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Still on the Hoof!
By Patrick Dunning
Jim Lauchard’s son found matching sheds of a suspected 230-class phantom buck while scouting a field before planting season last spring in the Buckeye State.
He told his dad he wasn’t interested in keeping the antlers and gave the set to Jim, who forwarded photos to his taxidermist and later had the sheds mounted.
“I got a call from my son one day and he said to come check out a shed he had found. When I got there and he pulled the left side out, I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen anything like it; I thought it was a high fence deer,” Jim told Buckmasters. “He found the other side three weeks later and told me I could have them.”
The farmer has yet to identify this 22-pointer (before shedding its velvet) on the hoof, and no trail camera photos currently exist of this deer on the property the sheds were located.
The left side sports a 26-inch main beam and 10 irregular points with 6-inch first and second circumference measurements, totaling 113 clean inches of bone. The right side features a 29-inch main beam, a 7 3/8-inch base and 94 1/8 total inches of antler.
Buckmasters master scorer Toby Hughes estimates this whitetail’s inside spread to be somewhere in the ball park of 22 6/8 inches.
While having this deer measured at the Hughes Ranch in Caledonia, Toby’s wife and fellow BTR scorer Lori Hughes noticed one point was broken off at the top of the rack’s right brow tine, suggesting someone had shot at this deer last season and missed.
“There’s a slice in the back of one of his brow tines. Somebody most definitely has seen this deer on the hoof, taken a shot at it and hit it in its rack,” Jim said.