Rack Magazine

Trash talk and some eau-de-deer combine to cook this buck’s grits.

When Josh Stephenson saw the tsunami rolling through the yellowed stalks, he stood and grabbed his bow. Whether the parting corn represented a Biblical shift or the opening of a new fault line near Danville, Ind., whether a robed and bearded man, a herd of deer or geology was to blame, the 25-year-old bowhunter wasn’t going to find out without clipping his release to the string.

He didn’t sit down again until the arrow he’d nocked was long gone, along with the bulldozer of a buck it skewered en route to the ground. Josh was breathing as if he was the one with a hole through his bellows.

Three years of waiting and hoping had ended after only one hour in a stand that Josh almost hated to use for fear of spooking the very deer he wanted so badly to tag.

He wanted to go home.

He didn’t want to go home.

He went home, not far from there, but he changed his mind again.

Josh bought his current home late in the fall of 2010, so he didn’t hunt much that year. He was too busy with the move, his excavation business and his part-time taxidermy, which isn’t nearly as part-time as it once was.

On his way home one night after the calendar flipped, he rounded a corner and saw several deer, bucks and does, on his neighbor’s land. One of the bucks clearly dwarfed all the others.

That sighting led him to ask his neighbor if he could hunt his land, and the man granted him access to about 10 acres, specifically a draw where Josh suspected the deer he saw might live.

He later discovered the draw was more travel corridor than bedding area, and he never saw the buck that had spurred him into knocking on his neighbor’s door.

The next spring (2012), he began collecting trail camera photographs of the big buck. Josh had two cameras in those 10 acres, but only one was yielding photos of the big whitetail.

One side of the deer’s rack was clean, but the other had some extras — maybe 16 points in all. By the time the season arrived, however, the deer stopped walking in front of the lens. (He found out later that it had moved onto another neighbor’s land, closer to an alfalfa field.)

In the spring of 2013, the deer began showing up again in front of Josh’s camera.

Josh had put up two stands in his draw, a lock-on-type and a ladder. He prefers the mobility of a climber, but he hated the noise it made when he came down from trees in the evenings, when the deer were most active.

He hung the fixed-position model near the edge of an unpicked cornfield. He’d seen a lot of deer near there the first time he used a climber to hunt the spot.

“They were all around me,” he said of that first night. “That’s why I decided a climber wouldn’t do.”

Even after he’d put up the other stand, Josh was careful not to overhunt it.

On a windy Nov. 9, he decided conditions were right to sit in it. Before climbing into the stand, he checked the nearby camera and discovered the bull of the woods had passed in front of it at 1:30 — just two hours earlier!

When Josh was aloft, he was so excited that he spent much of the first half-hour texting his brother-in-law, Travis Garver, and father, telling them about the photo he’d retrieved. Only when it occurred to him that the buck might still be in the vicinity did he reluctantly put away his phone.

He’d been there an hour when Josh thought he heard a deer grunting in the standing corn. He also heard what sounded like ears being stripped from the stalks.

When the commotion intensified, he actually saw stalks bending about 60 yards into the field; he heard snorting, too. And the image of deer feeding in his mind’s eye switched to one of bucks fighting, or maybe a buck chasing a doe. The latter seemed more plausible when the swaying stalks revealed that something was coming his way.

Josh stood long before he knew what was going to step out of the corn. So he was ready when the buck burst forth, limp stalks and leaves dangling from its impressive and familiar antlers.

The buck had places to go, deer to see, and neither were where Josh was waiting. So Josh gave a snort-wheeze call to get its attention while it was almost 70 yards distant.

“I really don’t know what the deer did after that,” he said. “I lost sight of it, and everything fell silent.”

A minute or two later, Josh looked up and saw the buck trotting in his direction. He believes it might’ve been trying to get downwind of a mock scrape he’d made and sweetened with both estrous doe and buck urine, that it had associated the snort-wheeze with the scrape it might’ve visited three hours earlier.

“It was just acting stupid,” he said.

Even the smartest whitetails get a little stupid every now and then.

When the deer was approaching bow range, Josh grunted twice, and it turned in his direction. It was between 15 and 20 yards away when Josh took the shot at the moving deer.

After impact, the buck stopped and looked around, as if searching for the rival that had gored him. When it saw nothing, it ran out of sight. Josh thought he heard a distant crash a few seconds later, but he chalked it up to wishful thinking.

“I was scared that I’d hit it too far back, at first,” he said. “After I calmed down, I called my uncle, who was also hunting. He’s good at tracking, while I’ve had more experience losing deer than finding them.”

Since it was going to be awhile before his uncle was free, Josh got down and found his bloody arrow, which brought a smile to his face. He then walked out of the woods, called Travis, and went home.

Back at the house, Travis and one of his friends examined the arrow and announced, “He’s dead.” But Josh was determined to wait, to give the deer more time, and to see if his uncle would agree. The other guys thought he should return to the woods post haste and start looking.

“No, not yet. I'm waiting,” he said repeatedly.

Eventually, of course, he caved. The three of them went back out at 6:30, and they were back at the house an hour later, double-lunged buck in tow.

A welcoming committee had already gathered.

Hunter: Josh Stephenson
BTR Score: 222 2/8
Compound Bow
Irregular

– Photos Courtesy Josh Stephenson

This article was published in the November 2014 edition of Rack Magazine. Subscribe today to have Rack Magazine delivered to your home.

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