Katera set at 70 pounds with Beman ICS carbon arrows and Rage broadheads.

The arrow penetrated the buck’s ribs, passed through its vital organs and struck the ribs on the opposite side.

“He ran in a circle in the field, then headed toward the woods, and I saw him fall,” said Norman, who slipped away and went to meet Martin and Jordan. They returned and found the buck at the edge of the field.

“When I first saw him, I thought (the rack) might be 20 inches inside, and he’d go 130 (inches),” Norman said. “But we got to looking, and we thought, ‘That’s a pretty good deer; no, that’s a really good deer.’”

When Norman, who has taken four deer in the 150-inch range with a bow, put a tape on the rack, its outside spread measured 25½ inches, and the inside spread was 23 5/8 inches with a tip-to-tip length of 22¾ inches.

The buck’s main beams were 23 2/8 and 24 inches long, with four tines between seven and eight inches long. With only 4 3/8 inches of deductions, the rack grosses 155 Boone-and-Crockett inches with net score of 150 5/8.

“If he had normal tines, I think he easily would have been a Boone-and-Crockett (qualifier),” Norman said.

Trophy wows Yadkin man

Kyle Drinkuth moved to Boonville in Yadkin County from Miami, Fla., 4½ years ago, but he already was familiar with western North Carolina.

“(My family) had been coming up here for years,” he said. “We have uncles living at Little Switzerland, so we made a lot of visits to North Carolina.”

After Drinkuth’s brother moved to North Carolina six years ago to work for Richard Childress Racing, it wasn’t long before Drinkuth followed and discovered how much bigger North Carolina deer were compared to Florida deer.

On Nov. 23, Drinkuth shot a 17-point non-typical whose antlers have been gross-scored at 163 2/8 Boone-and-Crockett inches and 156 1/8 net inches.

“I live on 109 acres in Yadkin County that’s mostly soybean fields separated by little wood patches that deer use as travel areas,” said Drinkuth, who works at a Winston-Salem body shop.

Drinkuth wasn’t in a tree stand but getting ready for work when he got his chance at the monster buck.

“I stepped out on my porch about 7 a.m. and saw a doe running across a soybean field, probably 250 yards from my house, then saw this buck staring at her from the top of a hill,” he said.

Drinkuth ran inside his house, threw a jacket on over his blue t-shirt, put on some boots and slipped into a hayfield beside his house.

“But I got anxious because I took an off-the-shoulder shot at about 200 yards and flat-out missed him,” he said. “The doe ran away, but for some reason, (the buck) kept standing there.”

Drinkuth crawled to a barbed-wire fence on to get a rest for his rifle, ranged the distance at 186 yards and pulled the trigger. The buck dropped in its tracks.

Its right main beam measured 23¼ inches, with a 6-inch brow tine, two 7-inch tines and another that was 6¼ inches. On the left side, the main beam was 23¾ inches, with a 6-inch brow tine and three more tines measuring 8 7/8, 6 1/8 inches and six inches.The inside spread was 17¼ inches, and the deer weighed an estimated 200 pounds.

“I showed the photo of the deer to all my buddies in Florida and said, ‘See, this is the kind of deer you can get in North Carolina,’” Drinkuth said.

Prayer answered

Felix “Tony” Futrell had sent a lot of prayers heavenward in his 67 years, but he never had one answered as quickly as he did Nov. 19.

“I was talking with the Lord the Monday before I shot the buck, and I told Him I hadn’t killed a decent one since 1964, and I’d sure love to get another one,” said Futrell, the pastor of Bullock Baptist Church in Granville County. “Lo and behold, He gave me one.”

A neighboring landowner had the buck’s photos on his trail camera for three years and had hunted it during that time.

“He told me it’d score 170 inches,” Futrell said, “and he scores deer for the Dixie Deer Classic. Last year, it was an 11-pointer.”

In 2009, Futrell had seen a big scrape on a path leading to the field where he was hunting.

“I put my climbing stand up the Monday before I got the buck and didn’t see anything on the path leading to the field, so I moved the stand closer the next day,” he said. “I didn’t go Wednesday, then missed a big doe on Thursday.”

Things didn’t look promising Friday, Futrell said; he’d seen nothing and decided to climb down from his stand a few minutes after 5 p.m.

“I’d got in the stand at 3 and had sat there for a couple of hours and was getting ready to come down when I heard a deer walking,” he said. “I saw him across the field.”

Futrell said events happened so quickly he didn’t have a chance to study the buck’s antlers before putting the crosshairs of his Nikon Monarch scope, mounted on his .30-06 Remington, on the deer’s shoulder. When Futrell pulled the trigger this time — the shot later measured 136 steps — the big deer fell in its tracks.

