Mystery Buck

The secondary rut was the key factor in this Guilford teen downing N.C.’s No. 3 non-typical.

During 2006’s deer season, the best non-typical buck taken by a North Carolina gun hunter was Tommy Ayers’ 172 3/8-inch monster from Stokes County — or so everyone thought at the 2007 Dixie Deer Classic.Although Ayer’s buck was a whopper, it eventually paled in comparison to a gigantic whitetail killed by a 16-year-old youth in Rockingham County during December 2006.

But only a handful of people knew about the 208 5/8-inch deer killed by Johnathan Reaser of Browns Summitt two years earlier because it wasn’t brought to the March 2007 Dixie Deer Classic and didn’t appear until 2008.

But Wake County Wildlife Club members, recognizing they had a record-book deer on their hands, created a special category at the 2008 Classic for Reaser’s buck, even though the boy and his dad didn’t drive to Raleigh until the last day of the event, a day after scoring usually ends.

The reason? When a B&C scorer put a tape on Reaser’s trophy, it was evident his deer wasn’t a run-of-the-mill animal. In fact, the buck qualifies as N.C.’s
No. 3 non-typical, easily a B&C qualifier (the minimum non-typical score is 195 inches of antlers).

So why so long a wait to have the deer scored?

“My dad (Don Reaser) has a friend who does taxidermy work and does all our deer heads, and (the friend) wanted to put the buck in some taxidermy shows,” the Northwest Guilford High School senior said, “plus I killed this buck so late (Dec. 20, 2006) in the season. And my dad’s family lives in West Virginia, and we took the (antlers) up there. When we got back after the holidays, the taxidermist worked to get them ready for the (N.C. Taxidermy Association) state competition (in July). He got third place with the mount.”

Reaser, who played middle linebacker for the Vikings as a sophomore, hunts perhaps two days each year until after Thanksgiving because of school, football practice and Friday night games.

“I hunt maybe once during bow season, then a day or two during muzzle-loader season,” he said. “I didn’t even shoot a buck last year (2007), but I passed up three nice eight-pointers. We don’t believe in shooting bucks unless we’re gonna have ’em mounted.”

The Reaser family has exclusive hunting rights at 600 farm-land acres in Rockingham County, a former clearcut with most of it covered in juvenile pines. It’s a perfect bedding area for the region’s whitetail herd.

“Nobody goes there but us,” Reaser said.

“When I was 13, I shot an 11-pointer Dec. 28 during the second rut there. My dad also killed a big nine-pointer there with one side of his antlers missing. If it’d had both sides, it would have scored in the 160s. The G2 was 14-inches long.”

The Reasers hadn’t seen buck he shot in 2006, but Johnathan said area residents had spied the monster deer at a bean field and at night.

“My dad scouted there earlier in the year and found some really big rubs on trees,” he said. “He knew a big deer had snapped branches off and broken them and made rubs.”

The day of the hunt featured mild weather, “not too awfully cold,” Reaser said. “I got to my stand about 7 a.m., kind of late; actually. It already was light.”

He climbed into a metal Hunter’s View two-man stand about 12 feet off the ground.

“It had burlap covering the sides and a (shooting) rail,” Reaser said. “My dad was hunting a different stand.”

The youth described the farm as “basically a place with a big field in the middle where (a farmer) grows corn, tobacco and soybeans; it has a road through the middle of it. It’s got about 100 acres on one side (of the road) that’s wooded and that’s where we hunt.”

Reaser’s stand was 50 yards from a field edge in some bordering woods that dropped down to a large swamp.

“It’s a big hollow that goes down into a marsh-type deal,” he said. “The marsh comes to a point, and the deer kinda travel around that point.”

The young hunter had hung two wicks soaked in Hunters Specialties Prime Time Estrus Plus deer scent on tree limbs.

“I also was using a Primos (can) call every 15 or 20 minutes,” he said.

