Deer lived in tiny plot that has produced several great bucks.
There’s a little piece of woods in Halifax County that is special to Douglas Brown of Roanoke Rapids.
“It’s shaped like a little triangle, maybe 100 yards on each side,” he said.
Brown doesn’t know exactly what makes it different, but he’s just about decided that it’s the place to be come mid-October.
“On Oct. 29, 2009, I killed a 21-inch 8-pointer,” Brown said. “On Oct. 22, 2010, my dad killed a 19-inch 8-pointer.”
Oh, and then there was Oct. 20, a little more than a week ago. When the sun slipped below the horizon and the breeze finally calmed down, Brown killed a buck bigger than the other two – this one a heavy, chocolate-colored main-frame 8-pointer, 18 1/2 inches wide, with four sticker points.
“He’s a really good buck for around here,” he said.
How ‘bout he’s a really good buck for anywhere in North Carolina?
Brown’s deer was living in an area of woods littered with white oaks. He’d put a stand up in 2005, cut a 20-foot wide, 100-yard long shooting lane and immediately started a mineral lick with Deer Cane Black Magic about midway between his stand and the end of the lane.
He knew there was a very active buck in there as early as six weeks ago.
“During bow season, on a Sunday, a friend and I went out there; I had 20 or 30 posted signs I wanted to put up, and when we started walking through, the smell of buck urine was so strong we were just about to gag,” Brown said. “I sat down my bucket with my tools in it, my staple gun, and we walked around for about 30 minutes. We found 18 rubs and five scrapes. He’d really worked them – there wasn’t a leaf left in any of them.
“The last several years, for some reason, this little area, about the size of a quarter of a football field, they’ve been tearing it up.”
The afternoon of Oct. 20, Brown climbed into his stand at 3:30 p.m., with the wind whipping. A small buck ran across the lane, non-stop, at 3:55, followed by a large doe and a smaller doe at 6:10. The does were skittish but feeding on corn that Brown had scattered around the outside of the Deer Cane lick, now 3 feet deep and as big as the hood of his F-150 long-bed pickup.
As soon as they left at 6:30, four raccoons emerged from a drainage ditch and spent five minutes eating corn before leaving.
“At 6:35, it was just getting dark in the woods, but you could still see down the shooting lane,” Brown said. “I happened to be looking, and I saw a deer all the way at the end. At first, I thought it was one of the does – they circle around like that a lot – but I could tell the body was too big to be a doe.”
Brown pulled a sandbag he had on the rail of his stand into place, got his Savage 110 rifle in place and peered through the scope at the deer.
“I’ve got a Simmons Aetec 3.8×12 scope, and I had it on six-power,” Brown said. “I was looking through it, dialing it up with one hand, and he’s coming to life in the scope. He’d been locked onto about a 2- or 3-inch thick tree, rubbing it for all it was worth.
“When he stood up, I could tell it was the buck that had been tearing the woods up.”
The buck was quartering toward Brown at 80 yards when the hunter realized he wouldn’t get a broadside shot. He lined up on the buck’s left shoulder and let fly with his .30-06.
“He ran roughly 20 yards; I followed him through the scope, and he bucked up,” Brown said. “I could tell he was hit good. He piled up between two trees. He was wedged between two trees with his head up. I thought he was still alive when he I got to him until I saw his eyes glazed over.
“I didn’t have to track him; I could smell him. I just started walking in the direction the smell came from.”
Brown’s big buck was a real beauty.
“He’s got tall tines, he’s wide and he’s got mass – and chocolate-colored horns,” Brown said.
See more bucks killed this season – and add your own phtoos – in the North Carolina Sportsman Bag-a-Buck Contest!
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