“I admit I was nervous and must have jerked the rifle when I shot,” he said. “I hit him in the neck. When I walked to him I said, ‘God, I don’t deserve this.’”

Futrell’s trophy had a 21-inch inside spread and 14 scoreable points and will be officially scored at the Dixie Deer Classic in Raleigh next month.

“My church members were happy for me, along with the man who had hunted him for three years,” he said. “He was very gracious and gave me the trail-cam photos the next Sunday at our men’s breakfast. He said if somebody else killed the buck, he was glad it was me.”

Election Day buck

Eugene “PeeWee” Brafford, 76, of Pinehurst, has six grandchildren and 16 great grandchildren.

Retired from Asplundh Tree Service since 1995 after 44 years of service, he once supervised crews contracted to service Carolina Power & Light Company.

“I’ve hunted every chance I get since then,” he said.

But with all those children and grandchildren, sometimes it’s been difficult to find the time to be in the woods.

“I was supposed to go opening day (of muzzleloader season, Oct. 30 in the central region) but I had to wait until Nov. 2, Election Day,” Brafford said. “I voted early, then drove 50 miles to Pittsboro (in Chatham County) to hunt.”

He climbed in a tree stand that morning to watch a cornpile near the edge of a pond. After a 2½-hour wait, a spike buck appeared, chasing two does around the cornpile. Then, Brafford saw a huge-racked buck start to walk out into the open at 5:10 p.m.

“The buck stuck his shoulder out of the bushes (and) didn’t pay any attention to the three other deer, so I put the crosshairs of my Thompson 54-caliber muzzleloader on his shoulder, steadied on the window sill and pulled the trigger,” he said.

The 19-point non-typical fell in its tracks. The distance was 110 yards “where I’ve got my gun zeroed in,” Brafford said.

Brafford hasn’t scored the deer, with drop tines on each antler, but he said he couldn’t reach around the bases of the antlers.

“I said, ‘Praise the Lord!’” when I got to him and saw his horns,” he said. “I’ve got a 12-pointer I shot in 1997 hanging on the wall, and this deer is a lot bigger.”

Brafford theorized the reason the buck didn’t chase the two does or the spike was because it didn’t have any testicles.

Person youth bags big 8-pointer

Colt Barnette of Roxboro, a 13-year-old student at Northern Person Middle School, likely downed the top-scoring 8-pointer in North Carolina last year.

It almost surely will have the longest single tine of any North Carolina buck.

Hunting Nov. 23 with his father, Zeb Barnette, at his uncle’s property in Person County, Colt downed his second buck — the first also was an 8-pointer — and one of North Carolina’s best all-time 8-pointers.

His father scored the buck at 172 gross and a 158 net inches.

“My dad was sitting on the ground next to the tree I was in,” Colt Barnette said. “Loggers were in the place we usually hunt a mile away. My uncle said he’d shot and missed this deer the previous Saturday. It was limping.”

The stand had been hunted only twice the previous two years.

“I saw the deer running toward me,” Colt Barnette said, “but I couldn’t get a shot, then he ran across the creek. He was limping on his back leg.”

Taking aim with his .280 Remington, the boy shot at the big buck, which continued running down the side of the creek. In the gathering darkness, neither one of the two hunters saw the animal fall.

Colt’s father called the landowner to bring a spotlight, and after he did, they walked to the spot where Colt had shot the deer and found a few droplets of blood. After following the trail 50 to 75 yards, they found a steep bank where it appeared the buck had staggered, then slipped. Looking down, they saw the deer floating in the creek.

The inside spread of the main-frame 4×4 rack measured 19 inches, with the right main beam an outstanding 28 6/8 inches and the left main 27½ inches long.

Although the brow tine on the left side was only 3½ inches long, the next one was an amazing 14½ inches, including a 9½-inch abnormal point, while the third tine measured 10 inches. On the right side, the brow tine was 3½, inches with next two tines 11¾ and 12 inches.

Colt Barnette became a celebrity at school when he showed his classmates photos of the buck.

“They were like ‘Wow!’ and even the teachers were impressed,” he said.

In five minutes, 260 inches

Northampton County was probably the best county in North Carolina for trophy bucks in 2010.

Ryan Nichols, 29, of Wilkesboro added to the region’s legacy Nov. 27 when he shot a 10-pointer that has been green-scored at 157 gross and 154 3/8 net inches. Nichols had downed an 8-pointer five minutes earlier.

“I killed my first deer there 20 years ago in October and have been in a dog-hunting club there since I was nine years old,” he said.

