Never a Dull Moment
By Mike Handley
Basketball legend Michael Jordan once said, “Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, (and) others make it happen.”
A group of deer hunters in Crawford County, Ohio, has adopted the latter as their mantra, and they gained a new convert in 2024.
Kendall Adkinson joined his girlfriend’s father’s group of friends for a series of man-drives during the last weekend of Ohio’s first gun season. Six men participated on Saturday, Dec. 7, the day his potential fa-ther-in-law filled his buck tag with a career-best, 175-inch whitetail.
“They hunt like that quite a bit, taking the whole week off,” he said. “I hunt with them on weekends; I don’t take off work. But I hunt by myself a lot during the bow season and after I get off work.”
Among the four who showed up for the Dec. 8 pushes, Kendall held the only buck tag, ensuring he would be stationed ahead of whoever took on the rolls of game drivers. Two of the men possessed doe tags, and his girlfriend’s father didn’t even carry a gun.
The foursome staged two drives that crisp and clear Sunday morning. The first yielded no deer, but the second pushed out a couple of small bucks and some does. The third man-drive, when the temperature had climbed to almost 50 degrees and the wind to 15 mph, was the charm.
Soon after the drivers began walking through the area, several does snuck out of the parcel, and one of them hesitated near Kendall, whose trigger finger was itching.
“I was going to shoot that doe, but she was in the brush and I didn’t want to fire into the woods toward the drivers,” said the 26-year-old pipefitter from Shelby, Ohio. “I had my eyes on her when someone yelled ‘Big buck!’”
Moments later, he saw the approaching buck at 50 yards and took the running shot with his .450 Bushmaster. The bullet hit farther back than Kendall had hoped, but there was no doubt he’d hit it.
When the gang regrouped, they followed the blood trail for only a short distance when Kendall saw the deer on the ground 50 yards ahead of them.
“I thought it was dead,” he said, “but it got up and ran across a nearby road.
“We continued tracking until we lost blood, with me out front in case the deer jumped up again. We kept pressing forward until, eventually, I saw the buck stand about 110 yards in front of us and shot it again,” he added.
Nobody weighed the 16-pointer or examined its jawbone afterward, but the consensus was the largest deer taken to date by the push club was between 5 and 6 years old, definitely mature. While none of the or-ange-clad hunters had ever seen the whitetail Kendall tagged, at least one local hunter had been keeping tabs on it. He even shared a trail camera image with them.
Toby and Lori Hughes measured the magnificent antlers for Buckmasters’ record book, arriving at 204 7/8 inches. The rack fell into the system’s semi-irregular category, an in-between classification — based on per-centage of irregular growth — for those configurations that are neither Typical or Irregular.
The 2024 season was fruitful for the gang. They garage-processed about 11 deer that weekend.
Kendall considers himself more of a bowhunter, but the camaraderie associated with the deer drives has also won his heart.
“It’s hard now to choose a favorite,” he said. “The thing about these pushes is there’s always action.”