His Rutcation Wasn’t All That
By Mike Handley
When Brian Fultz walked into Rick Busse’s taxidermy studio in Piqua, Ohio, on Dec. 11, he was unprepared for the man’s response.
“I can’t take it,” Busse waved him off. “I’m full, whatever it is.”
“I don’t know where else to go,” Brian replied. “Don’t you even want to look at it?”
Busse, who has mounted and measured some of the Buckeye State’s finest whitetails over a long and storied career, the man whose photographs have appeared in every deer hunting magazine specializing in world-class bucks, must’ve seen the sparkle in his prospective customer’s eyes.
He knows the look well.
“Alright, let’s see what you have,” he relented.
The two men walked outside to Brian’s truck, where the 17-pointer awaited them.
“Aw, man, looks like I have another one to do,” Busse smiled, fully aware he was looking at a 200-incher.
Brian didn’t even know such a deer existed on his property until 18 days earlier. The 42-year-old construction company estimator from Troy, Ohio, had eyes only for a 160-inch 10-pointer when the 2024 season opened.
For the last four or five years, he has scheduled a week’s vacation around Nov. 11 to coincide with the rut in Shelby County. Last year, however, the rut wasn’t all that.
“It was slow,” he said. “I didn’t see much in the way of deer activity that week. The 10-pointer was the biggest I’d gotten off my two trail cameras, but it was almost completely nocturnal, so I knew going in that my chances weren’t good.”
Brian forgot all about the 5x5 on Nov. 23, when an image of a much larger whitetail arrived on his phone at 2 a.m.
“There was no question it was a big deer, but it was (photographed) at a weird angle. I couldn’t really tell anything about the rack’s mass, just that it carried a lot of points,” he said.
Brian’s first hunt after his rutcation was Dec. 8. About 3 p.m. that day, his neighbor sent him a text saying he’d jumped a monster — every bit a 180-plus — while checking cameras behind his house. The man had already tagged his buck for the year.
Brian had to work on the 9th. At 2:00 that afternoon, he received photos of the formerly nocturnal 10-pointer in front of his favorite stand. Around 8:00 the next morning, he discovered the big one had passed in front of his stand at 4 a.m.
“I told my boss I needed to burn my last three vacation days, the rest of the week,” he said. “That was the most activity I’d seen all year.”
Brian rose early on the 11th, drove the half-hour to his property, and was in a treestand an hour before sunrise. He’d not hunted that area all year. The only reason he went to that setup — a ladder stand beside a grassy, pine-studded field, was because he knew the big one had been to the other one, and he didn’t want to spook it if the deer was still in the vicinity.
He’d put the stand there because it’s near a cornfield, and deer often bed in the 4-foot-high weeds after a night of Hoovering.
By 8:00, thanks to the biting wind, he was shivering uncontrollably. He hadn’t dressed for the cold that day. His father, Dave, who was snowbirding in Florida, texted him soon after his teeth began chattering. Brian told him how miserable he was and that he’d probably call it quits by 9:00.
As soon as he put down his phone, he looked over his right shoulder and saw two does only 25 yards from his tree, and the giant buck was coming up behind them. He’d never heard a thing.
In order to get a shot, Brian had to shift a quarter-turn. When he tried it, the buck saw him. Had the does not been there, or of the wind had been blowing in another direction, the game would’ve ended then.
“We stared at each other for 30 seconds that seemed more like an hour. I couldn’t move my crossbow, and I could hardly breathe,” he said.
Fortunately for Brian, the does broke the standoff by moving off into some brush. When the buck noticed, it headed after them.
After a double-lung shot, the deer ran maybe 50 yards before collapsing.
Twenty minutes later, after he’d called his dad, Brian got down and went to the start of an ample blood trail. He had his dad on Facetime as he approached the downed buck.
“Those antlers had the heaviest mass I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Within an hour, six or seven people joined him to see the deer that Busse would eventually tape at an even 200 inches. The rack is a mainframe 6x4 with seven irregular points. Its bases measure 6 3/8 and 6 4/8 inches.
“I was just at the right place at the right time,” admitted the father of two sons, 9 and 12. “But I put in my time.”