Long drive, missing keys, forgotten credit card turns into a big day for Hamlet deer hunter.
A hunter may have everything in his favor — especially during November’s deer rut — and still not put venison in his cooler or a big rack on his wall.
But he may encounter the worst kind of luck and still bag a bruiser buck that will be the talk of the county.
Now, nearly everyone knows the factors that boost chances to have a good buck walk in front of a hunter’s bow, muzzleloader, rifle or shotgun. They include, but may not be limited to:
• Excellent property with great habitat and partners to help pay the lease;
• Hundreds of trail-camera photos of bucks that seem to say “Take me! Take me!”;
• Agricultural fields or food plots, planted with the most succulent crops to draw deer like magnets off neighboring lands;
• Large white oaks that drop bushels of acorns and create great ambush spots;
• Excellent locations for elevated stands of all kinds that can be easily and safely accessed that offer nearly invisible entrances and exits;
• Hunting partners who can’t shoot but still know the value of passing on young bucks that have the potential to grow eye-popping’ headgear;
• The most-modern weapons, including the latest, fastest bows, the sharpest broadheads, the best rifles and scopes, sighted-in slug guns and a place to practice shooting that’s not the same place you’re hunting;
• The most effective deer lures and cover scents;
• Cheap corn, apples or sweet potatoes, if you don’t have qualms about baiting;
• Warm clothing for cold days and waterproof outer garments that keep water from pouring down one’s neck when cold rain or sleet falls;
• Little hunting pressure, no poachers, no free-ranging dogs;
• And, last but not least, wives and/or girlfriends who understand, or at least accept, a deer hunter’s need to hunt and don’t lather on several thick coats of guilt each time he heads out the door. Better yet, a female friend who likes to hunt as much as you do and can be outside in the elements for long hours without complaints and doesn’t mind smelling like fox urine.
Oh, there’s one more thing: just get “out there.”
On the other hand, bad luck only gets you so far in deer hunting, and sometimes it can be downright beneficial.
Take the experience of Bryan Wilks of Hamlet. Last Nov. 18, hunting in Richmond County, he dropped his buck of a lifetime, a deer with a 25 1/2-inch outside spread that scored 154 2/8 Boone and Crockett points at the Dixie Deer Classic this past March.
“Our luck was so bad the day I killed my best buck, me and my buddy, Ron Tatum, said when we finally got in the woods, it had been a ‘chaotic’ afternoon,” said Wilks, 43.
When they finally bagged the monster buck whose antlers measured 6 7/8 inches in circumference at its bases, Wilks and Tatum named the deer “Chaos.”
To set the scene, Wilks was 2 1/2 hours away from home at a farm he owns in Edgecombe County when he received a cell-phone call from his best fried.
“It was my vacation week, and I just hanging with some of my buddies up there, having a good time, hunting bean fields and shooting my rifle,” he said.
He wasn’t expecting to burn any serious deer-hunting powder that Monday until Tatum called around lunch time. His buddy’s good news was that Wilks had been invited to hunt a great ground blind at Tatum’s hunt club. So at about 1 p.m., Wilks pointed his truck’s hood southwest and hammered down. After an uneventful drive, he picked up Tatum at 3:30 p.m., and that’s when their luck seemed to change — not once but eventually three times.
“When Ron called, he said he wanted me to hunt the ‘Fire Break Stand’” Wilks said, explaining that he’d built a four-sided, tin-roofed box blind in 2011 and had given it to Tatum when his friend had joined a local hunt club. After both had hunted the property, they decided a fire break would be the perfect spot to place the stand. Even better, the stand site afforded an extremely long field of fire, a perfect fit for Wilks’ rifle, a .300 Remington Ultra Mag topped with a 4x18x50 Night Force scope.
“There’s this long fire break that’s about 10 yards wide by 300 yards long,” Wilks said. “We put the stand at one end of the lane.”
In previous seasons, they’d converted the strip into a food plot, an especially good thing to have in Richmond County, part of the Sandhills where very little grows that whitetails like that isn’t sowed, fertilized and grown.
“The pines on one side of the fire break were cut-over about seven or eight years ago and are pushing up 15 feet or so,” Wilks said. “The other side is hardwoods.”
