There was no sliding, at first. With every heave-ho, the dead buck's considerable front end seemed fused to the tailgate, and the brothers Swinford felt as if they'd bitten off more than they could possibly chew.
Rob was the heaver, on the ground with the bulk of the deer his older brother had shot. Richard, hoing from the truck's bed, had the buck by its also considerable antlers.
They mistakenly thought they'd already done the hard part, after dragging close to 400 pounds of dead weight for more than 100 feet, which required 20 backbreaking minutes.
"It took all we had to move him," Richard said of the enormous whitetail. "It was like trying to pull a truck."
Getting it into an actual truck almost defeated them.
"Every time we pushed and pulled, the tailgate wanted to come up with the deer," Richard said.
If the 34-year-old deer hunter from Hillsdale, Indiana, had been given more than a minute or two to really look at the deer before he shot it, he might've been too shocked to shoot.
Richard was hunting his father's farm in Vermillion County – 80 acres of cornfield and pastureland. His ladder stand is on the north side of a timbered creek that dissects the pasture.
He shot his first buck, a 10-pointer, from that same place 18 years earlier. He's had dibs on that piece of ground ever since, and he has taken a deer by firearm in all but two of those seasons, though none compare with the one he felled in 2011.
"It was windy and warm, and the cows weren't in the pasture that evening," he said. "It was almost too breezy to hear a squirrel moving."
With low expectations, since he'd just walked to his stand, Richard pulled out his smartphone and began checking the weather forecast for the following day. Indiana's firearms season lasts only a couple of weeks, so he was already thinking ahead.
"I hadn't been there for maybe two minutes, and I happened to look up and catch a shimmer of white. It was a deer's rack, and the buck was only 10 yards from me ... RIGHT THERE ... and it had no idea I was there," he said.
The 19-pointer, a runner-up to the state (rifle) record, has a BTR composite score of 222 7/8 inches.