Making Hay While School’s Out
By Mike Handley
Fourteen-year-old Hunter Windsor needs an eighth day of the week whenever he’s aching to trade football and baseball gear for camouflage. The high school freshman from West Portsmouth, Ohio, otherwise finds little time to indulge his love of deer hunting.
“I don’t get to hunt as much as other people do,” he laments.
That wasn’t the case on Dec. 2, however. The school system adds an extra day (the Monday after) to the Thanksgiving break. With no team practice on the calendar, Hunter and his dad, John, watched the sunrise from a familiar blind, a flat spot originally chosen by the boy’s grandfather.
Ohio’s gun season was under way, and Hunter carried a .450 Bushmaster, one of the calibers allowed under the state’s straight-walled cartridge rule. He’d shot only one small buck with it to that point.
“After sitting in the blind for two or three hours, we headed over to stalk into the wind on the adjacent public land, which is more hilly,” John said. “It’s routine for us. We’ve made that same hunt many times.”
“Probably around 11:00, we stopped walking to eat some graham crackers and drink water,” Hunter took up the tale. “We were just standing there when I looked over and saw antlers. That’s all I could see, at first.
“The deer was maybe 75 yards away, but coming closer. When it was within 35 yards, I had to wait a second because it was behind some trees, and all I had was a chest shot. I waited for it to turn a little, but I wound up shooting it in the right side of the chest,” he continued.
John was beside him, amazed at his son’s composure as he propped his rifle on a shooting stick and took aim. The encounter lasted no longer than two minutes.
“After I shot, the buck took off running downhill, and we lost sight of it,” Hunter said. “We didn’t know it had run only 75 yards and dropped.”
John was impressed by his boy’s initial calmness, and the shot looked good. Even so, he was in no hurry to push their luck.
“Some people say you should wait four hours, but we waited only an hour,” John said. “At that point, Hunter was as nervous as he could be. He’d shot a deer a couple of years earlier that we never found.”
“I was shaking like crazy afterward,” Hunter confirmed. “All I could think about was shooting and losing that other deer.”
Other than to briefly discuss the hit and where the boy had aimed, Hunter and his dad spoke little during the wait.
“There was tension in the air. You could cut it with a knife,” John said.
The tracking job was slow and methodical. At times, both father and son were on their knees, scouring the ground for the next drop of blood. As they moved downhill, they eventually spotted the dead deer. The bullet had struck precisely where Hunter had aimed, and the heavy chunk of lead had taken out both lungs.
“They don’t bleed much with these cartridges,” John said. “They bleed alright, but mostly inside.”
The Windsors had heard rumors of a giant whitetail in the vicinity, and they’d even spotted a giant on a distant ridge earlier in the year. In addition, a relative had retrieved a trail camera image of the animal, but they never expected to see it on the hoof.
A couple of weeks later, the Windsors drove three hours to meet with Buckmasters scorers Toby and Lori Hughes. When the measurements were tallied and the score — 244 4/8 inches — revealed, Toby asked Hunter about his thoughts.
“I got no words …,” he replied, wringing his hands.
Although the antlers are festooned with stickers and kickers, tine length is the rack’s greatest asset. Six of the nine uprights exceed 10 inches in length, four of them more than a foot long. The left P-2 is 15 inches, and the P-3 on that side is 14 4/8 inches long. Also, the main beams are pushing 30.
“We never thought in a hundred years that we’d get this kind of attention over a deer!” John said. “This is all new to us. We weren’t thinking straight, so we didn’t even get a lot of pictures. Never thought to have the deer weighed or aged. It didn’t even dawn on us what an accomplishment this was until we saw people reacting.
“What makes this extra special, though, is we were side by side when it happened,” he added. “Neither of us is going to forget that day.