Eighth-grader takes 153-inch 10-pointer while father videos the hunt.
Hannah Justice is only 13 years old, but she already has what thousands of grown men would love: a huge trophy buck to hang on the wall.
Justice, an eighth grader at Farmville Middle School, killed an enormous Hertford County 10-point buck on Nov. 11, that’s been green scored at 153 2/8 inches.
“It’s hard to believe,” Justice said. “He’s really big. “I try not to brag about it. Not many of the boys at school have seen it. Most of the ones who saw it didn’t believe it at first.”
The buck has an 18-inch inside spread, main beams that measure 25 inches each and tines measuring 10-7/8, 10¼, 9½ and 9½ inches.
Justice was hunting in a box stand with her father Greg Justice, a contractor from Farmville when she killed the buck.
The two were set up near a logging road and a pine thicket on a farm the elder Justice and four friends have leased for several years and managed for trophy bucks the past three years.
“We were killing the same-sized deer — 17 to 18 inches (wide), 110 to 120 inches (B&C score),” Greg Justice said. “We all put our guns down and started hunting with bows. Several of us have kids, and they get to hunt with guns.”
Justice’s son Tanner has taken two nice bucks with a gun, and now wants to start bowhunting, and Hannah Justice had taken a big 7-pointer.
Her latest kill, however, is the first real trophy the management plan has produced.
“I killed a 130- to 135-inch deer last year, but Hannah’s is the first really big one we’ve taken,” Greg Justice said. “It looks like some of the big deer have (gotten away) from us for a couple of years.”
Greg Justice figured the big 10-point buck he had on his trail cameras was not going to get away, especially when he got a photo of it during legal shooting hours.
“This deer showed up around Halloween; we’ve never seen him before,” he said. “He came from out of nowhere. He would be on my trail cam about three or four times a week, always at 11 p.m. or 1 a.m.
“Then, he showed up one morning between 7:15 and 7:30, and I told Hannah, ‘He’s gonna mess up.’”
Justice said that 90 percent of the time he hunts on weekends he has one of his three kids with him. He’s got a lock-on stand set up a hundred or so yards away from his box blind; when it’s “his turn” to hunt, he hunts from the loc-on with a bow and leaves one of the kids in the box blind.
When it’s their turn, they sit together in the box, and he videos the hunt.
“A lot of times when I sit in the lock-on and she sits in the box, we text back and forth and tell each other what’s coming,” Greg Justice said.
The afternoon of the buck’s big “mess up,” the two Justices got into the box blind at 3:30 p.m. A couple of small bucks and two does visited a nearby corn pile around 4:30.
Then, the big boy showed up.
“I looked down in the pines and saw those big horns, and I told Hannah, ‘There’s your deer, get on him,’” the elder Justice said.
Hannah Justice said the buck was bigger than she ever imagined he’d be.
“The trail cam didn’t do him justice,” she said.
The buck walked right in to the corn pile, but it presented only a head-on shot that Hannah Justice didn’t feel comfortable taking. It ate at the corn pile for a good 15 minutes, and that helped calm her nerves.
“I think the time he stood there made it easier,” she said. “I started to relax; I had a chance to breathe and clear my mind of all the what-ifs. It was very hard not to look at his horns.
“Every time I did, my stomach, the butterflies were everywhere.”
Finally, the buck looked into the woods to its left, picked its head up, turned completely around before Hannah Justice could get a shot, and started to walk directly away.
“I grunted out the window and he stopped, then he turned around broadside and looked right at the box,” Greg Justice said. “I’m looking at him through the (video camera) viewfinder, and I thought I would never hear the gun go off. But it finally did, and I saw him buckle up and run off.”
The young hunter paid a price for the knock-down shot, but she didn’t mind at all.
“She had a bruise from the scope (on her Model 7 .260 Remington) over her eyes, but she must have told me 10 times in the box, ‘I love you; I love you. You could have killed that buck,’” Greg Justice said.
Be sure to watch the video of young Hannah Justice taking the shot on the big deer.
The Justices waited about 15 minutes before climbing down. Greg Justice found a couple of specks of blood, but he decided to call in some help to trail the deer.
He went back to camp and got four hunting buddies, all of whom had good lights. They found little specks of blood for the first 30 yards, and then the buck sprayed blood for 30 or 40 yards until reaching the pines.
When they found the deer, 20 minutes after starting on the trail, it had fallen with its horns around a pine tree.
“He had torn up that pine tree, trying to get his horns off before he died,” Greg Justice said. “His tips almost come around and touch, and we had to sort of shinny his head up the tree to where it was narrower to get his head off.”
See other bucks killed this season – and add your own – in the North Carolina Bag-a-Buck Contest!
