Neighbor’s trail-cam photos led hunter to take 160-inch 12-pointer
Jacob Davis of Townville, S.C., didn’t do a lot of deer hunting this season until Nov. 5. That’s when a neighbor showed him a trail-camera photo of a huge buck, a monster 6×6 with a high, wide rack.
“I had eight cameras (out) where I hunt, and I wasn’t getting any pictures, so I really wasn’t hunting very much,” he said. “Then, my neighbor stopped me on the road one day (Nov. 5) and asked if I’d seen this deer he had on camera.
“I started hunting the next day.”
Davis saw the big 12-point buck the next day, Nov. 6, got too excited and missed a shot when it was presented.
“I took off the rest of the week and hunted him. On Friday (Nov. 10), he came out in the morning, and it was real foggy. He came out at about 100 yards. I could see him with my eyes, but when I put the scope up, nothing,” he said.
“He kept walking in and out of the woods; it terrified me. Then, two does came out — they were rutting like crazy. I grunted one time, and eventually, he worked his way to 50 yards, and I shot him.”
The buck reacted as if the shot, from his .308 rifle, was right on, which it was. Davis said the buck trotted across the field and fell dead at the edge of the woods.
Davis’ big buck, which carried a 19-inch inside spread and tines as long as 11 inches, scored a fraction above 160 inches typical.
“When I took him to my taxidermist, I didn’t anticipate him scoring that high,” Davis said. “I killed a 154-inch buck in Kentucky last year, and I didn’t think this one was as big as that one. But my taxidermist said he thought he might be a 160-inch buck. About an hour after I got home from taking him, he called me and said he couldn’t stand it and had put a tape on him. He said it being a main-frame 6×6 had a lot to do with it. He said he’s been doing taxidermy almost 30 years, and it was only the third perfect 12 he’d ever gotten in.”
Davis, 21, was hunting in a two-man ladder stand overlooking a 100-acre soybean field.
“I’ve been hunting that stand since I was about 7 years old,” he said. “It’s on an old water oak. I’ve killed a lot of deer out of that stand. I can walk across the street from my house to that stand.”
