Chances are, Dan Blanchette wouldn’t have driven into New Hampshire last September if the state of Maine allowed Sunday hunting.
While scouting public land on Sept. 16, the 46-year-old and a lifelong friend, Jerry Lanoie, found the mother lode of buck sign. The most exciting was a very fresh and very large ravaged tree.
“We both stood there, trying to calculate the size of the buck that made such a huge rub,” Dan told Gita Smith, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “We then found what we thought was its route from its bed to some oaks (which were raining acorns).”
Since Dan had acquired the permits for them to hunt, he got dibs on the rubline.
Two days later, the guys hauled in treestands an hour and a half before returning to climb into them. Their spots were 400 yards apart.
Dan was in place by a quarter after 4:00.
“I had a 20-yard window and one at 10 yards. Otherwise, it was so thick that I wouldn’t be able to see all of the deer ’til it was right on top of me,” he said. “Still, there was such a big beaten-down trail full of deer tracks nearby that I was committed to stay.”
After listening to squirrels for 45 minutes, he heard a deer walking. He then heard a different noise.
“I kept hearing movement for 10 minutes, and then it sounded like a deer rubbing a tree ferociously. In fact, I could hear branches breaking,” he said. “It was so thick that I wished I could’ve drilled a hole through the trees just to catch any glimpse.”
The deer was only 40 yards or so away, but Dan couldn’t see anything. That it was near where he and Jerry had found the monstrous rub was enough to push his adrenaline into the red zone.
Slowly, the buck wandered into his vision, and when it ducked under a low-hanging limb, Dan saw the rack, which was festooned with a piece of tree and grass.
Before the man could release his arrow, it popped off the string and toppled noisily to the ground. Amazingly, the animal paid no attention to the ruckus. Nor did it notice Dan nocking another one.
The deer was only 8 yards away when he released arrow No. 2.
“If I’d had any more time to look at that rack, I would have been a puddle of water,” he admitted.
The antlers tally 196 1/8 inches by the BTR’s yardstick. It’s the runner-up to the state compound bow record taken 20 years earlier.
— Read Recent Blog! Photoshopped? Nope: With a BTR score of 199 4/8 inches, B.J.’s Jefferson County whitetail is the new Alabama record for Semi-irregulars felled by compound bow.