Brandon Brewer’s infatuation with the 16-pointer he shot in 2016 took root when he found half its rack a year earlier. It bloomed when he collected photographs of the year-older buck.
The monstrous whitetail’s was the first image he saw after checking his trail camera that year. Knowing the deer was still alive and even bigger made the wait for the Arkansas firearms season tortuous.
Brandon hunts 70 acres in Arkansas County, most of it timbered or in CRP.
When the rifle season finally opened, he visited the tract for 12 consecutive days. He was still collecting nighttime photos of the deer, but it never came through while he was hunting.
“I guess that buck was smarter than me,” he told John Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.
When Brandon walked outside in the pre-dawn on Nov. 26 to get a read on the weather, he almost stayed home. A dense fog was hugging the ground, and the stout wind was wrong for where he was hoping to go.
“I needed a northwesterly or northeasterly wind to get into my stand without the deer smelling me, but it was blowing from the southeast,” he said.
He wound up taking advantage of the darkness and fog to cut across wide-open corn stubble, stool in hand. When he reached the other side of the field, he took up a position within a group of saplings.
Nearly three hours after he’d parked his truck, Brandon was seriously considering walking back to it when the day’s first deer exited the timber.
Even though his scope was fogged, he was able to discern antlers. By the time he’d wiped the lens to get a better look, the buck had disappeared into the tall grass.
“I got upset,” he said. “I blew my grunt call four or five times. I also had a bleat can that I turned upside down several times.”
When that didn’t work, he pulled out his telephone and sent his wife a text: Well, I guess I’ve missed that big buck.
“After I hit the send button, I looked up and spotted the gorilla walking the edge of the CRP, coming straight toward me,” he said.
In the time it took Brandon to raise his rifle and lean against one of the saplings, the whitetail had closed to within 70.
It got no closer.
Brandon’s 8x8 has a BTR composite score of 215 4/8 inches.
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