Gary Cole isn’t exactly a trophy hunter, but neither is he a meat hunter. There’s no point in striving for the latter when your floor freezer is on the fritz.
Going into the 2021 deer season, the 66-year-old Pepsi Cola machine operator from Lexington, Indiana, had eaten tag soup for two years, and prospects for anything more substantive weren’t exactly keeping him awake nights.
He’d seen a decent buck the previous Thanksgiving, but he chose not to take the iffy shot.
The only game plan Gary had when he left his home on the morning of Nov. 20 was to sit in a 10-feet-high ladder stand next to a dense thicket. His 46 acres offer deer the only substantial cover in the mostly agricultural area.
For him, location trumps gadgetry.
“Plain, ordinary, is the way I hunt,” he told Gita Smith, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “I sit on stand, or now and then on the ground, with my back against a tree. No deer blind. I hunt in the woods, and I don’t pay the wind a whole lot of attention.”
He chose the ladder stand on the fateful day only because he’d seen a doe run into the adjacent brambles. And since the rut was underway, knowing a doe was in there gave him confidence.
When he arrived at the property and took his Remington 870 out of his compact SUV, he was greeted with a cacophony of bird noise – turkeys and crows.
“I thought, If they don’t shut up, I’m leaving,” he said.
He’s now glad he didn’t listen to his inner curmudgeon.
It took him 10 minutes to reach the ladder, and the bird ruckus continued until almost 10:00. Shortly after the woods grew quiet, Gary saw an outstanding buck exiting the pines 40 yards from him.
The deer wasn’t in the wide open, so it took Gary awhile to find a clear path for his 12-gauge shotgun’s slug. When the deer finally stepped into a window, he squeezed the trigger. He fired three more shots as well, leading the running deer as if were a fast-flying dove.
He says the last three shots were more for insurance, since the first probably took out the heart and passed through both lungs. The deer collapsed after covering only 40 yards.
At 190 1/8 inches, Gary’s is the largest shotgun-felled Typical ever recorded from Scott County. The 13-pointer is Indiana’s 16th overall in that category. Half its uprights exceed 10 inches in length, and the mass measurements total 37 4/8.
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