Big Buck 411 Blog

Curiosity Killed the Buck?

Curiosity Killed the Buck?

By Mike Handley

Mike Every will never put on another face mask without thinking about the day it almost robbed him of the chance at the largest whitetail he’d ever seen.

The veteran archer from Mason, Michigan, was deer hunting in Ingham County last fall when the local legend suddenly appeared near one of the scrapes Mike was babysitting. The shot should’ve been a slam dunk, but the man’s mask was crooked and obscuring his vision.

Ill-advisedly, Mike tried to thumb the covering into place while drawn and looking at the deer a few yards away, but the effort tripped his release.

Mike had heard about the buck from his brother and a neighbor, but he’d never seen it, neither in trail camera photographs nor on the hoof. The only photos he got were taken seconds before his arrow left the bow, the first time.

“My neighbor was seeing the buck behind my barn every morning on the way to work,” Mike told Richard Smith, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “My brother saw the buck bedded in my bean field when it was in velvet.”

Mike got serious about the deer upon his return from a successful Colorado elk hunt. He erected a stand at the edge of a 140-acre cornfield. It was so far from where he parked that he had to hike a half-mile through the corn in order to avoid spooking any deer that might’ve been bedding along the fencerow.

Aside from its remoteness, the location held a lot of promise.

“There were lots of deer tracks and two scrapes,” he said. “The stand was only 12 feet high, but I had plenty of cover.”

The third time he visited the setup, on Oct. 17, he saw an enormous buck silently approaching one of the scrapes less than 15 yards distant. It might or might not have been the local legend, but he didn’t waste time thinking about it.

When Mike drew his bow, his face mask was in the way. As he tried to nudge it downward with his thumb, he inadvertently tripped the release, and the arrow nicked the animal’s rear end.

The startled whitetail ran into the corn, but then it came back out to see what had stung it.

“The buck was curious about what had happened. Maybe it thought another buck had poked him in the butt,” Mike said.

The second arrow hit the 16-pointer squarely in the chest.

The rack — a mainframe 7x6 with three irregular points — tallies 198 6/8 inches on the BTR scale, which makes it the runner-up to the Michigan compound bow record (as a Typical).

— Read Recent Blog! Shooting without Breathing: A 200-inch whitetail is a bucket-list specimen, and, for most of us, it’s a box that’ll never be ticked.

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