Deer was estimated to be 6 1/2-years-old
With a borrowed rifle, and with his wife sitting in a nearby stand hoping to see a massive trophy buck they’d been tracking for more than 3 years in Caswell County, Mike Gibbs shot that very buck, a 17-point brute that has been green-scored at 170-inches.
With an 18.5-inch inside spread, the deer had stickers all over the G2s and G3s, including one that was more than two inches long.
Gibbs and his wife headed into the woods On Dec. 10 around 4 p.m., and she went to a stand she’d been hunting pretty hard all year. Her trail cameras had taken many photos of the big deer since early November, but they were all night time photos. It was a chilly day, and though she’s no big fan of hunting in the cold, she hoped with a little luck to catch him slipping into the open during daylight hours.
Meanwhile, Gibbs was hunting a stand with no trail camera nearby, but he had been noticing a lot of tracks in the area over the previous weeks, and with some other big deer in the area as well, he was hoping fortune would smile on both he and his wife.
It smiled on him in a major way. So much so, that once she realized it was the deer she’d been after, his wife was really happy for him.
“I joked around with him and told him he’d done killed my deer, but I was honestly really happy for him. I was glad to see him get such an awesome buck,” said Gibbs’ wife, who already had her own trophy buck being mounted at the taxidermist.
“But we’re going to have to put his in a different part of the house than mine or our son’s. Our bucks’ antlers look like pencils compared to Mike’s,” she joked.
But at first, Gibbs wasn’t sure he’d even hit the deer after pulling the trigger on his nephew’s Remington 700 .270.
“It was around 5:10 p.m. when he showed up walking towards the corn pile. I actually heard him more than I saw him, but he finally peeked out to where I could see one side of his head. I put the crosshairs to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. He took off running, and I thought I had missed,” said Gibbs.
After picking up his wife from her stand, he asked her if it sounded like his shot hit the buck. She said it did, and not long after they began looking, they found plenty of evidence that he had hit the deer.
“The trees were covered with blood all around where the deer had been,” he said.
About 50 yards away, they found the big buck, which their taxidermist estimated to be 6 1/2-years-old.
“That was a smart deer, and we were after him for a long time. We hunted him hard and he finally made a mistake,” said Gibbs.
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