After a decade of hunting public land in Ohio, Bryan Weaver expects to run into other deer hunters. He never imagined seeing a whitetail conga line, however.
That’s what happened during the Maryland man’s deer-cation last November.
The first day afield was a bust. Bryan saw lots of deer stands, but few deer.
On Sunday, after a friend dropped him off at a trailhead, Bryan struck out for an area that had yielded a good buck the previous year. Getting there required a very long hike and crossing a beaver dam, which was daunting, but he was willing to pay the price to escape the crowd.
“The crossing wasn’t too hairy,” he told Ed Waite, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “Once across, I walked another several hundred yards, found a good tree, and climbed 15 feet.”
Around 4:30 p.m., chaos erupted within a nearby thicket.
“I thought I heard at least three different bucks grunting, and I wondered if they were fired up by a hot doe,” he said.
The answer, a doe indeed, burst out of the thicket in short order. The crashing sounds were still inside, though, which indicated a buck might be next. By the time Bryan was able to snatch his crossbow from its hanger, a giant was 15 yards in front of him.
After stopping the animal with a mouth-bleat, he took the shot.
“We were practically face-to-face when I pulled the trigger. All I remember seeing were points and more points,” he said.
Bryan was still replaying the scene in his mind when a nice 8-pointer came onstage. Two other bucks soon joined it. All were panting.
“It was insane. I couldn’t keep track of them all,” he said.
When the conga was over and the dancers were gone, Bryan got down and followed a blood trail to the top of the hollow in which his deer was lying. His friends met him at the beaver dam and helped wrestle it across the swollen creek.
The buck’s BTR score is 192 2/8 inches.
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