Not-So-Well-Kept Secret
By Mike Handley
Long before Gavin Glance's trail camera sent him an image of an otherworldly whitetail on his recently purchased 12 1/2 acres, the deer had gained Most Wanted status with five or six other hunters.
Understandably, Gavin shared the news with only his father and a few close friends. He thought the buck was a well-kept secret until a cousin informed him that someone else had posted a photo on social media.
"In no time at all, the buck became the talk of the town," Gavin said. "Turns out, a bunch of people were hunting it. About all I could do was say, ‘We'll just see what happens.'"
Weary of paying rent and having no regular place to hunt, the cabinetmaker from Lincolnton, North Carolina, used his savings to put down a deposit on a big chunk of a 90-acre, yet-to-be-developed parcel. Since the other parcels had not been sold, he also gained permission to hunt those.
Soon after signing the contract, the 23-year-old put out a trail camera to get an idea of what kind of deer were there. Soon, he was monitoring a bachelor group that included a handsome 9-pointer that became his target buck for the upcoming season.
The 9-pointer was usurped when images of the much bigger deer were relayed to his phone.
"I was working in the cabinet shop when it arrived. That's why I began calling this deer Varnish," he laughed. "He stayed in front of the camera for 15 minutes."
Eventually, the bachelor group that was regularly passing through Gavin's plot dispersed for a couple of weeks. Some of the bucks later paired off, but male bonding was largely forgotten as the rut approached. Varnish had disappeared as well.
In mid-October, Gavin put an arrow through the 9-pointer that had been his original target buck.
Nearly three weeks later, he finally got another photo of Varnish, taken five minutes before sundown. The next day, Nov. 9, was North Carolina's blackpowder opener, and Gavin could shoot one more buck.
"I stayed up way too late that night," Gavin said. "I got only three hours of sleep."
As soon as Gavin got into his stand, which was about 300 yards downhill from a gravel road, he prayed for his late cousin to join him that day. He watched a little buck beneath his stand before sunrise, and a couple more came through afterward. He also spotted an 8-pointer.
A little past 10:00, after an hour of seeing nothing, he heard a deer grunt up the hill. When he decided to walk up to the road, he spotted a doe about 75 yards distant. She was maybe 10 yards off the roadside, and the giant buck from the trail camera was 15 yards behind her.
Rather than cross the road, which would've sealed the deal for Gavin, she took a hard right to parallel it, heading for the neighbor's soybean field. Varnish followed.
When the two deer were between 250 and 300 yards away, Gavin tried a Hail Mary before they crossed the property line: He shouted "Hey!" The buck stopped, and Gavin shot and missed.
"It was way too far," Gavin admitted. "The buck jumped the fence and stopped again, right in front of the neighbor's box stand. I just knew it was over then. I thought, Here we go."
Fortunately for Gavin, nobody was inside the blind.
"I was tore up," Gavin said. "After I went over there to make sure there was no blood, that I'd missed, I went home and shot my muzzleloader a few times to see where I was hitting. At up to 120 yards, it was dead perfect. Beyond that, it was going everywhere."
When he returned to hunt that afternoon, Gavin used his rangefinder to determine a 120-yard shooting perimeter. As the day wore on, he saw a couple of small bucks. When the last one kept looking to its left, he followed its gaze to the big buck, standing where it had jumped the fence that morning.
The world-class whitetail was coming his way.
Gavin kept his eye on a downed tree 138 yards away. He decided he would take a shot if the deer came to the near side of it.
Instead, the buck skirted the blowdown before disappearing briefly into the brush.
"I tried to stop it before it went out of sight, but I don't think it heard me," he said.
Gavin was relieved when the buck reappeared, only closer. That time, a vocal from the hunter caused it to put on the brakes and stare from about 100 yards.
The bullet hit high in the shoulder, but it anchored the deer. Gavin wasted no time in reloading, approaching the animal, and administering the coup de gras.
The rut-worn deer weighed only 165 pounds on the hoof, 30 to 40 pounds less than the average size of a mature buck there. Gavin guesses it was probably 5 1/2 years old.
"After word got out, many people sent me their trail camera pictures and even videos of the deer," he said. "One set of pictures show a missing drop tine, which would've pushed its score past 200 inches."
Even without the missing drop, the whitetail's antlers tally 193 7/8 inches by Buckmasters' yardstick, enough to earn the state's No. 4 spot among Irregulars felled by blackpowder. It's the largest ever recorded from Lincoln County.
BTR measurer Wayne Cox taped the 21-pointer. The rack is a mainframe 5x5 with nearly 30 inches of irregular growth.