Few Southerners get the chance to track deer in snow, which sounds easy enough.
In theory.
A Louisiana oil man thought it would be a piece of cake, but that was before the giant whitetail he shot last January ceased bleeding, before its tracks began disappearing as the temperature began rising.
It was fun while it lasted, but when four sets of eyes could no longer pick out the buck's trail, Ricky Book started making phone calls. Reinforcements, one wearing a collar, arrived around noon that day, four and a half hours after he squeezed the trigger.
Ricky didn't spend a lot of time scrutinizing the rack of the deer that stopped to smell a bush he'd doused with Tink's #69 just 30 minutes earlier. All he knew was that the deer certainly exceeded his expectations, so he raised and fired his .45-70, which Louisiana classifies as a primitive weapon (alongside muzzleloaders).
"It bucked like a mule and took off into the nearby brake," Ricky said. "I know I'm supposed to wait, but I just couldn't. I got down immediately and went to see if there was blood, even though I could tell I'd gotten into that deer."
Ricky found a few drops and followed them into the woods, and he soon jumped the deer. Rather than chase it, he returned to his stand to wait for a while.
When his brother, nephew and his nephew's little boy arrived about 8:15, they all began following the trail. After about 45 minutes and a quarter-mile, they stopped. Ricky wound up talking to a man with a tracking dog, and they met him at a local store.
"That dog went another quarter-mile right to it," he said.
The deer was aged at either 6 1/2 or 7 1/2 years old, and it weighed 229 pounds, even after gallivanting past at least two estrous cycles.
"It had been rutting hard, really worn down," Ricky said. "We figure it was every bit of 300 pounds at his prime."
The story of this Catahoula Parish brute's demise will appear in Rack magazine this fall. Its BTR composite score is 203 5/8 inches.