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. 

When I got home, I knew right away that I gotta keep this deer happy using everything in my power. I started throwing out six bags of corn and a bag of trace minerals. And just like all the years before, he came to the corn every day up to Aug 31. Then he was gone. No, no no! He can’t ghost me. Bow season was starting in just 12 days.”

The buck wasn’t supposed to disappear until mid-November. Graham had a full-on anxiety attack.

“My taxidermist, David King, and dad, Bill Smith, tried to soothe me. They said, calm down, he’ll come back because he’s been with you all these years. I was panicky that he’d found another corn pile on someone else’s property.”

The next thing Graham knew, the buck went nocturnal. “He showed up on trail cams on Sept. 2 at night and then continued to be seen only in the nighttime.”

On bow season opening day, Graham and David went to a spot in Alamance County belonging to the grandmother of Graham’s wife. Back home, wouldn’t you know, the deer daylighted at 6:45 a.m. The next morning, before church, Graham was back in Alamance to shoot a doe, and he prayed for a sign. He says the Bible verse Matthew 7:7 came to him. In church, later that morning, a guest preacher referenced the same quotation, and Graham believed it was a sign that he would kill the deer. His confidence soared.

“I went out 3:30 that afternoon. I felt really good. Deer started moving around 5:30 — does and small bucks. Two mature does walked in 20 yards from me around 7:25 and ran away in a few minutes. Why, I wondered? I looked over my left shoulder and saw two big-bodied deer coming my way. My buck was one of them. He approached the corn pile, putting him 25 yards from me, quartering away. I drew my bow and hit his left side. The shot angle got the heart, lungs and gut.”

The terrifically elusive buck ran 25 yards, fell, got up, ran another 25 yards, and fell. It was all over but the shouting. Which was exactly what Graham did.

Master scorer Wayne Cox taped the buck at 203 3/8 inches, putting it firmly in Buckmasters Trophy Record Book.