Some men squeak when they see rats, snakes or spiders. It takes a dead buck - a big one - for Bill Nadeau to sing tenor.
That said, the deer hunter from Indiahoma, Oklahoma, outsang Luciano Pavarotti on Nov. 3.
While looking for the buck he shot that afternoon, Bill called a buddy, Kris Borden. The phone was to his ear when he found first blood, and ditto for when he found the deer less than 40 yards from it.
Kris heard it all.
“He kids me now,” Bill said. “I’m 55 years old, and he says I sounded like I was a third-grader.”
Oklahoma’s nine-day primitive arms (muzzleloading) season ran from Oct. 28 through Nov. 5 in 2017. Bill pulled the cards from the three cameras on his Comanche County tract on Wednesday, Nov. 1.
One of the units had photographed a buck he’d nicknamed Boomer three of the previous five days. The time stamp on a couple of those convinced Bill to hunt from a ground blind on Nov. 3.
With only two minutes of legal shooting light remaining that Friday, an antsy doe appeared. Boomer was next in line.
“I didn’t have time to get buck fever,” he said. “I thought, That’s him; pulled the hammer back; and boom.
“I kind of fell apart afterward,” he added.
Bill sat there for 15 minutes, and then he walked the 40 yards to where the deer had been standing. That’s when he called Kris, and he found the animal shortly thereafter.
As soon as a photo was posted on the Oklahoma Hunting and Fishing Facebook page, a dozen hunters sent Bill pictures of Boomer. Many had been hunting the buck for two years. One guy, Lawton taxidermist Clint Hunt, had been after the deer for three seasons.
The 5 1/2-year-old 16-pointer tipped the scales at 195 pounds, dressed, which is as big as they get in that part of Oklahoma. The antlers tally 200 6/8 inches by the BTR’s yardstick.
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