Kevin Pfeiffer doesn’t mind jumping through hoops to indulge his passion for deer hunting. In 2022, he scored a slam dunk.
For more than a decade, the 55-year-old inkmaker from Harrison, Ohio, has taken advantage of the Great Parks system’s deer management program. He became acquainted with the properties, the lottery and the rules in 2006, three years after the program was initiated, and he’s been hunting them regularly since 2013.
In 2018, he became a coordinator.
Nowadays, the archery-only program includes 17 tracts divided into 69 areas. One must apply for the permit, pass a shooting competency test, and amass points per deer to be able to choose particular areas.
It’s far easier to utilize Ohio’s public hunting lands.
“These are not public lands,” Kevin says. “They’re private parks, and the hunting boundaries are marked, all with 100-yard buffer zones to properties bordering the parks.”
Marking property lines is one of his responsibilities as a coordinator, which means he intimately knows many of the tracts.
On Jan. 2, 2022, Kevin met his cousin, Donald Miller Jr., at a parking area around 6 a.m. Carrying a stand and his crossbow, he walked 15 minutes to a cedar thicket in their sector’s northwest corner and jacked himself 15 feet up a tree. Don headed for a creek in the southeastern corner.
The cousins were maybe 90 yards apart.
Don shot a doe about 7:45 and contacted Kevin around 8:00. Fifteen minutes later, Kevin looked over his right shoulder and saw a buck approaching.
After the shot, the giant whitetail ran for about 60 yards. When Kevin could no longer see its tail twitching, he assumed it had collapsed. After calling Don, he planned to wait a half-hour before looking for his bolt and a blood trail.
His resolve crumbled in 15 minutes.
Kevin could find neither arrow nor blood, so he backed out and joined his cousin for the recovery of the doe. When that mission was accomplished, the two returned to begin searching for the buck.
When Don jumped the animal, they stopped and went to lunch. Two and a half hours later, they parked closer to where the wounded deer had lain. With no blood trail to follow, the duo basically just combed the woods.
Kevin followed game and horse trails and a gas pipeline to a creek bed. The deer was on the other side. If he hadn’t looked both right and left, he would’ve missed it.
“I went through all the emotions that day, from absolute elation to being a complete wreck, and then back again,” he said.
When news of the deer’s demise spread, another park hunter and even a private landowner shared trail camera images with Kevin.
He discovered later the deer had been shot — a clean pass-through with an arrow — earlier in the season.
“The taxidermist found entry and exit holes in the cape,” Kevin said. “Plus, some of the trail cam pictures showed an obvious abscess and possibly even dark blood smears.”
He thinks someone shot the buck just prior to the rut, which peaks around Halloween there.
“When I shot it, the deer’s tarsal glands were solid black. I believe it was following a doe’s trail,” he said.
Kevin thinks the injury might’ve taken the buck out of the initial rut, and that it was trying to make up for lost time.
Scott Beam measured the antlers for Buckmasters three years later, arriving at 214 2/8 inches. The 15-pointer is a mainframe 5x5 with exceptional tine length. Its P2s are 13 2/8 and 15 3/8 inches long, and the P3s register 11 6/8 and 12 5/8 inches.
For more information about the meticulously managed program, check out www.greatparks.org/conservation/bow-hunting.