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Three-stanza Limerick

Three-stanza Limerick

By Mike Handley

The script for Corey Chitwood’s hunt for a nearly 200-inch whitetail could have been written in the form of a limerick.

There was a young man from Kentucky, who began his season unlucky. He went out with a bow, was beset by a doe, and his world became far less bucky.

He returned to his blind with a crossbow, the weapon du jour from which bolts flow. Launching an arrow from his chair, he didn’t cut a hair, and a trip to the mount shop he did forego.

Things changed when he took out his rifle; performance anxiety he stifled. When the deer came for a bite, he did give it a fright, and took home a rack tall as Eiffel.

That’s a fair summation of the Corbin, Kentucky, deer hunter’s 2018 season.

Corey usually hunts a much larger property, but curiosity drove him to put out a trail camera in a little 4-acre tract, just to see if any deer were passing through it.

“The first picture I got was of a giant buck,” he told Dale Weddle, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “For two weeks after that, the photos were regular and in daylight.

“When I got a look at the (rack’s) jacked-up side, I went ahead and apologized to my wife beforehand, because there were a lot of things I was probably going to miss out on during the upcoming season,” he continued.

Corey could not find a suitable tree near the corn pile he’d created, so he took a chair out to the spot in mid-August and surrounded it with brush.

On opening day of bow season, one and a half hours into his afternoon hunt, he saw the centerfold buck scratching its ear with its foot. Even from 80 yards, the swaying rack made him gasp.

The animal disappeared shortly afterward.

Fifteen minutes later, four small bucks approached the corn. And then Corey saw two more – the big one and a spike – in some brambles just 15 yards from his hiding place.

As the deer came closer and Corey began readying for the shot, a snort caused his train of thought to jump the track. It also sent deer running in every direction.

Unbeknownst to Corey, a doe had come in behind him.

His next encounter with the buck came on the third afternoon of the Bluegrass State’s crossbow season. He got a 40-yard shot that time, but his bolt hit only a small tree.

The 17-pointer, which taped out at 198 6/8 inches, wasn’t as fortunate when they next met during the rifle season.

— Read Recent Blog! Long Time Coming: Told by everyone the nearly 194-inch buck he arrowed last season was a record book specimen, Edward Walters contacted the Pope and Young Club seeking to have his deer measured.

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