Thirteen-point green scores 167 6/8 Boone & Crockett.
Few big-game animals are smarter than a white-tailed buck that has lived past 3 1/2 years. A deer that Daniel Pittman killed Nov. 2 in Warren County proved that point.
Pittman, a native of Henderson who moved to Louisburg 2 1/2 years ago but still works the swing shift at St. Gorvain Glass Company in Henderson, had access to some private land he and a friend had been sharing with a local deer-dog club for 10 years.
“(The dog hunters) had been trying to kill this deer all season,” Pittman said. “Me and my dad and the dog club hunt the land; sometimes I hunt with the dog guys.”
The day he dropped his huge buck, Pittman said he and his friend had jumped the deer as they were going to a permanent deer stand.
“It was in the afternoon, and I was actually working third shift (that day) and I went hunting before I had to (report for) work,” Pittman said.
The place where he’d put his tree stand couldn’t have been chosen with more care. Pittman had placed his stand at a bottleneck with a swamp and cutover to his right, an oak grove behind him and a soybean field to his left.
“I think (the buck) had been laying in a streak of cutover that varies from 75 to 300 yards in width that’s on either side of a pond,” he said. “I guess this is how this buck had been able to stay away from the dog hunters.”
After arriving about 4 p.m., Pittman climbed into his stand and began a fairly long wait.
“Right as the sun was setting and I had about 10 minutes of (legal) shooting time left, I had grunted an a little 6-pointer that came out (of the cutover),” he said.
Pittman had soaked a rag in some deer lure, and the buck ran to the tree where he was sitting and started rubbing its antlers on the trunk.
“I think the big one heard the 6-pointer, and he came out of the cutover,” he said.
The buck ran toward the smaller deer, stopping about 22 yards from Pittman, who dialed down the magnification setting from 14 to 4 power on the scope atop of his 300 Winchester Magnum Tactical 110 rifle chambered in .308 caliber.
“It was almost a straight-down shot from the homemade ladder stand I was in,” Pittman said.
The massively-tined buck, which weighed 176 pounds and sported a 6-by-6 mainframe rack with a 1 1/2-inch abnormal point off the base of one brow tine, fell in its tracks.
“I talked to the dog hunters that afternoon, and they told me they’d been going in at night with a spotlight (legal until 11 p.m. in eastern North Carolina) to try and see him, but they never did,” Pittman said. “Whenever I was in my stand, they’d ride right past it when they went to turn loose their dogs.”
The buck’s beautiful, mahogany-colored rack has a 20 1/2-inch outside spread. Its longest tine is 13 1/4 inches long, and the main beams measure 22 1/2 and 24 3/4 inches.
The rack was scored at Hayes Taxidermy and green scored 167 6/8 net typical Boone & Crockett inches, making it one of the highest-scoring typical racks assessed in North Carolina during the 2011 season.
Pittman plans to take the shoulder mount to the 2012 Dixie Deer Classic in Raleigh.
See other bucks killed this season – and add photos of your own – in the North Carolina Sportsman Bag-a-Buck Contest.
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