Nichols was supposed to turn out the dogs that day, but his friend, Eric Anderson of Wilkesboro, volunteered for that task, so Nichols was given his friend’s stand.

“(The stand) is in a low area near the Meherrin River,” he said. “It’s usually flooded, but it was dry this time.”

The club released a pack of dogs at 3:15 p.m., but a different pack had opened up earlier that afternoon.

“I heard a deer coming, and it turned out to be an 8-pointer,” he said. “He came running past me at 60 yards, and I threw up my shotgun and rolled him. I walked over to him, called my wife on the cell phone, told her I’d got a buck, then I said I thought I heard other dogs coming.”

He had just hit “end” on his phone when a second buck appeared on the same trail as the first deer — but headed in the opposite direction. Nichols knelt beside the 8-pointer (which measured 106 inches) and got ready.

“He was coming straight to me, and I shot him at 20 yards,” he said. “I knocked him down, he got up, and I shot him a second time, and that put him down for good. I shot him a third time because he was making a growling sound.”

The second buck had an inside spread of 17 1/8 inches, main beams of 22 and 22 1/8 inches, and two tines on each beam between nine and 10 inches.

“I later looked at my cell phone, and I had taken the picture of the first buck at 3:27 p.m. and the 10-pointer at 3:32 p.m. — five minutes apart,” Nichols said.

Lee County produces huge 8-pointer

This past deer season was productive for parts department employees at Chatlee Boats of Sanford, but it was particularly good for boat mechanic John Parker.

He used a muzzleloader to down one of the most-stunning 10-pointers taken in North Carolina this past season.

“I was actually hunting very near my house in Lee County,” he said. “I have 12 acres, and my father-in-law has 12 acres right beside me. We had seen this deer on trail cameras since August. I’ve been feeding deer corn at this place since the summer.”

Parker climbed in his stand at 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 9 and saw does being chased along the edge of a creek by a wide-racked buck.

“He was acting like an elk, trying to herd his does together, I think, to find which ones were in heat,” he said.

The buck jumped across a creek, then stood still, offering Parker a shot at about 80 yards with his Knight in-line disk muzzleloader topped by a Bushnell scope.

The animal dropped when the hunter pulled the trigger.

“It felt like 200 yards, but it was only 80,” Parker said, “I had to sit down and calm myself for about 15 minutes before I could get down.”

The buck was an 8-pointer that was rough-scored at 152 gross and 148½ net inches.

“The rack is nearly perfect and had a 21½-inch inside spread with only one half-inch kicker on one side,” he said.

The deer weighed 170 pounds.

Jonathan Nowell, parts manager at Chatlee, killed a 140-class 10-pointer the same day in Lee County.

Rosman hunter downs great mountain buck

Austin Pettit, 19, of Rosman, used a bow and arrow to down one of the highest-scoring mountain bucks of the year in December.

“I was riding my 4-wheeler about three miles from my house (in 2009) when I saw great sign around one of our food plots,” he said. “There were scrapes and rubs everywhere, some of the rubs as big around as my leg. A buck had torn up a bunch of hemlocks.”

Pettit decided to return to the spot to scout in 2010 and found the same sign — lots of rubs on large trees and scrapes.

“I knew it had to be a big buck,” he said.

Placing his stand along the edge of one of two food plots, he was ready Dec. 3.

“I decided this year I was going to bow-hunt only,” he said. “There’s nothing quite like the adrenaline rush you get when you are close enough to a buck to hear the arrow hit. It’s not at all like a rifle where you just hear ‘Boom.’”

Pettit was featured in North Carolina Sportsman in 2006 for bagging a 29-pound, 2-ounce turkey gobbler, one of the biggest of the year, and he bagged a 29-pound, 12-ounce gobbler in 2010.

But hefty gobblers are much more commonplace in the far western North Carolina mountains than big deer, especially 9-pointers that total 167 inches.

Pettit got his chance Dec. 2 when he climbed into his stand before daylight. About 20 minutes after good light, two does came into the food plot, and the young hunter made three or four grunt calls.

“I heard something coming down the side of the ridge, really coming hard and making a lot of noise,” he said.

A buck charged into the field, stopping about 35 yards away from Pettit’s tree stand.

“I raised up my Mathews Solo Cam Switchback bow,” he said. “I was using Beman Xpress carbon arrows with 6-blade fixed Muzzy broadheads. I made a really good shot and hit the buck right behind the shoulder.”

The big deer bolted away across the field and into a thicket before falling.

“He maybe went 70 yards,” said Pettit, who had killed a 10-point buck a couple seasons ago that measured 145 inches.

