Perhaps the wind just happened to be right on Dec. 20, 2013, or his elevated box stand is airtight. Or maybe Alex LeBlanc’s little piggies simply don’t stink.
The deer he shot that day didn’t seem concerned with the 20-year-old’s shoeless feet.
An hour and 15 minutes earlier, when he climbed into the box blind at 2:45, Alex had been wearing waders. That’s way early for starting an afternoon hunt in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, where the temperature had risen well into the 70s those five days before Christmas.
People thought he was wasting his time by going afield so early, since everyone knows deer aren’t especially eager to be afoot when mosquitoes are buzzing. But the young conductor for the BNSF Railway didn’t want to waste an off-day watching the clock spin inside his Opelousas home.
So he dressed lightly, slid into his rubber hip boots, and went to the family’s property, going deeper in than he would’ve otherwise ventured. He chose that particular shooting house so his Uncle Gary and little brother, 9-year-old Ryan, wouldn’t walk past him when they came to hunt later in the day.
“It was 75 degrees, and everybody told me I was crazy for going out there so early,” Alex said.
The 10-foot-high, fiberglass stand overlooks a planted shooting lane near the property line.
“It was very hot in there. The first thing I did was open the windows and the door to let in some fresh air,” he said. “After I opened the windows, I kicked my hip boots off and propped up my feet. I was eating peanuts and playing on my phone until about 3:45, when I decided to close the door and get quiet.
“It wasn’t long, about 15 minutes, before this buck stepped out in the lane 50 yards in front of me,” he added.
Alex knew the deer was way bigger than his previous best, a foot-wide 7-pointer he shot in 2012, but he didn’t realize that it was a truly world-class animal. The buck was ambling across the shooting lane, in no hurry, far calmer than the man in the box.
You’d think a guy could go through the motions of raising a rifle, sticking its barrel out the window and squeezing the trigger without incident. But that would be assuming that a deer of this caliber wouldn’t dump sugar in almost anyone’s gas tank.
Alex was not suave.
“I was shaking, almost panicked,” he said. “I kept bumping my gun while trying to get it out the window in a hurry. It was all happening too fast, but not fast enough.”
When the rattled deer hunter finally managed to poke his new .270 WSM out the window and at the animal, the shot buckled it, but only for a moment. The buck found its feet and regained enough steam to knife through the nearby weeds.
Alex’s uncle and brother had just settled into another stand on the property. They heard the shot, of course, and were dying to know what had merited a bullet, since the family tries not to shoot young bucks.
There aren’t any antler restrictions per se, but local hunters target mature bucks, and the LeBlancs do the same.
“I called Uncle Gary and told him I’d shot a monster, and he said they were on the way,” Alex said. “I paced around the stand for 10 minutes, waiting on them.”
It didn’t take long to find the deer. There was a bit of hair on the ground where the buck had been standing, and then a clear blood trail that led them right to the bruiser. It had run less than 60 yards.
“I looked ahead, and I could see the antlers sticking up,” Alex said. “As soon as I saw them, I took off running.
“When I put my hands on the rack, I said, ‘I’ve never seen a deer this big before!’” he said. “We were really freaking out. You have to see this deer in person to realize how big it is.”
The buck, which had never been photographed by any of their trail cameras, weighed 220 and was aged at 6 1/2 years old.