George’s Dandy 

We arrived a day early to do some scouting, and I was excited. This property had some fine woods for bedding and cover. I watched the property the first night and saw a few deer, but no bucks. So I was little apprehensive about opening morning. Well, opening morning came. I had my blind set up on a tree line where the deer were traveling from the south to the woods where they were bedding in the north. Well, "low and behold," all the deer came out about 500 yards to the "east." It was hard to tell what they were, as they were in a ravine, so I could only see them once in awhile.

The rest of the day I saw nothing.

The next morning I set up on the ravine where I saw the deer on the first day. I left my blind where it was originally. Well guess what, "they all passed next to my blind." Including a nice 8 point buck! So I hunted some public ground the rest of the day. As I was going to go to the hotel, I was beat and tired. My son said "come on Dad," "you are not going to shoot one in the hotel!" So I went back to my first spot. It was about 30 minutes until I had to go. I heard some shooting to the south, lots of shooting. After awhile I was thinking to myself, "I wonder if they chased anything across the road." I looked behind me and about 1/2 mile away, through my binocs, I could see a nice buck standing in the field. "Of course he was on property I could not hunt. So I just kept an eye on him. The next time I spotted him he had worked his way to a tree line where I could hunt, and he was making a scrape. "Dirt was just a flying!" So I grabbed my shooting stix and my 300 Benelli and took off running towards him. All the time trying to keep some small tree's between us. I needed to close the gap to get close enough that I may have a chance on getting this great buck. I stopped at a fence, dropped to my knees, put the gun on the shooting stix and started looking for the buck. I couldn’t find him in the tree line he was in before. I thought darn it he must have seen me. I kept looking through my scope and finally, there he was, crossing between the two tree lines. As I continued looking through the scope, I thought "wow his rack was super heavy and tall!" I waited until he was about 150 yards away and I grunted really loud, to see if I could get him to stop. He did, and I fired. He took off, on a "3 legged death run," and ran into the tree line I was in, only 150 yards away. I quickly ran to the other side to see if he was coming out. I was prepared to throw another round at him if I had to, but he never came out. I was excited and started looking for him right away. When I found him, there was no ground shrinkage! I immediately called my son and told him I shot a freak nasty, super heavy massed buck. Within minutes he was there sharing the excitement with me. The whole trip was worth it just seeing his face as he walked up on the buck. I love it!!!

The buck grossed 173". It had 44" in mass alone. Ended up being 14pts total.

George