Big Buck 411 Blog

How to Christen a Crossbow

How to Christen a Crossbow

By Mike Handley

John Higdon is a quick study.

An hour and a half after sighting-in a new crossbow last fall, he was pointing it at a living target and slipping his finger into the trigger guard. Moments later, he revoked the pass he’d given the buck a year earlier.

During Kentucky’s late muzzleloader season in 2018, John pegged the deer as a still-gangly 3 1/2-year-old. He figured if the buck’s third rack could attain 160 inches, its fourth might exceed 180.

His estimations were on target, the first confirmed when he and his girlfriend found one of the deer’s sheds the next spring. A neighbor had picked up the other side.

John put out three trail cameras prior to the 2019 season. When he checked them 45 days later, one of the units had photographed the buck. He collected a few more images in October.

“Wednesday, Oct. 30, was the first time I really tried to go after the buck,” John told Dale Weddle, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “The pre-rut was kicking in, and I thought I needed to kill the deer before gun season came in and it ended up in somebody else’s sights.”

That trip left a sour taste in his mouth.

“I climbed into my treestand and started to pull up my bow. In the process, the clip on my rope got wedged between the cam and the string. When I pulled, the string came all the way off the bow,” he said.

Two days later, he was sighting-in a new crossbow. An hour and a half after that, he was hunting with it.

“I headed out about 3:00,” he said. “There was a south wind, which wasn’t the best deal for where I was hunting, but I decided to gamble.”

His destination was a lock-on stand at the edge of a soybean field where he’d spotted the buck the previous year.

“I’d been up the tree about an hour when I started seeing deer,” John said. “At first, I saw four or five small bucks. They were not aware I was there. Everything seemed perfect.

“About 5:30, the big buck stepped out of the woods,” he continued. “It was following a doe, bumping and nudging her.”

The two deer eventually split. As the the doe walked into the middle of the field, the buck turned toward John.

The 28-yard shot was easy-breezy, a guarantee the animal would not grow a fifth rack. Its fourth has a BTR score of 185 7/8 inches.

View BTR Scoresheet.

— Read Recent Blog! The ‘Gawd-awfullest Buck’: Kentucky’s 2020 archery season has yielded several great whitetails in and out of velvet, but few can match Joey Craver’s kickstand buck.

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Copyright 2020 by Buckmasters, Ltd