Rack Magazine

Ohio trucker keeps promise to share venison with his friend’s mother, the leaseholder.

Robert Smith of Sidney, Ohio, spends most of his days in the cockpit of a semi. So busy crisscrossing the country in 2012, he could hunt only during weekends.

He rarely got two full days, however. By 5 p.m. on Sundays, he was often beginning a new week behind the wheel.

At 5:30 Saturday morning, Dec. 15, he met a friend, Rodney Campbell, and Rodney’s Uncle Monroe Overbey at a farm rented by Rodney’s mother. She’d agreed to let him hunt there if he’d bring her a steak from any deer he shot.

Over coffee, Uncle Monroe suggested Robert sit in a treestand from which he’d hunted earlier that week. He said it was a great spot, but he wanted to sit in another stand beside a railroad track that was about 350 yards away.

Robert was happy to oblige. Within the hour, he was climbing the 12-foot aluminum ladder up to a handmade platform.

“It was an old homemade bench made of metal and wood, sort of resembling a lawn chair,” he said. “The ladder was the kind you buy from a store.”

Sometime after 7:00, Robert heard a noise and glanced over his right shoulder. It was still pretty dark at that point, so even though the animal was just 15 yards away, he couldn’t see much more than a deer-shaped blob.

“It was just too dark to shoot,” he said, “so I watched it go about 30 or 40 yards into the field.”

Robert was understandably thrilled when the animal reversed course and headed back toward the near tree line. He could tell it was a buck by then, but that’s about all. He had no idea how big its rack was.

“It came to within 15 yards again, and then it stopped all of a sudden and bowed up, broadside to me. A coyote exited the woods behind it,” he said.

Robert said the field — long, narrow and atop a plateau — looked like an old airstrip surrounded by woods. The deer was in the open when it froze.

“I leaned against the tree and squeezed the trigger when the buck turned its head to look at the coyote.

“Right after the shot, all I could see was white smoke,” he continued. “When the deer didn’t drop immediately, I thought I’d missed it. My heart was racing 100 miles per hour, and I’d had to tell myself to slow down and take a deep breath before I squeezed the .50-caliber’s trigger.”

He didn’t miss, however, and he needn’t have reloaded his muzzleloader. The buck didn’t get far with a hole in its heart; it collapsed within a few yards of where it took the bullet.

Five or 10 minutes later, Robert called Rodney for help, and he saw Uncle Monroe descending his stand. Monroe arrived while he was admiring his buck.

Robert had shot a couple of does during another lifetime in Tennessee, but this was his first deer with antlers. It was also his largest bodied whitetail, by far.

“It took all three of us to load it on the four-wheeler,” the 44-year-old remembered. “It weighed 235 pounds, field-dressed. The head was HUGE. Body massive. He was a monster!”

The mile-long ride back to the truck was tricky.

Rick Busse, the taxidermist who measured and mounted Robert’s 13-pointer, recognized it immediately. He had been collecting web cam footage of it for five years, 3 miles from where Robert shot it.

“I asked him how he knew it was the same deer, and Rick pointed out the buck was completely blind in its right eye,” Robert said.

This article was published in the August 2017 edition of Rack Magazine. Subscribe today to have Rack Magazine delivered to your home.

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