Two brothers, two arrows and one very big buck.
Tony Yoder might prefer not to dwell on the day he white-knuckled his bow and torqued the shot at the biggest whitetail he’s ever encountered. But every time he visits his brother, Winston, the memories come flooding back … of seeing the monstrous buck, shooting at it, spending an entire day looking for it, and then seeing his arrow protruding from the dead animal’s back two days later.
That arrow, however, was sort of a scarlet letter. Unlike his brother’s, which was responsible for the buck’s undoing, Tony’s arrow was a monument to a botched shot, there for the entire world to see.
“That’s why we call it the Big Deuce,” says Winston, putting a positive spin on things. “Because it took two Yoders and two arrows to bring him down.”
Tony’s shot at the Illinois bruiser came on Monday, Nov. 5, the first evening of the brothers’ planned 10-day hunt in Adams County.
Last season marked the fourth time Winston, 47, has driven from Silverstreet, S.C., to the Land of Lincoln. His two brothers-in-law tried for years to persuade him to join them. When he finally did, he was so gobsmacked by the numbers and size of the deer that he threw in with Tom Mills, the brother-in-law from Florida, and leased a couple of farms.
Tony, who hails from Jessup, Ga., was Winston’s guest in 2012. They stayed in an RV moored at a state park near one of the farms.
Tony was hunting from a ladder stand overlooking a food plot when the enormous buck strolled within range. He and Winston found and followed a faint blood trail to the property’s bedding area before deciding they’d have an easier time tracking in daylight.
“We looked all day Tuesday, to no avail. We didn’t even hunt,” Winston said.
On Wednesday, Nov. 7, Winston went to the same piece of ground before dawn, but about 400 yards from where his brother hunted two days earlier.
“Something just told me to go to this little 10-foot, hinky-dinky ladder,” he said. “Nobody had hunted from it in two years, but I just had a feeling.”
When it was barely light enough to see, Winston saw a big-bodied buck enter the bedding area 200 yards across the cut cornfield. The short ladder stand is situated in a point jutting into the field. He also saw an 8-pointer at about 7:30.
Around 8:25, he decided to throw out some aggressive grunts to see if he could lure the big buck out of the thick stuff and into the open. Five minutes later, he happened to glance behind him to see a Chia buck at 50 yards. As deer often do, it had come in from the least likely direction.
“It was all fuzzed up, ears laid back, ready for a fight,” Winston said. “The woods are pretty open there, and I thought I’d been watching every direction. But he came in without making a sound and caught me totally by surprise. As soon as I saw it, I thought, Shooter!”
The buck was definitely looking for the deer it thought it heard. It took 30 minutes for it to move 10 yards closer.
Winston was talking to himself the whole time, trying to avoid staring at the animal’s impressive rack, which wasn’t too difficult after he noticed the arrow – his brother’s arrow, apparently – protruding from the big whitetail’s back.
When the buck was within 40 yards at 9:00, Winston threaded an arrow through a 3-foot-wide gap. The deer spun around, ran 15 yards and headlong into a cedar tree before hitting the ground hard.
Winston sat down on wobbly knees and waited until his breathing returned to normal before calling Tony, who might well have run the entire 400 yards to be at his brother’s side.
When Tom got there, they filmed the recovery.
Three or four days later, a neighbor showed them a trail camera photograph of the 6 1/2-year-old buck working a scrape, the arrow in its back. The buck weighed a respectable 252 pounds on the hoof – a giant compared to South Carolina deer, but nowhere close to the 300-pound 9-pointer Winston shot off the place during an earlier hunt.
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This article was published in the October 2013 edition of Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine. Subscribe today to have Buckmasters delivered to your home.