Daddy Sang Tenor
By Mike Handley
Some men squeak when they see rats, snakes or spiders. It takes a dead buck – a big one – for Bill Nadeau to sing tenor.
That said, the deer hunter from Indiahoma, Oklahoma, outsang Luciano Pavarotti on Nov. 3.
While looking for the buck he shot that afternoon, Bill called a buddy, Kris Borden. The phone was to his ear when he found first blood, and ditto for when he found the deer less than 40 yards from it.
Kris heard it all.
“He kids me now,” Bill said. “I’m 55 years old, and he says I sounded like I was a third-grader.”
Bill works at a Goodyear plant. He raises quail, and he guides bird hunters (Triple7quail.com). And when he’s not involved in those pursuits, he’s chasing whitetails in Tillman and Comanche counties.
At the top of his most recent wish list was a buck he’d nicknamed Boomer. He collected the first trail camera photographs of him in 2015.
In 2017, the cameras began clicking in September. And for the first time, the buck’s appearances weren’t limited to late nights or wee hours.
Oklahoma’s nine-day primitive arms (muzzleloading) season ran from Oct. 28 through Nov. 5 in 2017. Bill pulled the cards from the three cameras on his Comanche County tract on Wednesday, Nov. 1.
One of the units had photographed Boomer three of the previous five days. At 9:00 one morning, the distinctive buck was with a doe for at least 30 minutes. Other photos showed him coming in five minutes after shooting light had faded, which is why Bill decided to try a ground blind about 200 yards from the setup in hopes of intercepting the deer long before it walked past the camera.
Bill’s not a big believer in ground blinds, which is a nice way to say he hates them. He’d set this one up for his wife.
His first sit in the hated blind was on Friday afternoon, Nov. 3. With prime time winding down, he looked at his watch to see there were only two minutes of legal shooting light remaining.
That’s when an antsy doe appeared, constantly glaring over her shoulder.
“She even licked herself, and I wondered if she was in heat,” he said.
Almost immediately, she took off running as if a coyote were bearing down on her. When she ran past an open-mouthed Bill, he glanced in the opposite direction and saw Boomer standing in the wide open, 40 yards from him.
“I didn’t have time to get buck fever,” he said. “I thought, That’s him; pulled the hammer back; and boom.
“I kind of fell apart afterward,” he added.
When the smoke finally dissipated, Bill was a little unnerved that the buck wasn’t lying there.
“The shot was too close for me to hear the hit,” he said. “He was so close, if I had missed, it would’ve been the worst shot in history.
“I thought I heard him running away, but I had no idea which direction he went.”
Bill sat there for 15 minutes, and then he walked over to where the deer had been standing. That’s when he called Kris, and he found the animal shortly thereafter.
When Bill regained his composure, he knelt beside Boomer and prayed.
“I wish I could say I’d made a 400-yard shot, in the wind, after having crawled on my belly in the grass, but that’s not what happened. All I did was get really lucky and pull the trigger,” he said. “The glory goes to God.”
Trail cams get a little credit, too.
“This buck would’ve never been killed without trail cams,” he said.
As soon as a photo of the deer was posted on the Oklahoma Hunting and Fishing Facebook page, a dozen hunters sent Bill pictures of Boomer. Many had been hunting him for two years. One guy, Lawton taxidermist Clint Hunt, had been after the deer for three seasons.
“It’s interesting. Nobody had seen the deer in the flesh, and nobody had daytime pictures of him,” he added.
He believes the otherwise intelligent, 5 ½-year-old deer’s downfall was the rut.