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Zach Galifianakis Wasn’t in this Movie
By Mike Handley
If you ask Ryan Piper, the best remedy for a hangover is Oreo cookies, a selfie and a gagger of a whitetail. Those three things, along with a buddy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, did the trick for this Ohio hunter on Nov. 5, 2016. Noel Underwood, Ryan’s friend and neighbor, was buried on Nov. 4. Afterward, the man’s friends g... READ MORE
Short Arrows, Long Antlers
By Mike Handley
Three of Michigan’s four crossbow records were toppled during the 2016 season. The new No. 1 Perfect is Trent Smith’s Allegan County 10-pointer. Steven Campbell’s 16-pointer is king of the hill among Semi-irregulars. And an 18-pointer taken by Butch Kulikowski is the state’s new Irregular record. Both Campbell’s and Ku... READ MORE
No Culling Necessary in this Sack of Treats
By Mike Handley
Jeff Berkemeier might have collected the mother of all treats on Halloween 2016, but his 12-year-old neighbor had only a broken heart to unwrap. The boy and his father had been keeping tabs on a tall-racked whitetail the’d nicknamed Skyscraper. The woods-saavy kid knew more about the deer’s habits – where it bedded and fed –... READ MORE
No Time to Spare
By Mike Handley
What began as just another sweaty afternoon stint in a shooting house for William Vickers ended 22 deer later with a puff of smoke. Because he was baking inside an enclosed box blind, the 36-year-old engineer from Marianna, Arkansas, didn't realize how cool it was beyond his four walls. He'd unwittingly chosen to babysit a food plot on the coolest ... READ MORE
Not All Rumors are Unfounded
By Mike Handley
Had Tom Wingate not retrieved trail camera photographs of an exceptional mainframe 8-pointer in 2015, he might’ve dismissed the following year’s rumors of a monster roaming the farmland near his 450-acre lease on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He was smitten as soon as he saw those nighttime images. “It was the biggest buck I had... READ MORE
Teamwork
By Mike Handley
One of the biggest whitetails felled in the South in 2016 came out of the Peach State, proof that two heads (and guns) are sometimes better than one. One of those heads belongs to Shannon Sledge, who owns a dairy farm near Ty Ty, Georgia. The other rested on the shoulders of a friend who’s also an employee, Skippy White. Skippy had been keepi... READ MORE
Worth the Hike
By Mike Handley
Shannon Alvis shot one of the largest public land bucks ever recorded from Alabama on the last day of the Black Warrior Wildlife Management Area's three-day, mid-December rifle hunt. He can thank a buddy for telling him about the hunt, his intuition for choosing the perfect place to hang a stand, and a doe for leading the giant whitetail to slaught... READ MORE
Wide Load
By Mike Handley
Some deer are just too big to be trussed atop a four-wheeler. Karen Little and her husband, Allen, gave up trying on Nov. 20, 2016. No amount of lifting, pushing, pulling or clever binding put them any closer to securing the buck she'd shot to their ATV. Between the whitetail's heft and its extraordinarily wide antlers, the task was too great. Even... READ MORE
And from Public Land, No Less
By Mike Handley
Less than an hour after climbing a tree and pulling up his rifle on Dec. 13, 2016, Mississippian Josh Clark lowered it again in preparation to leave. The clock was ticking on the last day of the Canemount Wildlife Management Area's primitive weapons hunt, and Josh wanted to look at something else, preferably a deer. The hunter from Iuka had already... READ MORE
No Bangs for this Okie Buck
By Mike Handley
If Darren Ambrose had been hunting with a compound instead of a longbow on Nov. 18, 2009, chances are he wouldn’t have had an opportunity for a do-over. He was so bedazzled by the whitetail sporting a drop tine and 21 other points that he shot over its back from a mere 10 yards. Fortunately for him, the whisper of the longbow’s string w... READ MORE
Can You Hear Me Now?
By Mike Handley
Ben Humphries might not have been on a rooftop, but he did plenty of shouting on Dec. 17, 2016. The bowhunter from Ozark, Missouri, used every last lithium ion in his cell phone's battery to share the news of his good fortune that day, unaware a dead phone would prevent him from checking-in the dead whitetail. Show Me State hunters must tag deer wi... READ MORE
No Joke
By Mike Handley
When Chris Cypert saw the 2016 trail camera photograph of a buck with an extra beam, said to have been taken within 30 miles of his home in Searcy, Arkansas, he refused to take it seriously. He'd seen plenty of big buck pictures passed around from phone to phone, shared on Facebook, and exchanged by email. The ones purportedly from Arkansas usually... READ MORE
Against a Snowy Backdrop
By Mike Handley
Three seasons after his aging grandfather shot his last whitetail in 2013, Doug Kisamore connected with his best from the same backyard stand. Nobody sat in the box blind on the eldest Kisamore's 4 acres in 2014. The homestead is mostly open except for 100 feet of thick brush at the rear of the tract. After retrieving several trail camera photograp... READ MORE
Ringside
By Mike Handley
It doesn't take a lot of bang to bring in a buck. That Levi Tarwater's giant whitetail materialized while two juvenile bucks were butting heads could be coincidence. Or it could be the older deer, curious, wanted a ringside seat. The 29-year-old bowhunter from Hoyt, Kansas, might never know. "The noises the two spikes were making weren't very loud,... READ MORE
Trading a Soup Spoon for a Fork
By Mike Handley
It took half a decade for Husky Hummel to leave Ohio with something more than a nonresident hunting license in his pocket. The 48-year-old car dealer from McClure, Pennsylvania, is accustomed to eating tag soup. He prefers it to the notion of shooting a deer for the sake of shooting a deer. His first two seasons in Ohio were spent learning and hunt... READ MORE