Liberty’s Jeff Ferguson used patience to down the biggest buck of his life Sept. 14 in Chatham County.
“I’d watched this deer since he was 3 1/2 years old when it had a 130-inch rack,” said 29-year-old Ferguson, a native of Liberty who works for Cookout Restaurants. “I had 50 to 100 trail pictures of him last year, and had 200 to 250 pictures this year.
“Since last year he’d added more than 30 inches of growth to his antlers.”
Ferguson, who has hunted whitetails in Ohio, Nebraska, Illinois and Wyoming, climbed into his 16-foot ladder stand that morning at 5 a.m. and the buck appeared at 6:15 a.m.
“I knew from my trail camera he was coming to a corn pile and a Trophy Rock block I bought at Gander Mountain real early, between 6 a.m. and 6:25 a.m.,” he said.
Ferguson was hunting a 40-acre block at private land that had 10-year-old cutovers, thickets, lots of big oak trees and overgrown fields.
His stand was placed at the edge of one of those fields.
“A couple of does came in real early, then they left, and the big one came in,” he said.
Using a Mathews bow with Carbon Express arrows and Sniper XP3 three-bladed mechanical broadheads, Ferguson took aim at 30 yards and released an arrow that hit the buck in a quartering-away shot and went through its body. He later learned the arrow penetrated both lungs and the deer’s heart.
It ran about 45 yards and piled up.
Waiting an hour and 10 minutes, Ferguson left and contacted two friends to help him return and find the buck, which they did within minutes.
“He was where I thought he’d fell, but I didn’t want to push him after I shot him because I couldn’t be sure he’d fell; it just sounded like he did,” he said.
The 10-pointer’s rack has been rough-scored at 160 7/8 gross inches and 153 net inches.
“The rack has 40 inches of mass,” he said of his buck of a lifetime.
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