The Kings of Mitylene
By Patrick Dunning
MONTGOMERY, Ala.
Jackie Bushman has chased deer with quite a bit of success in Canada, Mexico and close to 40 U.S. states over the last 40 years, and still believes south Alabama whitetails are in a league of its own.
Hunting leases tie up virtually every square foot of timberland in Alabama, and all 200,000-plus state-licensed hunters hold three buck tags annually on top of being able to harvest one doe per day during open season.
Hunting is competitive in Dixie, and It’s a big deal any time you harvest a 4 ½-year-old buck or older. In fact, there’s only 15 200” white-tailed deer from Alabama in BTR’s record book, ever, and I can count on one hand the lot taken this century.
But that doesn’t stop us from chasing these critters and it didn’t stop Clark McLemore—avid outdoorsman and dentist in Montgomery who’s had some success harvesting Black Belt bucks lately, but it took extreme diligence to learn from his mistakes.
Clark gained permission to hunt a small urban piece next to his family’s farm in Montgomery County after the 2018-19 deer season. The property was nearly surrounded by roads and houses, full of hardwoods and low spots, transition areas and had a year-long creek running smack dab through the middle of it. The best part, this section hadn’t been touched in two years and Clark now had it all to himself.
Three nice bucks have now left that 90-acre tract in the bed of a pickup truck in the four years under Clark’s personal management and prescription.
The significance of these deer was, one, the size of their racks given the area, and two, these bucks lived in the city limits of Montgomery, probably 150 yards from a Publix parking lot.
The Kings of Mitylene, as Clark came to call them, challenged his woodsmanship and changed his perspective on chasing whitetails forever.
“Shortly after Alabama’s 2018-2019 deer season I gained permission to hunt a piece of property I’d known about for some time. I grew up hunting my family’s farm only a few minutes from there, so I was familiar with the area and the quality of deer to expect, which was more or less your standard Alabama buck,” Clark told Buckmasters. “The real reason I wanted to hunt this property was to have a place to call my own, a testing ground for hunting and management ideas, uninterrupted by other minds. I didn’t want to have all the deer to myself per se, but I did want to see my own ideas through to completion.”
Clark began putting cellular cameras out in spring 2019 and watched does and yearling bucks frequent a field for a month before things got interesting.
“On August 26, my birthday, I got to work and checked my phone for a few pictures and my stomach did a summersault. A bachelor group of nine large bucks grazed past my camera, all 8-pointers or better. Three of the bucks in those photos were individually the largest and most impressive deer I had ever seen in my life. Each of the three giants had uniquely impressive character in their own right.”
Those photos initiated a shift in Clark’s attention to the property. He gave the three distinguishable bucks nicknames: Flame, Bubba, and Grizzly.
Bubba was a mainframe 5x5 with tall tines and an impressive number of irregular points. One of its brow tines was split, and the other curved back like a fishhook. Clark jokingly referred to Bubba as a “Build-A-Deer.”
Flame was an unusually wide, mainframe 4x4 with a P2 kicker on its right side. Flame sported symmetrical split brow tines that curve like the profile of a candle flame, hence the name.
Clark held the most respect for Grizzly, who was a mainframe 6x5 with a P2 kicker on its right side. He played cat and mouse with this unpredictable buck for three years and couldn’t seem to seal the deal, ever.
“His frame and tines looked incredibly clean, symmetric and balanced. An ideal representation of the perfect typical whitetail buck,” Clark said of Grizzly. “I used to daydream about deer like him as an aspiring hunter flipping through a hunting magazine nearly every night before bed. Over the years of hunting experience those visions of whitetail grandeur faded in my mind and made way for the reality of Alabama deer genetics. My youthful imagination had not failed me though, it was like the property reached into my memory and pulled them out to make them real.”