Wilks and Tatum had planted Mossy Oak Biologic clover in August, then adding lime to the soil and liquid fertilizer in October to “give it a pop,” he said.
“We ran the tractor up and down, then planted (the clover),” said Wilks, who added some cabbage, turnips and oats to the mix.
“It came up beautifully,” he said.
Some club members, their relatives and friends hunted the Fire Break Stand before Wilks sat down in November. They harvested a couple of does, he said, but also saw “some nice bucks,” he said, “a 4- and 6-pointer and a handful of basket racks, but not the deer I shot.”
Wilks and Tatum had pictures of the wide-racked buck from a trail camera they’d installed.
But then came problem No. 1 that November day.
“The club is about 20 miles from Hamlet, and when we got there, we discovered the key to the gate was back at (Tatum’s) house,” Wilks said. “So we had to turn around and drive back to get the key.”
After retrieving the key, on the way back to the hunt club, they stopped to put fuel in Wilks’ truck.
“I guess we were in a hurry, because we’d got a few more miles down the road when I realized I’d left the receipt for the gas in the pump, and I also left my credit card on top of the pump,” he said. “So we had to turn around, again, and drive back 7 or 8 miles to get the receipt and my credit card.”
More wasted time was putting them farther behind the 8-ball as daylight was slipping away.
“Me and (Tatum) looked at each other, and he said, ‘This is a chaotic day,’” Wilks said. “We knew we’d have only a few minutes of light left.”
After they got to the property and got their guns out of the truck, only 30 to 40 minutes of good light remained.
“It was 4:50 (p.m.),” Wilks said, “and we had a 10-minute walk to our stands.”
Tatum had a squirt bottle of Code Blue doe scent in his pocket that he handed to Wilks.
“By the time I got to the stand, I was sweating because it was a little warm,” Wilks said. “The temperature was in the high 70s. I was wearing a short-sleeve camo t-shirt, and I was wet with sweat. I knew I had to cover my scent, so every few minutes I squirted some Code Blue out the window. I also was hoping maybe a buck would smell the scent.”
Finally, Wilks’ dicey luck changed.
“I was in the stand maybe 10 minutes, and a deer stepped out,” Wilks said. “I’m not a trophy hunter — I’m a meat hunter — so I got my rifle out the window and got ready to shoot. I only gazed at his rack; I didn’t look close.”
He estimated the buck was standing approximately 100 to 120 yards from the blind.
“I centered him up and pulled the trigger,” Wilks said.
Tatum immediately called Wilks and told him he thought he’d heard the bullet strike after the shot.
Wilks agreed that he’d hit the deer and told Tatum he thought it was a buck, but wasn’t sure.
A few minutes later, Wilks heard Tatum’s rifle boom.
“He called me and said, ‘I think we doubled up,’” Wilks said, “and I told him I couldn’t believe it after everything else that happened this mess of a day.”
Wilks walked to his truck, then drove to the lane and got out where he’d watched the deer jump out of the fire break and into the hardwoods.
“I wasn’t worried about him runnin’ away,” he said. “I knew he was gonna be close because of the .300 Ultra Mag.”
Wilks said he “didn’t even look for blood sign” and, as he walked into the woods, the first thing he saw was “these gigantic horns.”
“I said, ‘Oh, my Lord, thank you.’ The sight took my breath away,” Wilks said. “I never get nervous, but I started trembling.”
He wsa preparing to drive to Tatum’s stand and retrieve his friend’s deer, then drive back to the fire break and show Tatum his monster buck.
“But I looked up, and he was walking down the lane. He said, ‘Holy crap! I didn’t know I had a deer like that on my property,’” Wilks said. “It was a jaw-droppin’ (deer).”
They both agreed it was an unexpected ending to a day that seemed headed for the septic tank but ended in a penthouse.
“What a chaotic day to start with, and I end up killing my deer of a lifetime,” Wilks said.
Not many deer hunters get to experience such a day, but most know deer hunting can fit Forrest Gump’s life philosophy: “Every day is like a box o’ choc’lats — you never know what you’ll get.”
There’s also the popular 1960s theory of “Entropy,” that holds that matter is continually falling apart. Another way of expressing that idea is “Out of order comes chaos.”
Wilks probably would disagree a little. For him, “Chaos” came from major disorder.
Either way, he isn’t complaining.
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