And it wasn’t this hunter’s first trophy buck
Greg Robertson is no stranger to big deer. A resident of King, N.C., he killed a 165-inch buck in 2003 that was North Carolina’s No. 2 bow buck at the time. So when he saw a huge, Stokes County 9-pointer in a trail-camera photo earlier this season, he knew how good the buck was.
It took him until mid-November to kill him, but the buck wound up being well worth the effort. Sporting a 17 1/2-inch inside spread and tall, tall tines, the buck was rough-scored at 157 2/8 gross inches.
“My son, Kelan, really got on him. He hunted him all season, and he had him on camera before the season, regularly,” Robertson said. “After the acorns started dropping, about the second week of bow season, he disappeared. I told Kelan he wasn’t gone; he was just feeding somewhere else.”
Buck disappears from one set of trail cameras, appears on another
The buck showed up in trail-camera photos in late October, in an area his son was not hunting — but Robertson was hunting.
“I have two areas on this farm that I rotate between, and I asked Kelan where I should hunt. I hung a stand there and started baiting it,” he said. “We went to the beach for the weekend (Nov. 3-4), and I went in Monday and hunted a different stand. Then I went in Tuesday, and before I hunted, I fed, and I pulled cards from the cameras. Turns out, I had a photo of him Monday evening at 4:30, breeding a doe in a corn pile at the other stand. I hunted that stand Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and saw small bucks and does.
“A buddy tried to get me to go fish a (bass) tournament with him on Saturday, but I had a feeling,” he said. “I hunted Saturday morning and had a shooter buck come in, but not him. Something spooked him, and he left. I wasn’t going to hunt that same stand Saturday afternoon because it was so windy, but I asked Kelan, ‘Are you going?’ If he’d said no, I wouldn’t have gone, but he was going.
“I got in the stand, and a little before 5, I saw him coming across a road bed about 100 yards. He got down and in some cover, then he worked his way up a ridge to my left. I had a grunt call, and I hit it, and he threw his head up. He was working up the ridge, and I was grunting. He came up in a thick place, and I had a double bow-hanger on my tree where I could rest the gun. He came up to my left, and I found a couple of spots where I could shoot him if he stopped. He got to one, and he wasn’t gonna stop, so I stopped him with my mouth (grunt), then I pulled the trigger.”
Buck runs off, but not for long
Robertson said the buck ran off, and shortly thereafter, he saw a doe walk in and start smelling along the trail the buck had taken after being shot. “She was smelling the blood spots, so I knew where he was,” said Robertson, who got down, followed the blood trail and found the buck dead, 150 yards away.”
The buck had main beams of 25 6/8 and 26 4/8 inches, five tines longer than 8 inches, including one 10 3/8 inches long, and a 17 1/2-inch inside spread. Robertson killed him with his .50-caliber Thompson Center Encore muzzleloader with a 250-grain TC Shock Wave bullet.
“When I pulled that (camera) card and saw him breeding the doe, I knew that if I was going to kill him, my window of opportunity would be slim before he went back to being totally nocturnal,” Robertson said. “I figured I had to get him in the next week or two.”
