His brother urged him to hunt early and it paid off
Better late than never? Nope, that wouldn’t have worked for Joshua “Fatback” Sellers of Patrick, S.C., last Friday.
A 19-year-old student at Northeastern Technical College in Cheraw, S.C., Sellers was planning on heading to his deer stand later that afternoon when his brother, Steven, called and urged him to head out earlier. So he got ready and was in his tower stand, overlooking a very young cutover, by 3:30.
About 30 minutes later, he was lowering the hammer on a 145-inch Chesterfield County buck.
“Actually, I wasn’t gonna get in my stand that early, but my brother called and said, ‘I’m going hunting, are you?’ I said I was, but that I wasn’t planning on going that early, but he didn’t want me walking in late while he was already there, so I went earlier.”
And it paid off when the big buck showed up at 3:57 p.m.
“We have three stands set up in this cutover,” he said. “It’s only a 3- or 4-year-old cutover, but there’s a lot of broomstraw growing up between the trees for cover. Right after I get into the stand, I looked down and saw a little 4-pointer running a doe. Two or three minutes later, two big does came out to the corn pile. Then they left, and I caught something out of the edge on the left. I saw what I thought what was an 8-pointer.
“He was walking just over a hill, so I couldn’t see him that well, so I didn’t get too excited. Then he came up and went right to where (the does) had left. I waited until he gave me a broadside shot and took it.”
The buck ran off down the hill to the edge of the cutover and disappeared. Sellers called brother Steven, who wanted him to stay in the stand at least an hour before getting down. Then, he called his older brother, Zack, who had just gotten off work and asked him to bring a shotgun “in case we jumped the deer while we were trailing him.”
When Zack Sellers arrived, Steven Sellers stayed in his stand, while Zach and Joshua trailed the deer. They knew immediately it wouldn’t be a difficult task.
“When we saw all the blood he had dropped, it changed everything,” Joshua Sellers said, “He was just pouring blood.”
The brothers found him about 60 yards from the spot it was shot.
“Zack saw him and said, ‘You killed a monster,’ and I went over and was really surprised,” said Joshua Sellers, who had put a round from his Savage .308 through both of the buck’s lungs.
And what a buck it was. “Monster” might accurately describe it.
The buck had a tall, narrow, heavy rack that deer processor Heath Rayfield rough-scored at 144 1/2 inches later that evening. The buck’s inside spread was only 13 inches, but had three tines longer than 8 inches and one a quarter-inch short, as well as eight circumference measurements between 4 1/2 and 4 3/4 inches. The buck weighed 162 pounds.
“I don’t know why he was out so early,” Sellers said. “I have only been (hunting) about six times this year, and I hadn’t seen a single deer. This is only the second buck I’ve killed.”
