Austin Gaines learned an important lesson last deer season: Never assume the thing you heard is the same thing you heard before that.
The 24-year-old diesel mechanic from Gallipolis, Ohio, is fanatical about stocking his freezer with venison, so he was thrilled beyond measure when a buddy helped him gain access to a nearly 700-acre, deer-rich farm in Gallia County.
Since he’d never hunted the area, he was eager to put up and check his trail camera. In early September, he retrieved grainy photos of a monstrous whitetail, far bigger than the 8-pointer his camera had been photographing.
“I wasn’t sure it was real because I had not heard of a buck that size around there,” Austin told Ed Waite, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.
He missed the basket-racked 4x4 the first time he hunted the property, and he fell in love with the spot.
“I kept returning to that same place. I was seeing plenty of does and other animals, including a ton of squirrels. They were very annoying with all their chatter and scuffling through the leaves,” he said.
When Austin went out on Sunday evening, Oct. 21, he decided to try grunting. He thought he sounded like a gorilla that had eaten too much, but he valiantly continued using the call.
Sometime after 6:00, he heard what he thought was yet another squirrel behind him, but it wasn’t a squirrel. When he turned to verify his suspicion, he locked gazes with a giant buck on the opposite creek bank, just 12 feet from him.
“The buck ran straight away, up an old road. I, of course, grabbed my bow immediately and turned to face it,” he said. “When it stopped at 45 yards to look back, I took the perfect broadside shot.”
He watched the deer collapse.
“Everything had happened so fast that I hadn’t had time to get nervous,” he added.
Austin’s buck scores 209 7/8 inches on the BTR scale.
— Read Recent Blog! Ghostbusting, Ohio Style: The first time Daniel Stutler retrieved trail camera photographs of the monstrous whitetail he would later nickname The Ghost, he’d already tagged out for 2017.