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Change of Scenery Just the Ticket

Change of Scenery Just the Ticket

By Mike Handley

The next time someone asks Daniel Montgomery to sit in his treestand, the retired sheriff from Mt. Vernon, Indiana, will not be able to say YES quickly enough. Doing so last November resulted in adrenaline-marinated venison and quite a large piece of wall art.

The owner of the property he hunts in Posey County asked if he would mind if a friend hunted from his setup on the afternoon of Nov. 18. Dan had ushered in the state’s firearms season from the treestand two days earlier. He’d seen a lot of does and one large buck 400 yards distant.

The landowner’s pal needed an easily accessible stand, and his seemed like the perfect solution.

Dan went to a different setup that afternoon, looking forward to a change of scenery, and he began seeing deer almost immediately.

“Soon after I got there, a doe came up and was playing around the tree,” he told Lisa Price, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “Then a little buck came in, and I toyed with the deer, alternately grunting at it and taking its picture.”

He was still watching and photographing the animal an hour later.

“I was sitting there with my phone in my hand when I noticed a big deer body heading toward the little buck. It was walking through high grass, and its head was down,” he said.

A well-timed grunt caused the new arrival to stop 30 yards from the hunter and lift its head. Without burning any brain cells, Daniel knew it was a shooter, and he reflexively squeezed the trigger.

The buck bolted after the boom, and Daniel lost sight of it after 50 yards. Whether it fell or kept going didn’t really matter, because job No. 1 was to reload his rifle.

Turns out, he needn’t have bothered.

It took three men to pull the 26-pointer onto the back of an ATV, and Daniel had to straddle the handlebars to keep the front end from shooting skyward. Even field-dressed, his trophy weighed close to 200 pounds.

“I just lucked out,” Daniel says modestly. “I was in the right place at the right time.”

The Posey County whitetail has a BTR score of 223 inches.

— Read Recent Blog! Following Orders: After two decades of hunting deer on a spit of land once cotton-farmed by the president of the Confederacy, Bill Harvey finally shot his due in 2018.

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