How long does it take for deer to forget a boom? Two hours, apparently.
The morning prior to Kentucky’s 2015 rifle season, Alvin Hoover made himself a ground blind by stacking hay bales just inside the tree line next to a field frequented by deer. The setup was maybe 500 yards from his Todd County home.
He chose a spot allowing the best view of the 160-yard-long field, meaning his longest shot would be 85 yards straight across to the opposite side.
Alvin left his house at 4:45 the next morning – Nov. 14 – and he was in his hiding place shortly after 5:00, well before daybreak. He saw three deer in the field early, but he couldn’t tell what or how big they were.
Just before sunup, a doe and two fawns entered the field.
“At first, she was trying to figure out if I was anything to be scared of, but she finally went farther out, still keeping an eye on me,” Alvin said.
Two yearlings were next on the scene. Alvin didn’t see a buck until 9:30. He couldn’t tell much about it, but he knew it was small.
Alvin threw in the towel about 10:30 and went home. He returned to the hay bale blind two and a half hours later.
When a doe walked out at 2:10 and hung around for 20 minutes, Alvin couldn’t resist taking advantage of the opportunity for freezer meat. Had the deer not tempted him for so long, he might have resisted the urge to dull his knife.
“I was not planning to shoot a doe before I got a buck, but I wasn’t seeing or hearing anything else,” he said. “So I shot her at 2:30, tagged and field-dressed her, and then returned to the blind.”
There was no point in leaving so early, and the doe wasn’t going to spoil.
Alvin paid little attention to the next doe that came onto the field around 4:00 or to the spike that soon joined her. He says he was preoccupied with thoughts of how big a buck would have to be to trip his trigger.
“I was thinking what size buck I’d be willing to pass up and what I’d shoot,” he said.
When the last of the sun’s warm glow vanished, casting a bluish filter over the landscape, Alvin glanced at his wrist to see how many ticks remained on his hunt’s clock. It was 4:26, time for his eyes to probe the shadows along the field’s edge.
“When I looked up from my watch, my heart skipped a beat,” he said. “There was this magnificent buck with nice high tines approximately 75 yards away. It was right at the edge of the woods, pretty much broadside to me.
“I took a look at that rack and saw it had at least five points per side, not counting the brow tines,” he added.
“I decided it was at least a large 10-pointer, or maybe the 12-pointer some people had seen around the area,” Alvin continued. “The buck stepped out, chased off the spike, and came within about 40 yards.
“I didn’t really have a good shot then, however, so I waited ’til it was at 55 yards, standing broadside and looking across the field,” he said.
After the .243 bullet pierced its bellows, the buck took a few steps and collapsed. Seven minutes had elapsed since Alvin first saw the big whitetail.
Seeing the antlers up close was even more exciting.
“When I saw how big a rack it actually had, I got shaky,” he said. “It was a lot larger than anything I’d ever shot.”
Alvin never imagined his 16-pointer would score higher than a couple of 20-plus-pointers that had been shot in the area. He guessed his, which was a lot more Typical, might tally 170 inches.
Wrong. It’s almost 30 inches bigger than that.
This article was published in the April 2017 edition of Rack Magazine. Subscribe today to have Rack Magazine delivered to your home.
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