Although going to outdoors shows can get old after you’ve been to six of them in eight weeks, they’re still enjoyable, especially for the stories you hear and the folks you run into.
The Palmetto Sportsman’s Classic at the state fairgrounds in Columbia the last weekend in March was a treasure trove of trophies and tall tales, even if a lot of those tall tales were true ones.
First off, there was 11-year-old Hunter Mock, who brought in the biggest trophy buck of the 200-or-so that were scored by S.C. Department of Natural Resources officials. A fifth-grader, Mock was hunting in Allendale County last fall when a big buck cruised up to his corn pile. He raised his .243, the rifle cracked and down went the buck.
The buck had a typical 5×5 rack with two sticker points. Its gross score was 174 points, with a net typical score of 160-5/8 points.
After I took a photo of Mock and his buck, I got out a notebook and asked some questions, starting with, “Was this your first deer?” He started counting to himself, and he finally told me that no, this buck was one of six deer he killed last fall; he’s already killed eight. Eight by age 10?
I was talking later with Charles Ruth, SCDNR’s deer and wild turkey projects leader, about problems with the ever-increasing coyote population. Ruth related that biologists at the Savannah River Site — aka, the “bomb plant” — had trapped a coyote that carried a special collar, indicating it had been trapped and released as part of a study. The only thing was, the animal wasn’t trapped and released at the bomb plant; the collar indicated it was trapped as part of a study by Auburn University.
A call to Auburn resulted in the discovery that the school once did a coyote survey in Dorchester County, but a check of numbers on the collar indicated that this wasn’t one of the Dorchester coyotes. In fact, Auburn officials said the coyote had been trapped, collared and released only a few miles from the school’s Alabama campus in the fall of 2008.
So this animal had travelled about 240 miles from Auburn to the bomb plant in around two years — an average of 10 miles a month. My first question was, “Did it take I-16 all the way across Georgia?”
Last, but definitely not least, was the young woman who brought in a 10-point buck to be scored and said she was sure that no one else who was having a deer scored killed one the same way she did.
She related this story. One afternoon, she shot this buck, which fell immediately. But after a few minutes, the deer regained its senses, got up and loped off into the woods. The next day after work, she headed back for a look. Still in her nurse’s uniform, she went to where she’d last seen the buck, and within a hundred yards or so, she jumped the deer, which stumbled along a good ways until she overtook him.
Having no weapon, she took inventory and tried to figure out how to finish off the buck. She settled on her undergarments. The one above the waist was Victoria Somebody or Other and too expensive to destroy, so she took off her, ahem, lower unit, and proceeded to try and strangle the buck. Unable to get it tight enough, she found a glove in her pocket and stretched it over the buck’s nose and mouth, finally suffocating it.
She rode that buck in the back of her truck all over town, the undergarments still tied around the buck’s neck. It was embarrassing, she admitted, when someone pointed out they were “granny panties.”
And she had photos because, you know, you can’t make this stuff up.
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