Calhoun County buck dispatched subordinate before being shot
Renn Guthrie, a junior at Orangeburg Prep, has got something most of her male classmates can only dream about: a trophy buck.
Guthrie, 16, took a big 8-pointer the afternoon of Sept. 12 in Calhoun County while hunting with her father, Jimmy, who had seen the buck shortly after the season opened.
It took the Guthries four trips before Renn got him in the crosshairs, but the deer put on a show before she administered the coup de gras.
“I saw this buck from a ground blind the fourth day of the season, and I was surprised he had already shed his velvet; I was lucky to get out of there without getting blown up,” Jimmy Guthrie said. “I had pegged this deer as a 4 ½-year-old, about 175 pounds.
“Renn was with me three times after that – we saw a good many deer come out, but we didn’t have any luck.”
On Sept. 10, Jimmy Guthrie sat in a stand where he and his daughter had sat on the first day of the season, and he saw the big buck show up again. “I told her, we need to go back to that stand tomorrow, and she said she couldn’t, that she had dance that night,” he said.
They were back, two days later, in a ladder stand overlooking a 4-acre, fallow field, with a 600-yard shooting lane in front and a 350-yard shooting lane in another direction. Jimmy Guthrie had a corn pile on the side of the field away from the stand.
“We got in the stand at 5:30, and we didn’t see a deer for the first hour and 15 minutes,” Jimmy Guthrie said. “Then we had some deer come out, several smaller bucks, some basket 8s and one 16-inch, 8-pointer.
“At one time, we had nine bucks in the field, and we probably saw 20 does – 10 or 15 in the field at any given time.”
Everything changed at around 7:30.
“I saw him come into the field with his head down, and I couldn’t tell it was him until he picked his head up,” Renn Guthrie said.
Then, the fun began. The big 8-pointer put its head down and knocked the 16-inch 8-pointer right off the corn pile.
“He just ran him off,” Jimmy Guthrie said.
But Renn, who shoots on the sporting clays team at her school, didn’t have a good, broadside shot for a while, because there were so many deer in the field, the big was behind one or the other of them, or not presenting a good shot, for several minutes.
“I had to wait for the other deer to move out of the way,” she said. “He moved to one side, and I had a good shot.”
Renn Guthrie squeezed off a shot from her .300 Magnum rifle, but the buck, 140 yards away, acted like nothing had happened, except that he turned tail and ran into the woods.
“The buck never flinched, but she said she felt good about the shot,” Jimmy Guthrie said. “We waited about 15 minutes, then we got down there and spent 15 minutes looking around, but we couldn’t find any blood. She stayed where the buck was when she shot, and I went on down in the woods and made four circles, and I couldn’t find anything. I circled back toward the stand, and I was about to come back and pick her up, when I found him.
“He was about 50 yards from the field; he’s made kind of a ‘U’ turn and come back toward the field. He was heart shot, stone dead, but he didn’t leave a single drop of blood.”
Renn saw her father emerge from the woods, expecting the worst and ready to head home.
“I couldn’t tell if he was just going to pick me up and go home, and then he just said, ‘Congratulations, you got him.’”
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