Mike Handley posted on August 15, 2011 07:21
By Mike Handley
Casey Orr didn’t look for a blood trail because his deer fought off gravity for only 30 yards. Had he searched, however, he might’ve found two of them – one leading to the outlandishly palmated whitetail, the other back to the homemade ground blind where the 24-year-old had been sitting for an hour and a half.
Casey doesn’t remember being smacked in the brow by his .444 Marlin’s scope, probably because the buck of his dreams had strolled within 20 yards of his hiding place along the Choctaw County, Miss., power line. But when he saw that he’d actually shot the “freak” over which he’d obsessed since 2009, he was punch-drunk.
“I can't explain the feeling of joy that overcame me,” said the assistant baseball coach for Starkville Academy. “I ran right up to the deer and just started dancing and yelling. Had anyone seen me, they would’ve thought I was crazy!”
It had been a long 17 months since Casey first laid eyes on the buck in August 2009, when he’d driven to the family farm to watch for deer crossing a power line that cut through a pine plantation. Understandably, after seeing that gnarly rack, the hunter from Ackerman, Miss., considered it Priority One.
But almost a year passed before he saw it in the flesh again, also during the summer. He and a fishing buddy jumped it en route to a pond.
Not counting trail cam photographs, the third time he saw the distinctive buck was on Dec. 14, 2010, when the animal waltzed within spitting distance of his blind.
With an official BTR score of 210, Casey’s 20-pointer is No. 4 among Mississippi’s rifle-taken Irregulars. A narrow 15 6/8-inch inside spread gives it a composite score of 225 6/8 – the largest felled in the Magnolia State last season.
The complete story behind this amazing whitetail will appear this fall in Rack magazine.