Zac Prickett had an arrow nocked and ready. The buck he wanted was grazing eight yards away, upwind. Ten more milled around. If ever there was a sure thing.
But, no. The wind swirled, and instantly, a doe scented Zac, busting him with her tell-all snort.
The crowd turned tail, the buck ran away as hard as it could, and many agonizing weeks passed before Zac’s trophy walked back into bow range.
“It was so depressing. I just climbed out of my stand and sulked the 700 yards back to my truck,” he says.
“I caught a goodbye glimpse of him at 100 yards, just for a moment, standing and looking at me. Then he disappeared into an adjacent cornfield. Did I mention it was very depressing?”
During those weeks, the 36-year-old deputy sheriff scoured the 60-acre parcel he hunts in Champaign County, OH, looking for intel on the spectacular 22-pointer. Neighbors to Zac’s east, west and southwest had given him permission to hunt. The properties comprised a bean field, a corn field and a stretch of woods.
“I was familiar with this deer,” he says. “I watched him from 2023 to 2025, but I left him alone. He probably measured in the 170s in 2024. I lay down Lucky Buck and Trophy Rock mineral licks in the woods, and once or twice a month the buck would go into the trees and hit those minerals.”
On July 7, 2025, Zac checked his cameras, and to his joy, the trophy buck had showed up in daylight.
“He was a bowl of junk. His rack was forming, and it was all bowls. Our name for him was Junky.”
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Is it luck or planning when a hunter finds the ideal spot for a kill? Technology has taken a lot of the guesswork out of hunting. When Zac drove ten minutes from Saint Paris, where he lives, he was heading to a particular spot because he had picked up the buck on trail cams both morning and evening.
As part of its pattern, the buck would go into the woods about once a month. Even loud, human noises couldn’t scare it away. “In August, I was at my mineral site and left my truck door open,” Zac recalls. “After I got done, I reached in and the truck alarm went off for 15 minutes. The key had fallen off the center console and down to the frame, so I couldn’t start the engine. I was sure the alarm had spooked the buck and he had run away. But that night he was still there at his bed in the beans and feeding.”
In September, Zac ran into another spot of trouble: he was practice-shooting his Matthews Lift bow in his yard with his son. He set the bow down on the grass at the edge of his driveway when his neighbor drove up and over the bow.
“Just destroyed my bow,” he says. “That was three weeks before the season, and I had to buy a new one and all the bits and pieces. Then I had to get used to a new bow.”
The day before Ohio’s opener the buck showed up on a wood line between two fields where Zac had placed a wireless trail cam.
On day two of the season, the deer showed up again feeding along a wood line between the beans and the corn.
Zac says, “I decided to hunt that spot in the evening. At 6:30 p.m., does came my way. The buck was coming down the fence line behind me ( I was on the fence line). But my Ozonix quit, and the wind was swirling. He got to eight yards when he stopped. He stood, the wind swirled and a doe snorted.” After that Zac moved his stand to the southeast corner of the woods where the bean field made a turn to take advantage of the prevailing winds.
“I went to hang a stand and came back to hunt a different deer, one that was about 165 inches and 10 points,” he says. “I was in the truck on the way to shoot that one, and I got 200 photos on my phone — all at once. There was Junky, showing up at daylight, evening and night. Needless to say I didn’t go hunt the other deer.”
At daybreak on Nov. 1, Zac walked the soybean field along the only path that didn’t have hog manure laid down by a farmer.
“I headed out to where spotting scopes and cameras told me to go. I knew where this deer was bedding. I had watched him with binoculars and scopes all summer. At 8 a.m., a doe came to within 10 yards of me. Then a 140-inch buck walked within 10 yards of my stand. He kept turning around and looking over his shoulder.”
Eight does also walked within 10 yards. That’s when Zac saw puffs of steam in the woods. Something was moving closer. He could tell by the location of the steam.
Step. Puff. Step, step. Puff.
Zac saw a large rack through the trees. A buck came into view and stopped 20 yards from him. It jumped a 3-foot barbed wire fence and closed the distance to 10 yards.
“I was ready. I wasn’t giving some doe a chance to smell me. When I shot, my arrow pierced both lungs,” he says.
“Junky ran to the picked bean field and expired about 150 yards from me. I can’t explain my emotions in that instant. I mean, can anyone?”
Buckmasters scorer Dustin Gantz taped the rack at 228 7/8 inches and placed it in the Buckmasters Trophy Records Irregular category.
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