A motorcyle accident, a big snowstorm and two deer-tracking friends combined to give Dennis McPherson of Harnett County his buck of a lifetime and perhaps the top non-typical whitetail killed in North Carolina during 2010.
“I got in a bad motorcycle accident last August and had to have reconstructive surgery around my eye,” said McPherson, a 33-year-old long-haul truck driver. “Then, when I got ready for deer season, I found out I couldn’t see good enough through my sighting eye enough to shoot my rifle.”
McPherson, a veteran deer hunter, switched to a Remington 1100 12-gauge shotgun and loaded it with 00 buckshot.
With eight inches of snow still on the ground in Harnett County after a Christmas Day storm, McPherson got in a 17-foot-tall ladder stand near a swamp at 6:45 a.m.
“I started hitting my rattling horns as soon as I got settled in the stand,” he said. “About 7:05 a.m. a big 6-pointer stepped out 40 yards in front of me. I was fixin’ to shoot him, but he kept looking behind him and something told me to wait.”
Five minutes after the 6-pointer walked away, a buck with huge antlers walked out into the same clearing at the same distance, a stunning sight to McPherson.
“I was getting ready to unload the gun on him, but I was so excited I only shot once,” he said. “I later thought the gun had jammed on me but it hadn’t.”
The buck sprang away “into a big swampy area,” McPherson said.
However, the deer, hit by five pellets of buckshots, didn’t fall.
“He must have run a mile,” McPherson said later.
The hunter called two friends, Larry Reynolds and Sammy Thomas, to help him track the deer.
“We found where he laid down 30 yards from where I shot, but then he got up and started walking,” McPherson said.
The trio followed the buck’s tracks and dribbles of blood in the snow for 400 yards until they came to a creek. Then things got really hairy.
“We saw where a deer had scrambled up the opposite bank of the creek, but it must have been the six-pointer that joined him because we followed it but weren’t seeing any blood,” McPherson said.
Backtracking to the creek, then “crawled along” in the creek for 50 or 60 yards before finding where the injured buck had scrambled up the bank.
“We found him 50 yards from the creek,” McPherson said. “I picked him up and kissed his mouth.”
Taxidermist Andy Spears of Troy scored the buck’s the mainframe 4×4 rack (with seven sticker points) at 172 3/8 gross inches. McPherson also won a big buck contest at Asheboro’s Strider Buick Dealership where the antlers totaled 170 4/8 inches.
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