Buck has three brow tines on right beam, ‘scissors’ at end of left beam
After getting caught reaching to turn on his camera by a wary 16-point buck, Scottie Morris of Rougemont kept calm and reached for his bow instead. Before the buck bolted, Morris arrowed the Person County beast and dropped him in his corn pile on Oct. 5.
The big non-typical buck, which had three brow tines on the right beam and a left beam that ended in a pair of “scissors” measured 165⅜ Pope and Young inches.
Morris almost didn’t make it to his homemade, wooden ground blind that day. But after seeing a trail-camera photo of the buck taken the night before, he decided to finish up some taxidermy work early and rush to one of his corn piles on the edge of a bean field.
“I got in there at 5:30,” Morris said. “As soon as I got my camera set up, two does broke out across the field running to the corn pile. I thought, ‘This might be good; they might be moving early.’”
At around 6:30, the big buck walked out of nowhere beside the blind at about 15 yards.
In an attempt to capture the scene for Team Part Time Whitetails, an outdoors TV show on GEN7 Outdoors TV, Morris made a quick move to hit the record button, and the buck noticed the sudden shift in the darkness of the blind.
“So, he froze,” Morris said. “He was locked in — had his legs about half-bent like he was fixing to go. I said, ‘Forget the camera, I’ve got to shoot.’ I pulled my arm back and grabbed my bow. I pulled it to the left of the window, so he couldn’t see me draw it. Then, I just eased over and shot.”
Morris’ Mathews Chill X projected a 100-grain Ramcat broadhead roughly 18 yards toward his target, which had crouched simultaneously with the popping string.
“It spined him,” he said. “It really didn’t hit that high, but the arrow shot up into his spine and he dropped. I reached over and turned the camera on and caught him dragging around. But, I really wanted to get the shot on camera.”
Of the deer Morris works to manage on his tract of land, this buck was No. 1 on the hit list. Doubling in scorable points from eight to 16 over the past year, the trophy had added an estimated 35 inches to his rack, with the inside spread measuring 15 inches with the longest tine extending 11¼ inches. Morris had let him walk until he reached 4 years of age.
“I’ve fed him and fed him,” said Morris, “trying to keep him from getting shot. But I think he did get shot or hurt because his left side is just like it was last year. But his right side just went off with all this crazy mess; that big base with three brow tines. All I can figure is he got injured somehow or other for it to do that.”
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