You know it’s cold when the thought of field-dressing the first deer you see clouds all other notions.
Dalton Hunter’s mind was consumed with football in the fall of 2015. He was a junior and part of the first-string defense for the Corydon High School Panthers.
With the football season soon coming to an end and the stress of it pretty high, Dalton’s priority wasn’t spending his sparse down time in a deer stand. He slacked off the entire first day of the gun deer season and was seriously thinking of sleeping in on the second day.
Had his Uncle Andrew not called about 4:45 a.m. to remind the boy it was opening weekend and he needed to get up and out to his stand before sunup, Dalton might have remained under the covers.
Andrew was working third shift at the time, so he was unable to hunt except vicariously through his nephew.
Dalton’s grandfather drove him out to a family friend’s 600-acre farm that abuts a 20,000-acre state forest. Deer are plentiful and large there. In exchange for the ability to hunt it, Dalton and Andrew help the landowner as often as needed.
“I wasn’t sure where the best place might be, so I called my uncle. He felt I should go to the lock-on stand where he’d shot a 140-incher during bow season,” Dalton said.
It was cold Nov. 15, and young Dalton discovered he was underdressed for the occasion. He was wearing only light camo pants, a shirt and a blaze orange vest. Nevertheless, he climbed up onto the platform and secured himself.
“I was up in a sycamore tree in a fencerow between standing corn and a cow pasture,” he said. “I had a good view of the area around me.
“As the sun started up, it began to warm so the tree was defrosting. It was like it was raining down on me, very cold. I knew for sure I didn’t have enough clothes on,” he added.
Still, he persevered. There was a big timbered thicket nearby that held plenty of deer and funneled them right to the stand where Dalton was waiting.
“I had been there for quite a long time, and I was too cold. I made up my mind to shoot the first deer I saw, figuring I could dress it, drag it out and get warm,” he said.
“A little bitty doe and a small 6-pointer frequented that area. I thought I’d just shoot the doe. Then I would have meat and still have my buck tag for later — perfect — if they’d just show.
“Close to shooting light, I stood to be ready. When I didn’t see anything, I sat back down,” he continued. “That didn’t work so well, so I stood again.
“I thought I saw movement in the tall weeds about halfway across the pasture field. A barbed wire fence runs sideways to the fence line in which I was sitting. The deer was just on the other side of it, about 150 yards distant. I thought for sure it was a doe.”
As the deer approached the fence line between the pasture and the corn, all Dalton could see was a huge rack atop the buck’s head. He had waited too long to get ready, and now it was almost too late to react. The buck was running across a field that the deer had mown putting-green short.
Nothing was slowing its progress!
“I didn’t know what else to do, so I yelled almost at the top of my lungs, ‘Rahhhhh,’ and the buck stopped in its tracks and looked right at me. I had the S&W .500 to my shoulder already, so I centered the crosshairs and fired,” he said.
The buck collapsed at the shot.
“I was stunned, initially. It wasn’t my first deer, but it was by far the biggest I had ever seen on this or any other farm I’ve hunted,” Dalton said. “I sat there second-guessing myself: Did I really just do that? It had happened so suddenly, I wasn’t really sure.
“After a few minutes, I called my uncle and said, ‘I just shot a monster,’ and my uncle replies, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah … whatever!’ like he knew I was overly excited. I acted the same way when I killed a 113-inch 8-pointer a few seasons earlier.”
Andrew had to ask, “Really, how big is it?”
Dalton replied, “It’s two hundred inches!”
Andrew again: “Seriously, it’s not 200 inches. Where did it go? Did you see?”
“It fell right on the spot,” Dalton answered.
“Well, you need to get down and go over and check it out,” Andrew declared.
Dalton sat for a while, still shaking too badly to risk getting down. He sat for probably 20 minutes before he finally descended.
“Before I got down, I ranged the white belly at 151 yards.
“After I was on the ground, I could no longer see the buck for the fence and the weeds along the fencerow. I thought, Oh my gosh, did it get up and run while I was getting down? I was afraid that was what happened.
“When I got to 20 yards, I could see the buck moving. It was roaring, too. I had never heard or seen anything like it in my life. I thought it sounded like an old man roaring about something,” he said.
“I reloaded the rifle and took a finishing shot. I was so excited I couldn’t even touch it for 10 or 15 minutes. I just kept walking around it, hollering for joy!”
Andrew added the following history on the buck.
“Exactly one year to the day earlier, I saw this same buck in almost the exact same place,” Andrew said. “The landowner and I were hunting during the shotgun season. I had just shot a buck and was getting ready to clean it when the landowner shot a doe. The doe ran up into this same pasture and died almost in the same spot.
“He called me and said I needed to get over to him as quickly as possible as there were two huge bucks out in the alfalfa field. When I got there, sure enough it was that buck. It was picking up that doe and throwing her up in the air.
“It was easily identifiable as the same deer, but it had added a good 30 to 40 inches of antler,” he added.
Dalton shot that buck the same day, one year later, about 70 yards and 15 minutes later.
This article was published in the June 2017 edition of Rack Magazine. Subscribe today to have Rack Magazine delivered to your home.
Read Recent RACK Articles: • Dream Season: After two strikes, Kentucky bowhunter hits a home run during his third time at bat.
• Donnie Doesn’t Lie: Land of the Giants is everything this nonresident was led to believe.
• A Deer Runs Through It: Neither rain, sleet, snow nor an icy river can keep this deer hunter from pursuing what’s his.