When veteran jockey Jason Lumpkins was thrown off his filly and run over by four or five other horses back in 2011, his doctor warned him to stay away from the race track to give his banged-up body time to heal. That was the easy part.
The hard (or impossible) part was not hunting.
“Lumpy” ignored his doctor’s admonition. He simply wasn’t going to stay indoors during deer season. He might not be able to climb back on a thoroughbred, but nothing was going to stop him from climbing into a deer stand.
The 46-year-old lived in California at the time, but he chose to convalesce at his parents’ 60-acre farm in Ohio, where deer season was already underway.
He had four setups on a heavily traveled ridgetop to accommodate various winds. He’d seen three huge bucks up there during the spring and summer.
After a week of staying indoors – not even midway into his mending – Lumpy decided it was time to sit in one of his ladder stands. He’d been told to stay off his feet for three weeks, but he couldn’t stand it.
The first few days he hunted, he drove a four-wheeler up the mountain, parked as close as he dared, and then walked to his stand. Convinced the four-wheeler was spooking the deer he was hoping to see, he chose to hike the entire 250 yards from his parents’ home to his stand on Nov. 12, heading out an hour and a half before sunrise.
Early that morning, he saw a doe that kept peering over her shoulder.
“I didn’t want to spook her or the buck that might be behind her, so I offered up a very faint fawn bleat,” Lumpy told John Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.
The doe was indeed being followed by a buck, one of the three giants Lumpy had seen that summer. When it passed by at 35 yards, the bowstring hummed.
The 16-pointer is the largest Semi-irregular ever arrowed in Noble County, Ohio. Its BTR composite score is 182 7/8 inches.
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