I shot this buck on opening day. The deer came straight to the base of my tree and never presented a shot. I was looking at him through the foot piece of my Ol' Man as he was smelling my pull-up rope. He spooked and started running away from me. I stopped him around 20 yards and he was quartering hard away.

I shot him a little back and it angled up into his chest cavity. I thought I heard him crash within 100 yards but we looked for 2 hours before finding a little blood. We called a buddy with a dog but after 5 minutes of sniffing around, the dog laid down in the blood. After 5 hours of looking and no more blood, we decided to give up for the night. I had no time to go back and look Thursday and had to go to the coast for the weekend.

Word got out that I had shot a good deer and one of our camp members decided to go look for me. He spotted buzzards and walked straight to him. The deer was dead 81 yards from my stand and we had walked all around him.

I HATE that the meat was spoiled, but that was a phone call I will never forget. I went from down in the dumps to ecstatic in a matter of seconds. He was my biggest whitetail and to do it with a bow makes it even better. He scored 132 4/8. Not bad for a Lincoln County pine comb eater.