Five Years of Heartbreak, One Giant Reward

Graham Smith had two therapists in 2026: his taxidermist and his dad.

Graham’s anxiety hit the red zone after the buck he’d been watching and coveting since 2022 disappeared. The two older men were counseling Graham to calm down.

But as they say, “Never in the history of calm has telling someone to calm down actually calmed them down.”

Graham’s quest for this trophy was complicated by a stubborn promise the 27-year-old detention officer had made to himself.

“I resolved to hunt him with my bow and only by bow,” he says. “Over those five seasons, I could have had him at 100 yards and 75 yards, easy, with a rifle. I just wanted to harvest a really big deer by bow.”

The 150-acre cattle farm, in the Piedmont area of North Carolina, where Graham hunts, borders a nature preserve on which hunting is forbidden. Wildlife take sanctuary there.

“My buck would go in there and occasionally come over my way to chase a doe or eat from the minerals and corn I put down,” Graham says.

Big Buck 411 likes to ask someone who successfully shot a whopper buck: how did you happen to be hunting where you were, on that day and at that time?

Here’s Graham’s story.

In February, 2022, while scouting turkeys along a logging road, “a buck came along, and it was pretty special,” he says. “My deer season starts in May, the day after turkey season. That’s when I put out minerals and deer corn. I was ready to do whatever it took to keep that buck on my property.”

Sadly, there were no more in-person encounters for Graham, that year.

The next year was the same. The buck was seen on cameras from late October to early November of 2023 before disappearing.

“In 2024, I had an encounter in mid-November where he was chasing a doe 75 yards from me,” Graham recalls. “I was in my Lock-On, 25 feet up a pine, with my bow. I watched him, and then he vanished.”

Turn the calendar to 2025. Lots of things happened that year; the buck coming into bow range was not one of them.

In August of 2026, Graham was heading up to Michigan with his dog — a treeing Walker Hound — to participate in the Michigan Madness raccoon hunt.

“One of my trail cams goes off,” he says, “for the first time that season.