Randy Hayes of Peterson, Alabama, never expected to take another whitetail to a taxidermist, not after a tornado gutted his home and carried 15 irreplaceable mounts to Oz in 2011.
The 57-year-old, semi-retired welder now realizes he was too pessimistic.
He's not sure which is more surprising, that he's springing for another glass-eyed memento, or that he shot it so close to home in Tuscaloosa County.
"The deer around here rarely get above 120 inches," said Randy, who has hunted all over the country.
He knew this deer was the exception since finding its 2013 sheds in 2014. He saw the first antler beside a road, and its mate was a mere 2 feet from it.
Discovering the antlers was exciting, and finding them has turned him into an antler-seeking machine during the spring, but actually seeing the deer is what cemented his obsession with it.
Randy almost hit this tall-tined buck - then a clean 5x4 - with his truck in 2015. So intent on keeping its eyes on a doe on the other side of the road, the 9-pointer never even looked up or acknowledged the vehicle 5 feet from it.
"I hunted that deer so hard in 2015, I got hemorrhoids," he laughed. "My wife even commented she was concerned about the gasoline I was burning while making two trips a day to hunt."
His obsession came to an end on the 40-degree morning of Nov. 25, 2016.
"Shortly after daylight, it was like this buck just popped up out of the ground," Randy said. "When I saw it at about 70 yards, it was making a scrape and facing me. I shot it straight through the chest."
Coyotes are so plentiful on the reclaimed strip-mined property, they had already chewed into a hind quarter by the time Randy found his deer three hours later.
"They're bad here," he said. "On any given night, you can hear five or six different packs sounding off."
The buck's BTR composite score is 181 2/8.
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Cheers: Rocky Fahey / BTR Composite Score: 208 2/8