After sitting about 1 1/2 hours, Reaser saw some deer circling below him near the swamp.

“A six- or eight-pointer was following the does,” he said.

A few minutes later in the opposite direction, Reaser saw movement about 80 yards away in a cutover and spied deer legs behind some low brush. The youngster looked through the 4x12x40 Bushnell Sportsman scope mounted on his Winchester Model 70 .30-06 bolt-action rifle.

“(The buck) was walking, but all I could see was his legs, then he popped into an opening,” Reaser said. “He stood for 3 or 4 seconds, then turned and started to go back (into the thick cutover).

“I shot him as he was quartering away from me. The (bullet) went in back of his ribs and forward through his lungs.

“I think he’d just slipped in to check out the Primos calls, didn’t see anything, then he started walking away.”

The excited youngster immediately called his father, using a two-way radio.

“All I could say was, ‘Dad!’ ” Reaser said. “I was so nervous, I couldn’t talk. He said, ‘Did you shoot just to scare me to death?’ I told him I’d shot a good buck, what I thought was a 14-pointer.”

Unfortunately, after Don Reaser walked to his son’s hunting area, the pair couldn’t find the deer, even after looking most of the day.

“There was very little blood,” said Reaser, who thought the buck had headed into the swamp after the shot. But it had made a 180-degree circle, ran back up the hill (out of Reaser’s sight), went around a pond and fell on the other side. While walking to a stand two days later, the elder Reaser found the deer lying in the open on the opposite side of the pond.

“When we couldn’t find him, I thought he’d run into the sanctuary (cutover),” the boy said. “The bullet never came out his front, so that’s why there was so little blood.”

When scored at the Dixie Deer Classic, the buck’s gross score of antlers totaled 216 4/8 inches.

The rack’s inside spread was 21 3/8 inches. Other rack measurements included main beams of 25 3/8 and 27 inches, G1s of 5 2/3 and 5 5/8 inches, G2s of 7 1/8 and 10 3/8 inches, G3s of 11 and 13 inches, G4s of 10 3/8 and 10 4/8 inches. The rack’s abnormal point deductions totaled 21 5/8 inches, including 11 6/8 inches for a sticker point off the right main beam base and a second right-main beam sticker of 8 3/8 inches (the other abnormal point measured 1 2/8 inches). Total deductions (adding asymmetrical point differences) totaled 36 2/8 inches.

The only downside to Reaser’s accomplishment has been at school, where some of his classmates told him he had “spotlighted” the buck or shot it with a rifle.

“They’re just jealous,” he said. “They shoot spikes and six-point(er)s and stuff like that. We don’t.”

Although the youth was surprised when his dad brought the deer home, he said they both were more surprised at the Dixie Deer Classic.

“We had no idea it was third in the state,” Reaser said. “We took (the shoulder mount) to the Dixie Deer Classic on Sunday, just to get it scored. They had an amateur (scorer), and he told us it couldn’t be entered in the (club’s big buck) competition. We said, ‘OK, that’s fine; we just want an official score.’ So he scored it; I filled out a form, then we started walking around, looking at other deer. Then the P.A. (public address) said, ‘Johnathan Reaser, please report to the scorer’s booth.’

“I said, ‘Dang, what’ve I done now or have they dropped the rack and broken a tine?’ ”

When Reaser and his dad arrived at the Wake County Wildlife Club’s scorers booth in the new exhibition hall, a club official met them.

“He said, ‘Son, do you know what this is?,” Johnathan said. “You’ve shot the No. 3 non-typical in the state of North Carolina. We’re gonna name it the Deer of the Year.’

“It took me by surprise. I had no idea.”

Reaser said he hoped his brothers would get a chance at a similar buck in the future.

“Evan is 7 and Ryan is 13,” he said. “All they’ve killed so far is (wild) hogs.”

Johnathan Reaser has killed a hawg of a buck, too, one that’s like to be No. 1 in Rockingham County for a long time
to come.