This buck carried a main-frame 8-pointer with one long, abnormal point, and three 1-inch stickers.

“I’ve let a lot of small bucks walk in hopes of getting a chance at a deer like this one,” he said. “It was the best buck of my life.”

His father, Brett Pettit, agreed.

“This deer is the best I have seen from up here,” he said. “The taxidermist who is doing the mount said you just don’t see bucks like this come from Transylvania County.”

Caswell hunter scores with 165-class buck

Tommy Poteat, who lives in northwest Caswell County. bagged the best buck of his life the easy way.

“I was hunting at a 145-acre farm from inside an old abandoned camper,” he said. “It’s a place I hunt normally when it’s bad weather outside, raining or something.”

On Oct. 30, the first day of Central section muzzleloader season, Poteat, 46, a mailman for the U.S. Postal Service, was just hoping to put some venison in his freezer before he left for work to train another employee.

“I hadn’t seen this buck at all,” he said, “but my brother-in-law had two pictures of him on his trail camera. (The buck) just showed up the day I was hunting, I guess, cruising for does.”

Poteat had a cornpile about 80 yards away.

“(The deer) walked out of the woods about 7:30 and started eating at the cornpile, but I knew he wasn’t going to hang around,” he said. “He put his nose in the cornpile, then started walking away.”

Raising his Knight .50-caliber muzzleloader, fitted with a Redfield scope, Poteat zeroed in on the deer’s right foreleg and pulled the trigger.

“Boy, he took off then, ran across a dirt road and piled up about 130 yards away,” he said.

Eric Knowles of Broken Arrow Taxidermy in Reidsville scored the 10-point rack at 165 inches.

“I’ve killed a lot of big deer in Caswell, but none like this one,” Poteat said. “Normally, I can load a deer by myself, but it took two people to get him on the truck, so I’d estimate his body weight at 200 pounds.”

Granville crossbow monster

Cameron Metcalf is only 15, but he has the mentality of a veteran deer hunter. That’s what helped him arrow a massive Granville County 10-pointer last October.

“(The buck) had been the focus of my whole bow-hunting season,” said Metcalf, a ninth-grader from Wilson who attends North Raleigh Christian Academy. “I had (pictures) of him on my trail camera since September.”

After six straight days of rain, Metcalf said he had a “good feeling” about hunting Oct. 1.

“Me and my dad went to Granville County right after school, and I got in my stand about 4 p.m.,” said Metcalf, who carried a Horton crossbow given to him as a birthday present by his uncle, Jeff Christoff. He went to a stand between a cutover bedding area and a large stand of oak trees.

“Acorns were dropping, and that’s what I think (the buck) heard,” Metcalf said.

An 8-pointer appeared at a cornpile 20 yards from his stand, but Metcalf didn’t have a clear shot. With 10 minutes of shooting light left, the big buck appeared.

“I mistakenly put the 30-yard sight pin on him, and the shot clipped the top of his lung and liver,” Metcalf said. “He tucked his tail down and ran off.”

Metcalf and his father tracked the deer’s spotty blood trail for an hour, going 200 yards, but didn’t find the buck that day. A search the next day also proved unproductive. Landowner Glenn Preddy found the buck two days later after its body had been ravaged by coyotes.

“I was disappointed we didn’t salvage any meat, but I about flipped out when I saw the rack,” Metcalf said. “It’s a main-frame 10-pointer, but the (fourth tine) on the right side has been broken off, and it has two 3-inch sticker points, one behind each brow tine.”

Palmated Rockingham 13-pointer a true trophy

Eric Minter of Ruffin had a problem with a buck he was watching in August: he couldn’t tell how many points protruded from its rack — and Minter had a good pair of binoculars.

“I saw him with four or five other bucks in August, but he had such an unusual rack I couldn’t tell what exactly was on his head,” said Minter, a 24-year-old Danville, Va., fireman. “He had by far the biggest rack, but not the widest.”

The buck, killed Nov. 19 in Rockingham County, had 13 scoreable points.

“It’s a good rack to look at, but not very wide,” said Eric Knowles of Broken Arrow Taxidermy, who green-scored the buck at 147 inches.

“I was hunting a food plot located on the edge of a cutover I had planted in the fall with oats and Austrian winter peas,” he said. “I’d been hunting hard for two weeks and had seen some nice bucks, but no shooters. My trail camera had been taking a lot of pictures of deer feeding in my food plot, but they were mostly at night.”

That afternoon, Minter climbed into a ladder stand. With about 20 minutes of shooting light left, he hadn’t seen any deer and was beginning to become frustrated.

