Hunter shot the buck on Nov. 9 with a muzzleloader
Michael Hicks of Maiden, N.C. won the November Bag-A-Buck contest with a buck he killed in Ashe County. He and some buddies who hunt a 400-acre tract in Ashe County had plenty of trail-camera photos of big bucks in the months leading up to Nov. 9, the opening day of blackpowder season in Northwest North Carolina.
But Hicks had never seen the big 8-point buck that walked out of a stand of pines in front of his ridge-top box stand on that morning around 7:45.
It didn’t take long for Hicks to become very familiar with the buck. He dropped it with a 60-yard shot from his T-C Encore muzzleloader. Then he entered it in Carolina Sportsman’s Bag-A-Buck contest. His entry was drawn as the winner of the November contest.
Hicks will receive a free one-year subscription to Carolina Sportsman and a $25 gift certificate to the online Sportsman’s Store. He will be eligible, along with every other contest entry, for the grand prize. That’s a two-year deer/hog combo hunt for two people at Cherokee Run Hunting Lodge in Chesterfield County, S.C., a $50 gift certificate to the online Sportsman Store, a free, three-year subscription to Carolina Sportsman and an Energy Elite bow.
It was the hunter’s first time ever seeing the buck
“This was the first time I’d ever seen this buck. As soon as I saw him, I knew he was a shooter,” Hicks said. “Our piece of land backs up to the (New River) state park. And I figure he’d come off the state park, chasing does. There was one in front of him when he came out.
“We had five really good deer on our (cameras). But we hadn’t seen this one. We had another one shot the next Monday that we’d never seen. We take our pictures from year to year. So you can tell when you see one again.”
Hicks had seen a doe at daylight the morning he killed the buck. He was sitting in a box blind, 8 feet off the ground, on a ridge top in a big patch of hardwoods between two pine thickets.
“I hit him a little bit far back on his shoulder, but I caught his lungs,” said Hicks, a deputy with the Iredell County Sheriff’s Department. “He ran about 20 yards and fell over. Before I got out of my stand, I reloaded in case he tried to get up and run off.”
Hicks’ 200-pound buck had an 18-inch spread and 10-inch tines.
Click here to see the rest of the Bag-A-Buck entrants at CarolinaSportsman.com.
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