Clark’s first season hunting the Montgomery tract, he lived in Birmingham and leaned heavily on a single cell camera and a handful of traditional trail cameras. He got a crack at Flame on his first sit, 10 days into the state’s 2019 archery season, along with his first slice of homemade humble pie on the new property. All three bucks came out of a tree line at 5:15 p.m. about 150 yards from Clark’s lock-on into some tall grass in a transition zone.
When Flame got to within 43 yards, Clark drew his bow and mistakenly aimed between his second and third pins instead of his third and fourth pins. When he recovered the arrow, it was sticky with clear fluid and hair.
Close but no cigar.
“I lost a few nights of sleep after that. I really felt like a dirtbag hunter too afraid to make a decent shot on a big buck. I practiced shooting nearly every day and probably could have ranked in an archery tournament. Flame showed up on hunt one to humble me; a lesson the property sent loud and clear.”
Clark’s next idea was to set a ground blind close to where his target bucks regularly entered the field, and for the next two months he did his best to stay out of sight and downwind. He had a few encounters but nothing close enough for archery gear.
“Even though I was cautious to an extreme level, I think they knew something was up. I’d see them near a set of mine that I knew had an impossible wind to hunt at that time. I imagine they knew that, too.”
With light fading on Christmas Day in 2019 Clark managed to seal the deal and close Flame’s chapter. A tip off that Flame had made a favorable entrance to the field the evening before gave Clark a hunch that it may do it again, and he was right. Flame took the same trail two days in a row and Clark made a lethal shot at 25 yards with his compound bow.
After a short track, Clark recovered Flame and noticed a three-inch-long slice in its hide under the sternum from the first arrow.
“The feeling I had when I laid hands on him was different than I’d felt before. I’ve killed several bucks in my life but never had a connection or relationship as close as this one,” Clark said. “The usual childlike excitement of killing a big buck wasn’t there this time. It was a bittersweet feeling filled with reverence and respect.”
He added, “I had grown to know his tendencies so well, and achieved my goal but lost that relationship in the process. It affected me deeply as a hunter. But in time I learned this was only the beginning of what this property would teach me about myself as a hunter.”
Flame has a 24 1/8 inch inside spread and scored 151 inches for BTR. An Alabama Hammer, no doubt.
Two days before the end of the state’s recently extended deer season, Clark and his hunting buddy, Frank Litchfield, hit the woods for a 9th inning sit. Clark sat across the road on the far corner of the property glassing the field for next year’s potential shooters and Frank slipped into a hardwood stand and hung a lock-on at sunrise.
The morning was slow after a post-rut full moon and Frank didn’t see a single deer until 10 a.m. but insisted on holding out a little longer. As Clark made his way to camp, he received a text about deer movement, shortly followed by a whisper-yelling phone call about a big buck down.
“He hadn’t seen a single deer but was committed to the idea that deer would start moving mid or late morning, which we both knew was likely given the full moon. I drove back to camp and about the time I got there, he sent me a message that he saw a deer, more than likely a doe. About two minutes later he called me in a frenzy,” Clark recalled.
Frank wasn’t sure if it was Grizzly or Bubba he’d arrowed but was confident it was one of the two. They followed a weak, but steady blood trail for 125 yards or so and found Bubba, ending their 2019-2020 season on a high note.
“When we got to him, we made quite the scene. I bet every deer in the county could hear us celebrating. It was a special moment; I was so happy for his incredible luck and hunters’ intuition to pick the spot he did.”
Bubba had apparently picked several fights during the rut and broken 20 inches or so off its rack and one of the eyes was nearly swollen shut.
Clark and Frank green scored Bubba 160 inches as a 14-pointer.
Grizzly was still alive and, still, number one on Clark’s hit list going into next season. Not long after the 2020-2021 archery opener, he and his wife, Helen, welcomed their first child, Annie, into the world on October 26. At the time, the McLemore’s still lived in Birmingham so Clark was limited on how often he could hunt.