“All of a sudden, a buck stepped out of the cutover and walked along the edge of my food plot and started feeding,” he said. “One look through my binoculars was all I needed.”

He picked up his Ruger .270 rifle, looked through the Nikon Pro Staff scope and took the 70-yard shot. He climbed down after 10 or 15 minutes, then walked to where the buck was when he shot. Minter found a good blood trail leading into the cutover, which he followed for about 40 yards.

“There was the buck I had been after all season,” he said.

The deer had an inside spread of 17 inches and heavy, palmated beams that were thicker than their bases. The deer had 9-inch brow tine and “crab claws” on both of its next tines.

Rattlin’ bag works for Chatham county hunter

These days, it doesn’t take a lot of land to find a whitetail buck. However, the deer herd that frequents the land must have good genetics and a history of producing big racks if a trophy buck is the goal.

Take, for instance, the case of Shawn York, who was hunting a 15-acre lease in Chatham County on Nov. 20.

“I’ve let a lot of young deer walk,” he said, “but I actually was hunting a big 9-pointer I had trail camera pictures of; I didn’t know this deer was around.”

Sitting in a tree stand on the edge of a cutover, York saw the buck 150 yards from his cornpile, making a scrape underneath a small tree, but a shot was impossible because of the limbs between the deer and York. His problem was obvious — how to get the buck within shooting range.

“I started grunting and rattling with my home-made rattlin’ bag, but he didn’t pay much attention and kept on walking,” York said.

But 30 minutes later, he heard something crashing through the cutover, coming to him.

“He was just busting through there,” York said. “I think he was coming to see the fight he thought he’d heard when I was rattling.”

When the buck walked to within 40 yards of his stand, York grunted again to stop him, then zeroed in with his Remington .280.

“I shot him with a 150-grain Swift Sirocco bullet, and that put him down,” York said.

With a heavy mass rack, the buck has an inside spread of 15½ inches and tines on each beam measuring five, eight and 10 inches, plus brow tines that measured four and 5½ inches.

“(The rack) has been rough scored at 145 inches,” said York, who also has hunted whitetails in Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia.

“I killed a nice deer in Missouri in 2005, but this is my best buck and my second 10-pointer this year.

“What a dream season it has been.”

Harnett County yields late-season monster

A motorcyle accident, a big snow storm and two deer-tracking friends combined to give Dennis McPherson of Harnett County his buck of a lifetime and perhaps the top non-typical whitetail killed in North Carolina during 2010.

“I got in a bad motorcycle accident last August and had to have reconstructive surgery around my eye,” said McPherson, a 33-year-old, long-haul truck driver. “Then, when I got ready for deer season, I found out I couldn’t see good enough through my sighting eye enough to shoot my rifle.”

McPherson, a veteran deer hunter, switched to a Remington Model 1100 12-gauge shotgun and loaded it with .00 buckshot.

With eight inches of snow still on the ground in Harnett County after a Christmas Day storm, McPherson got in a 17-foot-tall ladder stand near a swamp at 6:45 a.m.

“I started hitting my rattling horns as soon as I got settled in the stand,” he said. “About 7:05 a.m. a big 6-pointer stepped out 40 yards in front of me. I was fixin’ to shoot him, but he kept looking behind him, and something told me to wait.”

Five minutes after the 6-pointer walked away, a buck with huge antlers walked out into the same clearing at the same distance, a stunning sight to McPherson.

“I was getting ready to unload the gun on him, but I was so excited I only shot once,” he said. “I later thought the gun had jammed on me, but it hadn’t.”

The buck sprang away “into a big swampy area,” McPherson said.

The deer, hit by five pellets of buckshot, didn’t fall.

“He must have run a mile,” said McPherson, who called two friends, Larry Reynolds and Sammy Thomas, to help him track the deer.

“We found where he laid down 30 yards from where I shot, but then he got up and started walking,” McPherson said.

The three followed the buck’s tracks and dribbles of blood in the snow for 400 yards until they came to a creek. Then things got really hairy.

“We saw where a deer had scrambled up the opposite bank of the creek, but it must have been the 6-pointer that joined him, because we followed it but weren’t seeing any blood,” McPherson said.

Backtracking to the creek, they “crawled along” in the creek for 50 or 60 yards before finding the spot where the injured buck had scrambled up the bank.

“We found him 50 yards from the creek,” McPherson said. “I picked him up and kissed his mouth.”

Taxidermist Andy Spears of Troy scored the buck’s the main-frame 4×4 rack — which also carries seven sticker points — at 172 3/8 gross inches. McPherson also won a big-buck contest at Asheboro’s Strider Buick Dealership, where the antlers measured 170 4/8 inches.