Trophy Bucks Locked-Up in Bertie County

Johnson is ordering a euro mount of these bucks just as he found them

Fishing trip leads to battling bucks discovery

Steve Johnson, 61, a retired detective from the county sheriff’s department, added two racks to his trophy collection the second week of November 2010 in perhaps the most-unusual way of any hunter last season — he was fishing two counties and 80-some miles away when he obtained his prizes.

“I was fishing for speckled trout at Swan Quarter when I received a call from Ron Swain, who was picking soybeans in a field off  NC 45 just south of Colerain,” Johnson said. “Ron doesn’t deer hunt, but he knew I did and that I’d probably be interested in what he found.”

What Swain had discovered in the field was a nearly perfect circle of flattened soybean plants and two dead trophy bucks with their 10-point racks locked together.

“(Swain) didn’t know what to do, so I just told him to pick beans around the deer and not disturb them,” Johnson said.
On the way home from his fishing trip that day — “The fishing didn’t work out too good either,” Johnson said — he and a friend stopped to examine the two bucks.
One had a broken neck. Johnson said he figured the other deer died from injuries sustained during the battle. Both had lost an eye, gouged out by the other’s antler.

“I believe they died about 48 hours earlier,” said Johnson, who thinks the bucks’ antlers had locked the first time they came together.

“After that, they just went ’round and ’round, knocking down soybeans,” he said. “We couldn’t find any ‘push’marks where they’d tried to do that. The only thing we found was where they went ’round and ’round.”

Mature bucks often fight to establish mating dominance, usually by clashing their antlers together, then pushing to decide which animal is strongest. The winner claim mating rights with does, thus passing on the genes of the most dominant buck.

Most deer fights aren’t lethal, but every so often, racks entangle, and the deer can’t extricate themselves.
“It was pretty amazing to see two quality deer like that locked together in death,” Johnson said. “I just hated to find something like that and not do something with it. You see this stuff in magazines and on television shows, but I never expected to see it myself. So I bit the bullet and took them to Drapp Harrell’s (Broken Arrow Taxidermy) shop in Ahoskie.

“He’s going to do a European mount with the heads locked just the way we found them in the field.”

Johnson, who took dozens of photos of the two soybean field bucks, said a friend had seen both deer before hunting season. Johnson said he’d watched “a large buck with his rack in velvet all summer long, and I’m pretty sure he was the biggest one of the two.”

Neither Johnson nor Harrell have measured the racks to determine their Boone-and-Crockett scores.

“I know one rack was 18½ inches wide, and the other was 19¼ inches wide,” Johnson said. “One had G2s that were 10-inches long, and the other had 11-inch G2s.”

The racks, although unscored, have been estimated to gross score between 130 and 140 inches.

About Craig Holt 1382 Articles
Craig Holt of Snow Camp has been an outdoor writer for almost 40 years, working for several newspapers, then serving as managing editor for North Carolina Sportsman and South Carolina Sportsman before becoming a full-time free-lancer in 2009.

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