An emergency medical technician in Brookhaven, Mississippi, carried his own personal defibrillator during the fall of 2017, and it required no electricity.
If Tyler Blalock needed to jumpstart his own heart, he had only to pull out a photo of an incredible whitetail that had walked in front of his trail camera for three years in a row. For obvious reasons, he nicknamed the deer Oh Wow.
Bucks of that caliber aren’t hiding behind every bush on the 136-acre farm Tyler and his 13-year-old son, Joseph, hunt in Franklin County.
On the afternoon of Nov. 22, Tyler put Joseph in a box stand overlooking a food plot, while he hiked another half a mile.
“Joseph had hunted in a stand by himself the previous year and taken a nice doe,” Tyler told John Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “I had plenty of confidence in his ability to hunt on his own.”
There were no arguments from Joseph.
As the hunt unfolded, father and son exchanged text messages to help pass the time and to keep abreast of what the other was seeing. Joseph’s phone was in his hands when he spotted three deer – a doe, a spike and a shooter –at 70 yards.
From that point onward, all the decisions were unconscious.
“I brought my gun up really quickly. I don’t remember squeezing the trigger, aiming or anything,” Joseph said. “I just heard the gun report, and the big buck dropped.”
The kid thought he’d shot a really wide and tall 8- or 9-pointer.
Joseph didn’t wait for his father, despite being asked not to approach the deer. When he reached the downed animal, he photographed it while the spike continued feeding nearby.
As soon as the photo arrived on his phone, Tyler almost broke into a run. He recognized the antlers immediately.
Joseph waited at his deer’s side while Tyler went for the vehicle.
“I thought I was dreaming, and I really didn’t want to wake up,” the boy smiled.
The 19-pointer tallies 195 6/8 inches by the BTR’s yardstick.
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