14-pointer tentatively measures 150 inches Boone & Crockett.
Jason Harris saw a huge buck on Nov. 8 when he was hunting on a farm in Randolph County, but it was a little bit out of range for his muzzleloader.
Harris, from Franklinville, planned to return to the same stand the next morning, hoping the buck might come a little closer and give him a shot with this .50-caliber Thompson-Contender smokepole.
But when he got up well before dawn, he tested the wind and realized it had changed directions and made put his stand on the wrong size of the breezes.
“I decided to get in my climbing stand on the other side of the land,” he said. “It pays to hunt the wind.”
Did it ever.
At 7:31 a.m., Harris found himself standing over a tremendous buck, a main-frame 9-pointer with five stickers, a 20-inch inside spread, 7-inch bases, two tines longer than 13 inches and two more pushing 10 inches.
“We measured it with a loose tape, and we got 152 (inches Boone & Crockett),” Harris said. “I expect it may go a little higher when they stretch a tape on it.”
Harris had his climbing stand on a tree along the edge of a grain field. He’d seen plenty of does in the area during archery season, had done some scouting and found a handful of big scrapes and a rub line; one rub was on a 3-inch cedar tree that had been broken over.
“There were still some acorns on the ground, and the does were still in there, so that’s where I went,” Harris said.
A few minutes after 7 a.m., Harris said four does came racing across the 60-acre field, really hauling the mail.
“About 10 seconds later, here comes the big buck,” he said. “He had picked out one of the does and was chasing her all over the field. I was whistling, trying to stop him, and I went ‘Hey, hey,’ but that didn’t work.
“I had a mouth full of sunflower seeds, and I spit them out, cupped my hands around my mouth and screamed as loud as I could.”
That worked
“He stopped, I put the crosshairs on him and shot him at 60 yards,” Harris said. “They all took off, and he was still chasing the doe, but he started to stumble and he piled up about 40 yards from where I shot him. He was about a foot behind the doe when he stopped.
“Hollering at him was the only way I could stop him.”
The buck has beams measuring 24 and 27 inches long – one of which ends in a crab claw that makes it a 4×5 mainframe with a few small stickers. The G-2s are 13 1/2 and 13 3/4 inches long, the G-3s both measure 9 7/8 inches long and the bases are 7 inches in circumference.
Just like two big bucks he killed in the same general area last season, this deer’s beams curve so much that the tips almost touch.
“Where I killed him is less than a mile from where I killed a big 8-(pointer) and a big 9-(pointer) last year,” Harris said. “They have the exact same characteristics as this buck, as far as the beams coming and almost touching.
“One of those bucks, you couldn’t fit your thumb between the tips.”
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