Retirement paying off for teacher with two trophy bucks

Two trophies fall within four days, one a 143-inch beauty

Browning “Coach” Campbell, a native of Dillon County, is enjoying his retirement. He kicked off his golden years by killing a pair of big bucks the first week in November.

First, Campbell dispatched a 143-inch 10-pointer, and a few days later, he dropped a 6 ½-year-old main-frame 8-pointer with sticker points.

“Retirement is everything it is supposed to be,” Campbell said.

After finishing a teaching career of almost 37 years at Gordon Elementary School in Dillon, Campbell’s quest for trophy bucks on his 1,300-acre lease in his home county shifted into overdrive.

The deer lease is unique, with a mix of terrain, including swamp, clear-cut, pine plantation, oak ridges and agriculture fields. The uneven-aged timber stands and crop fields offer deer on his property with a variety of foods, but his first trophy was caught checking out two groups of does in a cut cotton field. While cotton lacks much nutritional value, warm fall temperatures allowed tender shoots to emerge. A couple bags of corn dumped in the center of the field may have helped a little as well.

Just before daylight on Nov. 3, Campbell slipped into a ladder stand overlooking the cotton field under cloudy skies and a light rain. The rut was in full swing, and deer activity was on the rise.

Campbell could make out the outlines of deer in the field on his right and left, but it was to early for him to see much more than shapes. Neither group of deer was working on the corn, but Campbell kept checking the bait pile. He noticed two big deer sporting full headgear at least 100 yards beyond the corn, near the far treeline. One slipped into the woods, while the second headed toward one of the groups of deer.

“I immediately noticed one of the deer to my left out of the group was heading towards the buck. I didn’t even realize that one of those deer to my left was a buck,” Campbell said.

The two deer approached each other in aggressive postures until the smaller of the two turned around and headed back to the group of does, then into the woods.

“I assumed the deer was the same big 6-pointer I had watched the day before until I got a clear look at him in my binoculars,” he said.

Shapes were no longer just silhouettes, and Campbell could clearly identify a huge, shooter buck strutting well within range. He raised his Remington Model 700 and squeezed off one .270 round. A clean miss. The deer trotted off 10 to 12 steps and stopped, enabling Campbell to make his second shot count.

Then, the buck bolted directly towards Campbell and covered the entire distance at full speed, crossing a ditch and stopping at the base of his stand. Campbell quickly dialed down his variable scope and took his final shot at a target within a few feet of his muzzle.

The 180-pound buck had a symmetrical 10-point rack, 143-inch rack with a 17-inch inside spread and a pair of 8-inch tines on each beam.

Campbell and his son, Drew, hunted four days later on a nearby gas line, each seeing several bucks and Drew missing a main-frame 8-point buck with sticker points. But Browning Campbell got a crack at the same buck a little while later, dropping the 194-pound beast in his tracks. Drew Campbell arrived in time to finish the buck off.

This buck, which came from more than 200 yards into range, responding to a grunt call and can call, had split brow tines on both antlers and a second split brow tine on the left antler.