Big Buck 411 Blog

Change of Plans

Change of Plans

By Patrick Dunning

Tuesday morning, Nov. 1, Terry Hollis got two photos of a giant buck at his feeder at 7:17 and 7:20 a.m. When a buck like that is on its feet in daylight, you have to act quickly, so Terry devised a plan to tuck his SxS between two hay bales on top of one of the fields. Another thing about big bucks is you have to be ready to adjust your plan.

With a wind blowing directly into the bottom, Terry knew it would blow his cover. He didn’t want to take any chances with this deer.

So, abandoning the comfort of the SxS, he wedged himself against a fenceline that runs the length of his 25-acre property and parallels Big Haynes Creek in Gwinnett County. Terry said his target buck was using a lingering fog in a hardwood bottom for cover and only had one thing on its mind.

“I don’t know if he was trailing a doe that had been through there earlier, but he had no idea I was on the ground backed up in some brush,” Terry told Buckmasters. “I thought he was going to spot me, but for whatever reason he made a 90-degree turn to my right, and when he was broadside, I reached down over the fence with my rifle, aimed down the barrel underneath my arm and let him have it. He was so close; I knew I hit him.”

Change of PlansTerry’s hunting property is a little slice of heaven. He produces corn, winter wheat and rye grass for hay bales that serve as his retirement income. The creek bottom behind his house is inundated with white, red and water oaks dropping acorns for several miles.

He bought a 4-acre lot in 1987, built the house he raised his kids in, and little by little over the years acquired neighboring properties along the creek.

There’s an old barn on the north side of the property Terry uses to store square hay bales that double as a blind. All three of his grandchildren killed their first deer sitting in that barn.

Terry’s buck is a mainframe 5x5 with 16 scoreable points and 7 1/4-inch bases that hold their mass throughout the length of the beams.

You can read about the close encounter with this world-class buck in its entirety in a future issue of Rack magazine.

— Read Recent Blog! A Crown of Thorns: Jeff Humphrey arrowed this multiple forked-droptined beast from a 180 Realtree blind in September 2022.

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