Big Buck 411 Blog

Threading the Needle

Threading the Needle

By Mike Handley

Kentucky bowhunter Turner Curtis plucked a mental daisy for 20 minutes before attempting to thread an arrow through two trees between him and a whitetail with wrist-thick bases.

He shoots. He shoots not. He shoots. He shoots not.

He shot.

Turner might not consider himself a Robin Hood, but he pulled off the difficult shot last September 13, a Friday.

He and his father had seen this buck while feeding steers on the last day of Kentucky’s 2018 gun season. It was one of three bucks circling a doe bedded in a drainage ditch.

Turner got a trail camera photograph of it the following July 5.

“Our 600 acres are mostly open pasture fields with small patches of woods. By June or July of last year, I was running about six cameras,” he told Dale Weddle, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “I put up a hang-on stand over some corn and mineral at one of the sites.”

He began hunting it every other day, beginning Sept. 1, even when the animal stopped mugging for his camera that first week.

His lucky day, of course, was Friday 13th, a scorcher. Late in the nearly 100-degree day, Turner saw the buck walking a fencerow 200 yards distant.

“The deer was just taking its time, munching on browse, coming closer and closer,” he said. “Eventually, it jumped a fence and started coming at me, catty-cornered.”

As soon as it was within bow range, the deer stopped and stood for 20 minutes behind a screen of brush. Turner stared at a small gap for the entire time, waffling over whether he should try to thread an arrow through it.

In the end, he did.

The Madison County 16-pointer has a BTR score of 200 2/8, helped largely by a whopping 43 inches of mass.

— Read Recent Blog! Lesson Learned: Note to self - Don’t wear anything on your chest that a bowstring might snag.

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