Twenty-two-year-old Dawson Mashburn was at the beach celebrating the 4th of July with family friends last year when he received a photo of this Kentucky whitetail in velvet and he noticed its right beam was beginning to split.
"I got down there a little late, so I ended up on the couch,"Dawson said. "About 7 a.m. the following morning, July 3rd, I'm laying there half asleep and my friend's dad came out of the bedroom looking for somebody to show the video to. All he said was, ‘Look what this deer has done.'"
Dawson had found the buck's right shed on the farm in 2021 and scored it 79 inches. He guessed it would easily be in the 160s, and just as a 3-year-old. Its main beam hadn't split yet, but Dawson said you can tell where it was starting to do so.
He and his friend regularly made the 3 1/2-hour drive from northeast Georgia to Kentucky's coal country throughout the 2022 summer and watched from the top of a grain bin as the 37-pointer bedded under the same white oak nearly 600 yards distant.
"We'd get up in the grain bin with binoculars and watch him get up from under the tree and walk up the hill into a food plot we had,"Dawson told Buckmasters. "We watched him every day. When he ran on and off the property, we knew which paths he was taking. [We knew] the first person to see this deer was going to shoot him, so the plan was to surround him, and the first one of us to see him would take him.”
Opening morning of the Bluegrass State rifle season arrived draped under an inch of snow, Dawson looked up from his phone and saw the Muhlenberg County monster 24 yards from his box blind.
It took Buckmasters scorer Dale Weddle nearly 2 1/2 hours to measure all 230 3/8 inches of this stud, and Dawson was excited to see his buck scored firsthand.
"That's been one of my favorite parts, "Dawson said. "I never really understood the scoring system. Learning and getting to see how Dale does it was a lot of fun for me.”
You can read the full story of this Georgia boy's Kentucky buck in the 2023 Post-Rut issue of Buckmasters magazine.
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