When Teri Brown phoned her husband, Dick, to tell him she'd shot the buck over which she'd been obsessing for three months, it was not to ask for help.
Dick offered, of course, but she declined.
"I told him no, to just please leave me alone; that I was too nervous," she said. "I needed some time, so I told him I was going to shoot a doe, and then he could come."
She shot one, too, a 170-pounder - second-largest doe ever taken off the 3,000-acre ranch east of Waverly, La. With two deer on the ground, a combined 425 pounds, she was ready.
"Shooting the doe took the edge off," she grinned.
The 4B Ranch abuts the expansive Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge in Madison Parish. Cattle used to be king there, but the tract is managed more for deer nowadays.
In early October 2014, Teri retrieved a trail camera photograph of a buck she guessed would score in the 190s. Because she couldn't stop thinking about its nearly 23-inch-wide rack and long beams, every hunting decision she made was tied to the potential for encountering it.
She hunted from several setups in October, November and most of December, basing her decisions on when and where to go on the nighttime photos she was collecting. But she never saw the deer in the flesh until Christmas Eve, when Dick suggested she leave her bow at home and take her 7mm magnum to an elevated box stand.
"I actually listened to him, believe it or not," she grinned.
The 6 1/2-year-old whitetail made the mistake of chasing a doe in the wide open, during the day, within 200 yards of a woman who doesn't blink at such distances.
Teri's 15-pointer will grace the cover of Rack magazine in September. Its BTR composite score is 207 2/8 inches.