Jake Heagren’s buck might not wind up as Ohio’s largest for 2025, but there’s an excellent chance all the others would fit inside its world-class, 25-inch-wide rack. In fact, given that so few whitetails hit that mark, this one could be the continent’s widest this year.
Jake and brothers Josh and Jerrod first became aware of the distinctive buck in Nov. 2024. A friend saw it and shared a photo with Josh.
Jake had already tagged out for the season, so Jerrod made it his No. 1 target for the season’s remaining couple of weeks. He saw the animal only once, bedded in some cattails next to a bottomland pond.
The following summer, the brothers began amassing regular photos of the now much-larger buck. It was easy to see it was the same one because of the wide spread and forked P2s.
“It seems like we got photos on one of the cameras every couple of hours,” said the 33-year-old diesel mechanic from Howard, Ohio. “It never left the area.”
There wasn’t much reason to leave, really. The Knox County tract has everything a deer needs: plenty of cover, water and soybeans. Patterning the deer was easy, too. It frequently walked past cameras between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. and again at dusk.
Thinking his best chance to catch the deer afoot would be as it rose from its bed in the evenings, Jake hunted the deer in the afternoons. The plan didn’t work on opening Saturday, Sunday or Monday, but the fourth time was the charm.
Eighty-six-degree heat greeted him when he went out to a fencerow stand at 4:30 Tuesday, Sept. 30. The tree is so small that he almost looked like a lollipop sprouting from the fence, but that was the only cover and the best way to intercept deer heading for the tofu palace buffet.
The impossibly wide buck had come through there at 6:30 that morning.
Close to 6 p.m., while Jake was watching a small 8-pointer in the beans, four does crossed the fencerow and came to within 12 yards of his tree. A minute later, old Wide Load came in on the same trail, closing the gap from 40 to 13 yards post haste.
When it reached one of the does, the two touched noses. She jerked her head back immediately, as if she’d touched an electrified fence, and then jumped. The buck took two steps and stopped to gawk at her, and that’s when Jake let his arrow fly.
The big whitetail ran about 40 yards and collapsed. All three brothers were there for the walk-up.
The 20-pointer — a mainframe 6x6 — is the largest any of them have harvested in either Ohio or Kentucky. It field-dressed at 220 pounds, and they’re guessing it might’ve been 5 1/2 years old, since that was the first year its rack really jumped in size.
The Heagrens learned later the deer had been photographed on neighboring properties, one farm a mile and a half distant.
Toby and Lori Hughes measured the antlers for Buckmasters, arriving at 203 5/8 inches.
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