A Haywood County hunter traveled to Union County to bag 2005’s highest-scoring whitetail.
Deer hunters spend a lot of time scratching their heads, trying to figure out where exactly to hang a tree stand in the area they plan to hunt.Which tree will give them the best line of sight or most panoramic view? Which one of them is closest to the most heavily used deer trails? Which one will be the easiest to climb, and which one has the most natural stand location somewhere up the trunk?
Kenneth Burchfield didn’t have that problem last December at the farm in Union County where he, his son and his brother were hunting.
He didn’t have a problem, because, in fact, he didn’t have much of a choice.
His brother, Steve, had suggested Burchfield hunt a thick cutover at one side of the farm. The young pines weren’t tall enough to hang a tree stand in, but they short enough that if you could get high enough, you could cover not only the cutover, but an adjoining soybean field that had already been harvested.
Two trees towered over the little pines. One was a cedar, and was therefore eliminated from Burchfield’s thought process as unsuitable for a stand. The other was a hardwood tree that had somehow avoided the loggers’ saws when the cutover had been created several years earlier.
Burchfield had to cut a lot of limbs off the trunk to make the tree suitable for his portable climbing stand, but sometime after lunch, Dec. 9, he had his stand site ready, 25 feet above the forest floor.
“I could have shot in 15 different directions from that tree,” said Burchfield, who admitted to the owner of the farm he would really like to be able to see in 16 different directions and the cedar tree blocked his view of one particularly promising-looking area.
So the landowner headed back out with his chainsaw, and in just a few minutes, the cedar tree was history.
The payoff was pretty soon in coming — like less than 24 hours.
That afternoon, Burchfield hunted the stand — which was far away from any of the stands that had been set up in previous years. He saw a handful of does at a long, long distance away in the bean field.
The next morning, he was back in the stand having offered his teen-aged son, Trever, first crack at it. Trever, who was seeing a lot of deer every day from the stand he was hunting, declined.
Burchfield put his climber on the trunk and quickly got to the height where he had chosen to sit. It was barely 15 minutes before the action started.
“There was a major deer trail coming through the ( pine) thicket, right under my tree, and I was watching it, because I knew there was a good chance of a deer coming right under it,” Burchfield said. “But I was watching the field, too.
“It was about 60 acres, and there was a big, wooded island in the middle. I figured there was a good chance the deer were bedded down in there, coming out to feed.
“I hadn’t been there 15 minutes when I heard a limb break behind me. I tried to turn around in my stand, and I saw a little doe (coming through the thicket), then I saw (the tops of) a horn going behind her.”
It took the two deer about 15 more minutes to finally ease out of the thicket. Burchfield figured they felt ill at ease because the tall cedar was gone, close to where they were walking.
“Then the little doe came out in the field,” he said. “She was about 60 yards to my right, cutting across the bean field. She meandered around and started away from me, then she turned and started back toward me, and all of the sudden, I saw the horns sticking out of the (edge of the) thicket.
“Man, I was trembling all over. I wouldn’t move, and he finally did walk out, and I shot him.”
At 40 yards, Burchfield broke the buck’s spine with a 150-grain .30-06 bullet, and the deer collapsed in its tracks.
Until he got close to the deer, he had no idea what he’d shot — except that it was a big buck.
“When I got to him, I was amazed,” Burchfield said. “I’ve been deer hunting a lot of years, but I’d never seen anything like that.
“I still don’t know how the deer could have gotten through the thicket with those horns, but he came through so quiet — with me up there trembling so much. I had seen horns when he was behind me in the thicket, but I couldn’t see him good enough to tell how big he was until he stuck his (head) out of the thicket.”
What a head it was. The buck was the second-largest killed in North Carolina last year, the biggest killed during gun season.
The buck’s rack took top honors at the Dixie Deer Classic last March in the “Best Typical in N.C. by Gun” category, scoring 163 5/8 points using the Boone & Crockett Club’s scoring system.
The buck had a 20 3/8-inch inside spread, long brow tines and great length and mass. Only deductions for lack of symmetry between the points on each beam cost the buck a chance at making the B&C Club’s all-time record book.
Burchfield’s deer, which weighed 178 pounds on the hoof, had an 8-inch brow tine on the right antler and a 6-inch brow tine on the left side. On the right antler, the two longest tines were 12 1/2- and 10 1/2- inches long; on the left side, the corresponding points where 11- and 9 1/4-inches long. The buck’s gross score (before deductions) was 171 6/8 points.
“His right side was just a little bigger than his left side, all the way down his antler,” Burchfield said. “That was enough to keep him out of the book. But like my brother told me, ‘Your standards are gonna have to go way up after this deer.’ ”
That shouldn’t be a problem, because his hunting buddies have some fairly easy rules to follow: shoot does, but don’t shoot any small bucks that you wouldn’t want to mount.
“One thing’s for sure; now it will be a lot easier for me to let little bucks walk,” he said.
Knowing he’d likely be hunting in the same area this season, Burchfield did a little scouting work around his stand, perhaps to see whether the buck had been using that area a lot, or had it just happened to get on the trail of the little doe and wander in from somewhere else.
“I went back in the woods and looked around, and he’d done some major damage in that thicket,” he said. “There were plenty of rubs and scrapes — and big ones. He was horning some trees that were 6 inches thick.”
Burchfield had taxidermist Lynn Howell of Waynesville — just a hop, skip and a jump over the mountain from his home in the Haywood County town of Cruso — prepare a shoulder mount of his buck. During the process, Howell removed the buck’s lower jawbone and judged that the buck was 5 1/2 years old when Burchfield brought him back to earth.
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