10-point should make South Carolina deer records.
Staying alert paid off for Helen Chavis of Conway on Oct. 17 when a 10-point, 202-pound buck made a brief appearance in a shooting lane in front of her deer stand.
“You never know what you might see,” Chavis admitted.
But what showed up that summer-like afternoon was a heavy-beamed Horry County trophy buck whose rack later measured 135 6/8 inches.
Chavis, not your ordinary “Southern Belle,” knew what to do when the opportunity presented itself.
Chavis has been deer hunting for 18 years, figuring out that if she wanted to spend much time with the man she was dating, Ernest Rabon, that she was going to need to know what the inside of a deer stand looked like.
Rabon and Chavis started dating more than 20 years ago, and now the couple hunts in three different counties: Williamsburg, Marion and Horry.
The afternoon of Oct. 17, Chavis slipped into an elevated metal stand overlooking two shooting lanes cut through pines, with corn piles on both lanes. She was getting situated in the stand, brushing leaves off the floor of the stand to clear her feet from making too much noise.
“As I looked up after raking away the leaves, two does and a cow horn were already eating corn down one of the lanes,” she said.
After the does and the yearling buck fed for 20 minutes, they became nervous and Chavis raised her binoculars, scanning the edges of the woods for movement. Moments later, she noticed a buck standing just off the edge of the shooting lane in the brush.
Since Chavis and Rabon choose to target quality bucks, she continued to watch the buck as it stepped into the shooting lane.
“As soon as I saw four (points) on one side with the binoculars, he spun around and started walking back into the woods,” she said.
Chavis took aim quickly on the deer’s vitals and squeezed the trigger just before the deer made it back into the woods.
After the sound of the rifle cleared, Chavis was surprised that the heavy-horned buck was nowhere to be seen. But after a quick visit to the place the deer was standing, Rabon found the buck just 25 yards away, down a well-established game trail.
Stuart Johnston of Wildlife Creations in Conway green-scored Chavis’s buck at 135 6/8 inches, making it her first buck eligible into South Carolina’s record book.
Check out more bucks killed this season and add photos of your own kills in the 2011 Bag-a-Buck Contest!
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