Big Buck 411 Blog

26-point Swan Song

26-point Swan Song

By Mike Handley

Two years ago, Barb Putz Sanders put her shingle in the closet. After 50 years of plying her trade as a taxidermist, she walked away from the bench, abandoning her apron, knives, putty and paint, all the tools she used to turn dead animals into works of art.

In the fall of 2018, the great grandmother dusted off those tools to mount one last deer.

Her son, Mark, himself a 55-year-old grandfather of three, is to blame, though the decision was entirely hers. The extraordinary deer he shot would not wind up in the hands of anyone else, she declared.

The seasoned deer hunter scored on the fourth day of Missouri’s November firearms season, while hunting family land in St. Francois County.

The street dept. supervisor of West Alton, Missouri, had abysmal luck during the first three days, despite reasonably cold temperatures in the 30s. From Saturday through Monday, he saw only a turkey and a bobcat.

Snow fell Monday night, however, and the mercury dropped 10 degrees.

Eager to hunt in the white stuff, Mark went out early Tuesday, Nov. 13, to the 20-foot-high ladder stand his late father used to favor.

It was the perfect choice.

Eventually, Mark spotted a very large buck approaching and lifted his rifle. There was no need to evaluate it. The moment it stepped into the clear, he shot it.

The excited hunter didn’t go to the fallen deer immediately. He met a friend, and they drove back to camp to drink coffee with Mark’s brother.

The three of them returned for the recovery.

Later, when Mark asked his mother where he should take it to be mounted, she grinned.

“She happily came out of retirement to mount one last deer, and she did a beautiful job,” he continued.

Mark’s 26-pointer scores 220 7/8 inches on the BTR scale. His story will appear in Rack magazine.

— Read Recent Blog! THREE-OH-OH! Kansas yielded its second-ever, 300-inch whitetail during the 2018 season, the first actually felled by a hunter. (The other, a victim to EHD, was found dead in 2012.)

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