Big Buck 411 Blog

They Can’t Not Go Back

They Can’t Not Go Back

By Mike Handley

Southerners fortunate enough to experience the whitetail rut anywhere in the Midwest are hooked. They can’t not go back.

The numbers and size of the deer, both in body and antlers, is a big barbed hook through any deer hunter’s lip. They’re also far more apt to respond to rattling and calling.

That’s what happened to Chad Brooks of Gainesville, Georgia. He was so in love with Illinois that he bought 57 unfarmable acres in Greene County, just for hunting.

The 2018 season was the family’s first as property owners. During one of the state’s firearms hunts, Chad’s son, Hunter, passed up a shot at a remarkable whitetail because it was walking uphill and away from him. He refused to try the Texas heart shot.

Nobody saw the deer again until it stepped in front of a trail camera in January.

Before the 2019 season arrived, based on everything they knew about the whitetail, Chad moved a stand to the intersection of three major trails outside the thicket he suspected was the buck’s daytime hideout.

A neighbor collected tons of photos of the buck, which had grown a drop tine, but its image wasn’t on any of the new landowner’s cards.

For Chad, the initial stretch of bow season was a bust.

The whole family – Chad, his wife and their two sons, Hunter and Tyler – was there for the first gun season. Hunter went to the junction stand outside the thicket.

“About 30 minutes after sunrise, I felt my phone vibrating. It was Hunter calling,” Chad said. “He could barely talk, but I heard ‘I just shot the drop tine deer.’”

The deer had broken off its drop tine, but there was no doubt about its identity, according to Hunter. It ran about 75 yards after the shot, onto the neighbor’s ground.

After Chad secured permission to search for the buck, the entire Brooks clan began combing the woods. Brother Tyler found it just after Chad sent a text message to a guy with a tracking dog.

The deer hasn’t been scored yet for the BTR, but the young man’s dimple-to-dimple smile almost matches the rack’s inside spread.

— Read Recent Blog! Homework Buck: Fifteen-year-old Levi Pettit might not remember what any of his teachers said on Nov. 4, 2019, but he’ll never forget what happened AFTER he stepped off the school bus that Monday.

Copyright 2024 by Buckmasters, Ltd.

Copyright 2020 by Buckmasters, Ltd