Louisiana's Top-10 List Gets a Shuffle
By Mike Handley
John Holladay was moments away from writing off his afternoon hunt when a doe ran into view, a giant buck in her wake. Before the 62-year-old from Kelly, Louisiana, could even raise his rifle, the two deer disappeared into a pine thicket.
If they'd kept going straight, the deer would've entered a hay field, but a doe being dogged by a buck acts more like a pinballing rabbit ahead of a beagle.
John owns 100 acres in Caldwell Parish, 20 of which have been in CRP hardwoods for a quarter-century, with trees now 30 feet tall. He has two box stands behind his home, one facing East-West, the other North-South.
He knew which buck was chasing the doe. He'd first obtained trail camera images of the animal in 2023, when its rack might've scored between 150 and 160 inches. He collected photos of it three or four times a week between October and January that year — his usual span for monitoring cameras, since he pulls them after the season.
While some hunters leave their cameras out beyond the season to see which bucks have survived, John welcomes the break because he's grown weary of looking at photos of wild hogs.
"The deer might've stayed back there all year, for all I know," he said. "I would have gladly shot it, if given the chance, back in 2023."
John hunts every day after his shift at a pipeline company. He gets off at 3:00, and has plenty of time to watch the remains of the day from one of his stands.
In 2024, the buck stepped in front of his cameras about the same time as it did the previous year. And, similarly, it would appear every three or four days. John was so enamored of the deer that he put out eight cameras to help him pattern it.
Just after lunch on Tuesday, Dec. 3, John received a photo of a buck chasing a doe. He wasn't sure how big the buck was, but it was clearly a good time to be in a stand, so he left work a little early and was sitting in the East-West box by 3:00.
He'd tried to jumpstart rutting activity, or at least pique interest in breeding, by placing some estrous doe lure over a nearby scrape.
Less than a half-hour after he arrived, a 3-pointer chased a doe in front of him. Nearly a couple of hours after that, as John was preparing to go back to his house, another doe ran through the hardwoods with a buck in tow. She quickly led her would-be suitor back into some pines, and John got ready to shoot, expecting the two to pop out into the adjacent hay field.
"That buck was moving so fast after her that I couldn't get a shot on it as they disappeared," he said. "So I started watching the hayfield, figuring that maybe it would chase the doe that way."
While he was concentrating on the wide open, however, the doe cut back into the hardwoods.
"The buck stopped in a small opening where I could see part of its rack and shoulder. I got on the shoulder with my .35 Whelan, pulled the trigger, and the deer just disappeared. They both did. I had no idea which way they ran," he said.
After sitting in the near-dark for 10 minutes, John walked back to his house to retrieve a flashlight. He looked for blood or churned-up leaves for 40 minutes without success, and then he decided to walk a lane he'd cut with his lawn mower. Halfway down the path, John thought, Hell, I missed that deer.
"I'll admit I was depressed," he said. "I almost stopped looking. For some reason, though, I went a little farther, shining the light in the woods to my left, and that's when I saw the dead buck.
"It had gone only about 40 yards," he added. "Instead of running into the hardwoods, where it was pointing when I shot, it jumped back into the pines.
"I don't know why there wasn't any blood, because I shot it right behind the shoulder. Then again, I can't see blood in pine straw too good.
"When I got up to the buck, I just knelt down and said, 'Good Lord, what a deer!'" he said.
The retrieval was a piece of cake. John went home, got in his golf cart and drove to within a few feet of the buck.
John doesn't weigh the deer he shoots, but he says this long-bodied one — probably a 5 1/2-year-old — wasn't as big as they get where he hunts. He doesn't think it would've weighed more than 200 pounds on the hoof.
"We have good genetics in the area," he said. "I believe my buck's daddy lives 2 miles from me. Someone showed me trail camera photos of it, asking if mine was the same deer, but it wasn't. It was much bigger than mine, and is still living, as far as anyone knows."
John did learn that his buck had been photographed more than once on the property north of his.
The buck garnered first place in Simmons Sporting Goods' big buck contest, taking the "open firearms" division (for deer harvested within 200 miles of Bastrop, Louisiana, where the store is located).
Greg Hicks measured the 13-pointer for Buckmasters. It tallied 190 6/8 inches as a Semi-Irregular, the system's in-between category for racks that fall somewhere between Regular (typical) and Irregular (non-typical). It's Louisiana's ninth-largest ever recorded in the rifle/Semi category.
The impressive mainframe 5x5 has three irregular points totaling 9 6/8 inches. Half its uprights range from nearly 10 inches to 15 1/2 inches.