The McLemores’ moved to Montgomery in January 2021 and Clark was now the property’s budding expert, having identified all the key pinch points and travel corridors. As a perfect 6x6 then, Clark suspected Grizzly to be 5 1/2 years old. Grizzly didn’t associate with other bucks on the property and was becoming difficult to pin down.
“He seemed to be a loner and not interested in what any other buck was doing. He never took the same entrance to the field twice in a row, or the same trail to get to the field, twice in a row. Most of the time I had no idea where he came from,” Clark said. “Mid season I resorted to building a blind by hand out of square hay bales in the field I frequently saw him grazing. The biggest weakness in this blind was that deer graze all around it late in the afternoons, and there’s almost no wind direction that can keep me concealed all evening.”
Clark located another stand location this season, a road through a swamp bottom between bedding cover and a food source. He nicknamed it, “The Holy Pinch” and tagged out on bucks from a single tree, but never saw Grizzly.
Hoping to get the edge on Grizzly before the 2022 season, Clark bolstered his cell camera arsenal and reluctantly purchased a crossbow after realizing the rare opportunity to harvest Grizzly may be outside the range of a compound.
“I experimented with four or five different theories on what he was doing: crossing a paved road off the property, bedding on an island, moving across a beaver dam instead of the main trail, I didn’t know. But all my attempts to discover his secrets were fruitless. Every season so far, he had frequented the large field, but this year he didn’t he was a ghost.”
At this point, Clark was throwing the kitchen sink at Grizzly. He stacked some pine straw bales up against a tree and nicknamed it Bale 2.0. Juggling two babies now after his son, Henry, was born, Clark only found time to hunt twice in 2022. His third sit of the year, December 26, and the three-year anniversary of harvesting Flame, he slipped into Bale 2.0 that afternoon through an access he carefully obstructed from view by design.
As fate would have it, a lone doe led Grizzly across the other side of the field at last light and both passed the blind through the only shooting lane Clark didn’t have to reposition his body to take a shot. Clark ranged Grizzly at 43 yards, which was the exact distance Flame was the first time he hunted the property and missed.
“I dreamed of this moment a thousand times over for four years. The weight of all the blood and sweat sacrificed and countless dollars spent in the chase for this deer was crashing down on me.”
The bolt took flight, but Clark never heard it hit Grizzly’s hide and was unsure if he’d made a lethal shot. He could see his bolt 80-90 yards from his blind directly in line with his shot angle, which is where a missed bolt would usually land, he suspected. For the next 20 minutes he stayed put and the fear of another potential miss began to swallow him whole.
Clark found his bolt doused in bright, red blood and clipped it back in his quiver.
“I immediately threw my binoculars up to look at a stationary black blob a few hundred yards away in the field. Too dark to make out any detail at this point I slowly made my way towards it. I kept checking the blob every few feet I would walk. I made it to about 20 yards when I could see his rack. I withheld all my emotion until then,” Clark said. “It was finally over; the end of a saga that began four years prior, and the last chapter in the book of the Kings of Mitylene.”
Just like with Flame, there was an overwhelming sense of gratitude for each deer he had the honor of hunting on this property.
“It was a turning point for me. I knew it would come someday. The era of ‘me’ was over, now it was time to devote myself to giving others the gifts that I have been fortunate enough to experience in the outdoors.”
Clark took a moment to lay in the field next to Grizzly, look at the stars, feel the breeze, thank Grizzly for its life and appreciate the moment with all five senses.
Grizzly tipped BTR’s scales at 148 1/8 inches as a 16-pointer.
“Through the years of chasing Grizzly my imagination was almost all I had to rely on. He was the enigma of a buck— antisocial, mysterious, and irregular. I came to take deep meaning from the similarities between these traits of his and the mysterious and irregular path it took my mind to unravel our final encounter together,” Clark said. “Grizzly changed me as a hunter. I had never reflected so deeply on my core values and motives as an outdoorsman. I came out the other side with a more complete understanding of what hunting means to me. The Kings of Mitylene had given me that gift.”