Beams had less than 3 inches between tips
Jason Dunn is used to killing bucks with wide racks that aren’t very tall on the farm he hunts around his home in Snow Camp, N.C.
So when a buck with a tall, narrow, heavy rack showed up in front of his stand on Nov. 21, he knew it was one he’d never seen before, maybe one that had moved into the area as the rut peaked in Alamance County.
“He was a unique deer for around here,” said Dunn, who tagged the 141-inch buck that afternoon about a half-hour before legal shooting light ended.
“This is the first time I’d ever seen this deer,” Dunn said. “I never had him on a trail camera. I had a big 6-pointer on camera, and another 8-pointer.
“I missed the 8 the week before, then I found out my scope was messed up. I asked my brother if I could borrow his .270, and that’s what I was shooting.”
Dunn took the buck at 80 yards after it walked out along the edge of an agricultural field he said is a natural bottleneck that deer in the area use.
“I was hunting from a box (blind) a couple of feet off the ground, on this field that’s big on one end and narrow on the other: a bottleneck,” he said. “They move through that bottleneck all the time.
“I let the big 6-pointer walk when he came out. My 14-year-old daughter, Jaiden, has been wanting to kill it. I texted her and said I had seen it. Then this buck came out about eight minutes later. When he came out, I said, ‘Good Lord, what in the world?’ I saw his tines coming through the edge of the woods before I ever saw him, so I had the rifle up. A doe had come out of the woods on the opposite side of the field, and he was trotting. I grunted at him and stopped him, and I shot him dead in the heart. He didn’t go four yards.”
Dunn’s buck was something else. Its inside spread was just 12 5/8 inches, but its heavy beams wrapped around, leaving just three inches between the tips. A main-frame 5×5 with one sticker point, it carried tines measuring 10 6/8, 10 3/8, 9 5/8 and 9 3/8 inches long, plus brow tines that were 6 5/8 and 6 2/8.
“The taxidermist said it was 4 1/2 years old,” he said.
