As I walked down my driveway to my car on a Sunday evening in late October of 2009, I began wishing that I were heading into the woods. Although I was disappointed that I couldn’t be sitting in a tree with my bow, I decided I shouldn’t waste valuable time and daylight by hanging around the house. Acorns were falling consistently, but I would go out and try to see if a couple deer were hanging out in a few clearings and CRP fields that I check regularly throughout the year. If all went to plan, I could maybe see a big buck up on his feet that I could try to get a crack at before the does started coming into heat. As I carefully peaked over a hill into the first clearing I was planning on checking, I saw a deer which immediately caught my attention. He had huge brows, thick bases, and matching deep forks in both of his G2’s. He carried his mass out to the tips of his sweeping main beams. He was the kind of deer you lose sleep over.
As I continued hunting through late October and November, I had not seen the deer again. I chose not to run trail cameras since I was almost certain that the deer was bedding in a swamp and occasionally picking up the does that frequented the area as they came into heat. As gun season approached, I remember hearing every gunshot thinking that the buck could have been in someone else’s sights. I hadn’t given up, and I was passing a couple other good deer in hopes of getting a crack at him. After the gun season passed, I saw the deer around a half mile away in an area that I had neglected since I first spotted the buck on the other end of the farm. He was just milling around, following two or three does in a cut field, not 40 or 50 yards away from the road. I sat in my car for around ten minutes checking him out, the entire time in disbelief that I had been hunting this buck on the wrong end of the farm. As the archery season progressed, I ended up taking another nice buck that I had been watching. In the back of my mind, I was depending on the possibility that the saying a “good buck could become a great buck” would hold true.
While the archery season ended and a brutal winter blizzard passed through the area, I made a few futile efforts at finding the buck’s sheds with no success. For the next few months, I only hoped that I could possibly catch up with that buck sometime in the spring and summer velvet growing season of the following year.
During April of 2010, I began to watch two bucks that seemed to have considerably larger bodies than the rest of the bucks I had been seeing. That early in the year, it can be difficult to predict how large a buck’s antlers will be. Some bucks drop their antlers or grow their new set earlier than others, so I tend to focus on body mass more than antler development. As I continued watching these two bucks, I noticed that one was quickly developing big, bladed brows above his thick main beams.
It was then that I began hoping that the buck I was glassing was the same buck that I saw on two occasions the previous season. Shortly after, his main beams were past his ears and he began developing his G2s.I would see the buck almost every time that I went out glassing from late April until June 7.
Throughout the month of June I enjoyed watching several good bucks that were quickly developing some fancy headgear. However, I had not seen the big browed buck that I had been watching throughout the spring. I remained persistent and scouted and glassed some other bucks through the month of June. Then, on July 1, I finally saw the buck I had been searching for.
He had transformed into quite the beast.
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