Durham hunter hadn’t even sat down when big buck showed up
Corey White wasn’t in his deer stand long enough to be nervous when a huge, 14-point Warren County buck showed up 80 yards away. He had just taken off his backpack and hadn’t even sat down in the chair he’d brought.
White, a 27-year-old landscaper from Durham, was hunting on Dec. 14 as a guest of his uncle, Andy White, on land controlled by the Arcola Hunt Club. The club had finished breakfast and organized the first hunt of the day. They dropped White off around 8:30. He headed down into a creek bottom, found a place to sit, and everything happened.
“I had been there about five minutes,” he said. “I heard a dog bark, had taken off a backpack, and was getting my chair out to sit down when I heard a stick pop. When I turned, he was coming right down the ridge, straight to me.”
White said the buck was well-known to club members. Some of the members who still-hunt had trail-camera photos of him. And when the hunt was being organized, club members talked about letting the dogs loose in a block of woods where they talked about “a big buck” bedding.
White shot the buck with a 12-gauge shotgun
“When I first saw him, he was about 80 yards away, and he was trotting — not running fast, but getting out of the way,” he said. “He was about 45 or 50 yards away. I hadn’t even gotten to sit down when I shot him.”
The 3-inch load of 00 buckshot from White’s 12-gauge visibly staggered the buck, which stumbled. It jumped the creek and gave him another shot, going straight away. He took it, and connected with more buckshot. The buck disappeared into some thick brush.
“I sat down, waited in case he was just hurt. I didn’t want to go down there and jump him,” White said. “So I got on the radio and called one of the guys who was hunting with the club. He brought a beagle down there, and we followed him. He went right to the buck, about 100 yards away.”
Big buck was trying to slip away as dogs chased a doe
And what a buck it was. The Warren County 14-point buck was a main-frame 7×6. It had a split brow tine on the right beam and an inside spread of 19 1/2 inches.
“A lot of the guys were talking about it scoring around 150,” White said. “I’ve got an uncle in Rougemont who is a taxidermist. I sent it to him. He was going to measure it.”
White said the deer had buckshot throughout its body. His first shot was lethal. His second shot, at the buck going away, broke both of its hind legs.
“The dogs weren’t running this deer,” White said. “He dropped a doe off on the dogs and tried to slip out. The dogs stayed with the doe, and he was just slipping out, coming to me.”
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