Hot Spot
By Mike Handley
The beetle man hates Josh Feldman, but at least one taxidermist near Alton, Illinois, could kiss him.
Had it not been for Josh’s shaming, Aaron Fry might’ve paid to have insects clean his 2017 buck’s skull so he could screw it to a plaque. But the cape and antlers are now with a taxidermist, soon to be Aaron’s first trophy with hair and glass eyes.
“I’ve never had the urge to mount a deer before,” the 31-year-old fireman said. “I’ve just had European jobs because I couldn’t justify the expense.
“I told Josh I was going to take this one to the beetle man, and he said I was crazy,” Aaron laughed.
Few deer hunters would disagree with Josh.
Aaron shot the Jersey County whitetail on Nov. 4, the day his wife and daughters traveled to St. Louis for her to sign up for a marathon the next day. The nearly 600 acres he hunts is about an hour and a half north of his home.
His wife gave him a free pass to hunt that day, a rarity last year because the family was in the process of moving, which had consumed almost all of his spare time.
Aaron didn’t really jump up and down with joy, however, because the temperature was a balmy 70 degrees. Ordinarily, he’d avoid hunting in that kind of weather.
He drove to the property after lunch that Saturday, prepared to sweat. He hiked in for 15 or 20 minutes, and was sitting atop a 16-foot ladder stand by 2:30.
Aaron had erected that stand a year earlier, and it had paid off in 2016. It’s on a pastureland ridge about 5 yards into a brush line. The thick brush was to the hunter’s back. In front were woods crisscrossed with farm trails.
Almost immediately, Aaron began exchanging texts with his buddy, Josh.
“I sat there, I sat there, and I sat there, seeing nothing,” he said. “I eventually began studying a map of Alton’s streets and roads, which I have to know as a fireman.
“At 6:15 – this was before the time change – I put away my map. It was almost time to get down, and I was ready to call the day a bust,” he continued. “That’s when I looked up and saw this deer, the only one I saw that day, at 25 yards.”
He actually spotted the buck’s rack before registering the body emerging from the brush. It was to his left, too, not where he expected to see a deer.
“There were no trails there,” he said. “It wasn’t chasing or trailing a doe. It just walked out of the brush.
“Maybe 15 seconds after I saw it, I was looking at it through my peep sight. I didn’t even realize how big it was until it was running away with a hole in at least one lung,” he continued.
Aaron fought the urge to begin tracking his deer immediately. He had to pass the spot where the deer was hit en route to his truck, so seeing the beginning of a blood trail helped him calm down a bit.
When he was out of the woods, he arranged to meet Josh in town, and the two of them returned to take up the trail together.
“We followed the blood pretty easily until we started downhill,” he said. “When we lost it, I became worried. Josh was, too, but neither of us said anything.
“When we got to the bottom of the dozer trail, the blood resumed. We went farther, and I smelled the deer,” he added.
The buck was 60 yards from where it took the arrow. It had doubled back at one point, which means the guys had to have walked past it.
The deer died with its head leaning against a tree to which a trail camera was strapped.
When Aaron reached down to lift the rack, he realized the deer was not the 150- to 170-inch buck he originally thought he was shooting. It was much larger.
He was ecstatic over the thought of the trail camera photographing the deer as it fell, but the SD card malfunctioned. Aaron tried everything he could think to retrieve images, but nothing worked.
He was running five trail cameras on the place, and he’d collected images of several bucks that would’ve scored between 150 and 170. The photos he had of this buck were from units at the other end of the farm. It had apparently walked in front of the neighboring landowner’s camera as well.
Aaron thinks this buck might’ve been on the downhill slide, though nobody looked at its teeth. There’s very little difference between its 2016 and 2017 racks.
It was enormous in body.
“It took us a solid 25 minutes to get it on the four-wheeler’s front rack,” Aaron said. “We were totally spent afterward.”