In the Open

2006 season starts strong for Stokes County hunter.

Stokes County has produced some of North Carolina’s biggest bucks over the past half-dozen years, and it spit out another huge one on the opening day of bow season two months ago for hunter Jerrold Wade.Wade, an aircraft mechanic from the Davidson County town of Arcadia, arrowed a huge buck at 6:45 p.m., Sept. 9, the first day of the statewide archery season.

Hunting with his 14-year-old grandson, Cody Durham, Wade took a deer with an enormous body that was matched by the headgear it was carrying.

Joey Thompson, an official scorer for the N.C. Bow Hunters Association, met Wade when he brought the buck to John Brown’s Country Store No. 2 in King late that evening to register his kill. Thompson put a tape on the big 11-point buck — a typical 5×4 frame with two sticker points on the left antler — and green-scored the buck at 158 4/8 non-typical inches and 145 2/8 typical.

“I’ve never seen a buck like that before — never one even close to it — and I’ve seen 8s and 10s and 14s,” said Wade, who killed the buck on a piece of land he’s been hunting for seven years. “I had no idea he was around here. When I first saw him, I thought he was a mule deer, and I thought, ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’ ”

Thompson green-scored the deer, and some of the measurements he came up with were astounding. The buck had an inside spread of 17 1/2 inches and brow tines that measured 6 1/2- and 5 2/8-inches long, with the longest tines on each antler measuring 11 6/8 and 10 1/8 inches. The circumference around the bases of each antler pushed 5 inches, and the deer carried its mass all the way to the tips of its beams. Its two abnormal points — one between the second and third tines on the left beam and one projecting from the longest tine — measured 2 5/8 and 2 1/4 inches.

Even more amazing was the buck’s body size. Thompson said the buck weighed more than 200 pounds on the hoof.

“It took Jerrold, his two grandsons and his son-in-law to put it back in the back of the truck,” he said. “A deer that size is rare, especially this early in bow season before he’s been in the acorns a while and put on some more weight.”

Wade didn’t have an scales on which to weigh the buck, but one veteran hunter, Greg Robertson of King, whose 10-pointer from Stokes County was the biggest bow kill in North Carolina in 2003, saw the buck when it was checked at the store. He estimated the deer easily would have weighed 240 pounds or better on the hoof.

Wade said he and his grandson were barely able to drag the buck out of the woods, having to stop every few yards to catch their breath.

Wade and his grandson hunted that day in Loc-On tree stands about 40 yards apart in a patch of oaks and other hardwoods close not far from a thicket of 7-year-old planted pines and a half-acre food plot.

“I take him with me every chance I get,” Wade said. “We sit 40 yards apart so I can watch out for him and he can watch out for me.”

On the morning of opening day, they saw only wild turkeys — dozens of them. They got back in the woods that afternoon at 4:30 and saw nothing for two hours.

“All day it had been so hot — not any breeze at all — then around 5:45, the clouds rolled in and the wind blew up,” Wade said. “It got cold enough that I had to put on my jacket.

“I was looking to my left because I thought I’d heard something rustling the leaves, and when I turned around, this big buck was standing 30 yards away, eating white oak acorns. (Acorns) were all over, and the squirrels were up in the trees cutting ’em left and right.

“I didn’t move because my bow was hanging from the rack. I waited until (the buck) got his head behind an oak tree and got my bow down.

“There was an opening in front of him, but I knew if he got in the opening, seeing his antlers would affect me too much. There was a hole in the (branches and leaves) where I could see him, where his antlers were covered up, and I could get a shot at his shoulder through the hole.”

Wade was shooting a PSE compound bow and Easton XX75 aluminum arrows tipped with Land Shark broadheads, but his bow was missing one key element — sights.

Wade always has shot instinctively (without sights), so he pulled the bow to full draw quickly and let fly an arrow at the buck’s side.

“When I let it go, I heard a pop, so I knew I’d hit him good,” Wade said. “He started stumbling away, took off, then I heard him fall. There was a limb that he fell down on, and you could hear it crash. I looked over and gave Cody the thumbs-up sign, and he hollered back, ‘You’re the man, Grandad.’ ”

But the real “man” was on the ground, stone dead, barely 50 yards from where he’d been standing when Wade shot.

“We didn’t see him fall, but we heard him,” Wade said.
“We stayed up in our stands until dark because I was hoping Cody could get a shot. Then, we got down and went and found him.

“We were walking up to him, and Cody said, ‘Grandad, you didn’t shoot a deer. You shot somebody’s cow.’ ”

Wade believes the buck had come from the pine thicket, ignored the food plot, and headed straight for the acorn-laden oaks. His antlers were so dark Wade believed he was in full velvet when he first saw the huge deer, only to find the buck had rubbed them clean.

“I hadn’t seen any kind of sign in there to tell me he was there; there were no rubs anywhere — and he didn’t have any velvet left on his antlers,” Wade said.

“We started dragging him. He was so big we’d drag him a few feet and have to stop. Then Cody got on his cell phone and called this store in King — he had a friend that worked there, and they had some kind of big-buck contest Cody said I should enter. Cody’s friend said we had 13 minutes to get the deer there before they closed at 9.

“Cody told him it was a huge deer, a really huge deer. And the boy called back and said to just bring it on, that there were about 15 people waiting to see him, plus the guy from the Bowhunters (Association). We finally got him out and got him up there, and they were all still there.”

“To me, he looks perfect. I’ve never seen anything like him. Everything is perfect except for that one sticker point.

“I’ve hunted this place for seven years, and I’ve seen some good deer; I killed a 14-pointer one time, but he wasn’t half the size of this deer.”