Jack Seppala was ready to trade his last hour of daylight - prime time in the deer woods - for a truck heater.
Thirty-five degrees isn't so bad. Pushed by a 15-mph wind, however, it was chewing through every layer of clothing the hunter from Herndon, Kentucky, was wearing. Besides, he chided himself, what were the odds of his actually seeing the 30-pointer that caused him to apply for two-day quota hunt?
Crunch.
More crunches.
Jack scanned the woods until his found the noisemakers, and his heart felt like one of those your-table-is-ready buzzers handed out by restaurant hostesses. And he was no longer cold.
He and a cousin were hunting the Kentucky portion of the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. The previous year, they'd retrieved a photograph of what looked to be a 30-point cactus buck from one of their trail cameras.
The guys applied and were drawn for the Nov. 23-24 gun hunt in 2013. Even better, their assigned area was where they'd collected the photos of the deer they nicknamed the Brushpile Buck.
"By the time, the hunt date arrived, it was a little late in the rut, but the bucks were still chasing," Jack told Dale Weddle, who wrote the story for Rack magazine. "I had been bowhunting the spot where we caught the Brushpile Buck on camera, but hadn't seen him."
There was more competition when the gun season opened.
"On Saturday morning, we pulled in to where we were going to hunt before daylight," he said. "We split up and headed out. It was interesting, to say the least. Everywhere I went, there was someone shining a flashlight at me. I just walked and walked until I didn't see lights anymore."
The first day was mostly uneventful, but there was a lot of shooting in the vicinity on day two.
"The tags were either-sex, so people might have been meat-hunting on the last day," Jack reasoned.
He went to a different place that cold afternoon. About an hour before dark, he began feeling the chill of the near-freezing temperature and unrelenting wind.
Jack was shivering, almost ready to throw in the towel, when he heard deer approaching.
"I looked up and saw a doe about 80 or 90 yards away, and right behind her was the Brushpile Buck," he said. "I thought I was shivering before, but that REALLY made me shake."
He apparently stopped vibrating long enough to squeeze the trigger. Twice.
Still in velvet, the rack has a BTR composite score of 205 inches, only 10 of which are derived from inside spread.
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