A Giant Second Chance
By Mark Melotik
Now you see him, now you don’t. That quaint phrase more or less describes John Egan Griffith’s bowhunt for one of the most-impressive mainframe 8-point bucks ever taken, a buck Griffith would finally anchor last Oct. 15, following a three-year chase in north Louisiana.
Griffith, 28, has been hunting the same family owned 1,000-acre parcel for years and has taken some nice bucks there. But the 10-pointer he captured on trail camera during the winter of 2021 got his heart racing like no other. The wide, tall buck appeared to score somewhere in the upper 160s.
“The next year, In 2022, I got a bunch of photos of him during the early season almost every day,” John recalled. “At that point I would say he scored somewhere in the mid-170s.”
In late October 2022, John would get his shot at the buck at the edge of a soybean field, hitting him high in the shoulder. After a lengthy tracking job that came up dry, John was relieved to see the buck show back up on his trail camera some three weeks later, seemingly no worse for wear.
The buck shed its antlers unusually early that year, in early December, and John saw it on the hoof several times later while hunting, watching as the antlerless buck chased does and otherwise went about its business. But then, sometime after the season, it disappeared.
Almost unbelievably, the first trail camera photo John would capture of the big brute in 2023 would come not in late spring or summer, but on Oct. 12, well after the Oct. 1 bow season opener. By that time he had all but written the buck off as deceased, but John’s cell cam would capture another nighttime image of the buck, now a huge mainframe 8 with an additional character drop tine, on Oct. 13. And soon after came yet another telling signal it was time to renew the chase.
“I attended a wedding on 14th, and while there, I got a daytime photo of him, maybe an hour before dark. I remember I called my dad over to show him, and he said, ‘He’ll be back.’”
The next day, Oct. 15, John, with bow in hand, got out to his stand about 3:30 p.m., but most of the initial excitement of the hunt wore off fairly quickly.
“I remember it was hot, and I wasn’t seeing much,” he said. “Then, closer to dark, out came a couple does and a few small bucks.”
As the minutes ticked by, John was thinking it might not be his night, but then he once again scanned the large L-shaped field of beans.
“I looked out across the field, and suddenly he was there, facing me, about 350 yards away. Even at that distance, he looked like he was 4 feet wide.”
With the does and smaller bucks hanging around a protein feeder near John’s stand, the big deer made a steady approach, but its focus was not on the feed.
“He skirted the feeder, almost like he was scent-checking the does, but it was way too early for that.”
John waited patiently as the buck approached a shooting lane visible from his 24-foot hang-on stand. At 26 yards, he took the quartering shot, which he felt caught one lung and liver. Luckily, the hard-hit buck bolted back the way it had come, streaking across the bean field in plain sight for more than 300 yards before pausing and disappearing into the woods.
Just 10 minutes later, John was down the tree and on his way to his stepfather Dave’s home for help. When the two made it back about an hour later, now in darkness, they began their search at the woodline.
“There was good blood right where he entered the woods, but the tracking job was only about 15 yards,” John said. “Shining my light into the woods, I could see his white belly.”
In total the buck had made it about 340 yards after the shot, but the real surprise came when John bent down to grasp the rack in his hands.
“I knew he was big, but I didn’t know he was that big,” John said of his first thoughts.
A check of the rack’s amazing world-class specs tells the story. The inside spread is 24 inches, with nearly 30-inch main beams, with all tines eclipsing 10 inches — the largest at 12 1/2.
John weighed the buck at 270 pounds before field-dressing it, while the taxidermist aged it at 8 1/2 years. John’s guess had been seven.