When Fort Wayne, Indiana, deer hunter Bobbie Poynter headed afield with his muzzleloader on Dec. 10, 2017, he was thinking only of his empty freezer. A man who loves venison, he’d decided the trip would be his season finale, even if he went home empty-handed.
He did not go home empty-handed.
“No matter how things turned out, it was going to be my last hunt. I’d had very little time to hunt the preceding months, and I really wanted some venison,” he told Ed Waite, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.
The hospital administrator/basketball coach took advantage of an invitation extended by a friend, Chris Meyers, whose father-in-law owns 300 acres.
An inch of snow covered the ground when Bobbie arrived. The only deer he saw that morning, a doe, was beyond range, so Chris invited him to try a new spot after lunch.
“It wasn’t long before I saw a couple of does probably 300 yards away. Not far behind them was a small buck that seemed to be limping,” he said.
While glassing those deer, Bobbie caught a glimpse of two very young deer at the edge of the cut soybean field. He then began looking for their mother.
“Looking farther along the track they seemed to be following, I spied the back three-quarters of a large deer standing behind a pair of walnut trees,” he continued. “Since I had both of my tags, it did not matter if it was a doe or a buck. It was my last chance.”
He never saw the rack.
Bobbie and Chris took up the trail using the light from a cell phone. They heard the deer get up ahead of them, so they stopped pressing and returned an hour and a half later.
Chris was the first to spot the downed deer. Even then, neither of them saw that it wore antlers.
“When we approached and circled the buck, we were stunned at the size of its rack. And to think, all along, I thought I had shot the mother of those two young deer!” Bobbie exclaimed.
The Steuben County 25-pointer tallies 218 6/8 inches by the BTR’s yardstick.
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