Doe City Yields County Record in North Carolina
By Mike Handley
Things didn't go as planned when Warren Cooper took a tenant to his father's property in Franklin County, Virginia, on Nov. 10. The itinerary was uncomplicated: The men would go to Warren's father's property, and Dakota Treadway would shoot a doe off a hay field.
As far as Warren was concerned, the parcel was Doe City.
"I'd seen only one buck on that property, a little one, about a week earlier," the 32-year-old subcon-tractor said. "It's definitely a doe place. It's mainly an open hay field, separated from a railroad track by an overgrown road.
"Rather than just turn Dakota loose, I wanted to show him the property lines, houses and whatnot for safety reasons. My aunt lives there," Warren continued. "Plus, I didn't want him to shoot a little buck.
"We got out there around 5:30 that morning; just sat together at the edge of the woods. Maybe 10 minutes past 9:00, he spotted a buck.
"I told him to wait so I could look at it through my binoculars. It was an 8-pointer. Just when I put down my binoculars, I noticed a second and much bigger buck," he added.
The largest whitetail Warren had ever seen disappeared almost as quickly, however. He didn't even have time to raise his borrowed .50-caliber muzzleloader.
"I remember thinking, This is going to be my story. I go out to shoot a doe, see the biggest buck of my life, and I never even get a shot," he said.
The guys lost sight of the deer for 15 minutes, and then Warren saw a statuesque buck in the brush between 100 and 150 yards distant. He wasn't sure if it was the same one.
"It was standing there, not moving a muscle. I told Dakota that it looked like a decoy. He said, 'No. It's a real deer.'
"I said, 'If it is, it's a monster.'
"'It's a monster,' he replied."
Warren doe-bleated to get the deer to move, and the trick worked. The buck stepped out of the brambles for a second before turning around and wading back into them. A second bleat convinced it to do another 180.
The second time it stepped into the clear, Warren was ready.
"We weren't expecting anything; just went to shoot a doe," he said.
The hunt forever changed Warren's opinion of the tract. He now has a trail camera on the property, and he's already collected two photos of what he's convinced are his buck's offspring, a 7-pointer and a year-older 4x4 with similar brow tines. He's nicknamed one of them Nuts because his backside is always to the camera.
He thinks the 16-pointer he shot was 5 1/2 years old, at its peak for body weight if not for antlers. He says it weighed between 250 and 300 pounds on the hoof. Warren tips the scales at 288, and the deer seemed every bit as big.
Rob Gehman measured the antlers for Buckmasters, arriving at 200 5/8 inches, enough to crack the state's top 10 list of blackpowder bucks. It's also the second-largest muzzleloader-harvested whitetail ever recorded from Franklin County.
It's a stout mainframe 5x5 with 6-plus-inch bases and 20 4/8 inches of irregular growth.