Virginia's New No. 5 Typical by Blackpowder
By Mike Handley
Dustin Plummer used to beg his mother to take him to Walmart so he could have prints made of the images his old-school trail cameras collected.
Now, his cameras send the images to his phone.
The 31-year-old father of two from Sandy Hook, Virginia, runs a couple dozen cell cameras all year to keep track of what's roaming the lands he hunts. Last year, half of those were set up on a 40-acre tract in Goochland County, where he and his dad have hunted — often side by side — since he was a kid.
"I hunt hardwoods, not food plots or agricultural fields," he says. "That's the way I was brought up, and it's all I know."
Dustin awoke on Oct. 25 to cell camera video footage of a gigantic 8-pointer pushing a couple of does. He knew the deer well, although it was a master of avoiding lenses. He'd received only one late-season image of the buck in 2023 and one photo in 2021.
"I knew it was a smart old buck, so I figured I'd better go out and bowhunt it that afternoon, or else it might drop off the face of earth again," he said.
He actually saw it, but only briefly.
"The next morning, I pulled four cameras from elsewhere and moved them to this area," he said. "The buck would appear every third or fourth day, always at different times, on different cameras."
Dustin bounced around the property for the next two weeks, playing musical stands based on the deer's most recent appearances. It was as if he were playing Whack-a-Mole with the buck.
"Wherever I sat, he'd be at the opposite end of the property," he said.
The morning prior to their last meeting, the whitetail was photographed at the back side of the property, very near one of Dustin's five stands.
On election day, Nov. 5, four days into the Commonwealth's two-week early muzzleloader season, Dustin didn't know where to go. En route to the property in his truck, he prayed for God to just put him in the right tree. He'd hunted every morning and afternoon for nearly 14 days, and he'd chosen wrong each time.
Soon after he parked and exited, deer began snorting from every direction, something that had never occurred previously.
"I thought, Man, this isn't going to happen today," he remembered.
Nevertheless, he climbed a tree and settled in for the morning. When he stood to stretch his legs at 8:15, he spotted a doe on a ridge about 80 yards distant. Beyond her, he noticed the tips of very long tines rising above the crest, and he began shaking, aware of what he was about to witness.
The doe eventually came to within 75 yards before veering off into some holly bushes, and the buck took the exact same path, offering Dustin the shot for which he was praying.
After catching his breath and clearing his head, Dustin walked to the nearby creek bottom, his eyes pendulum-searching the hills on either side. Fifty yards down the creek, he stopped, scanned one of the ridges, and saw his buck, which had run maybe 100 yards from where the bullet struck it. There had been no blood trail because the bullet had lodged in the off-shoulder, never exiting.
The deer his friends nicknamed Crazy Eight is Virginia's new No. 5 Typical. Anders Blixt scored it for Buckmasters, arriving at 185 2/8 inches. The mostly clean mainframe 4x4 had five barely measurable stickers and knobbies on the left side, so the bulk of the score is tine and beam length.
The main beams measured 29 and 28 5/8 inches long, respectively. The antlers' P2s were 14 5/8 and 14 6/8, and the P3s were 10 5/8 and 11 3/8 inches. Without the sticker points, which add just under 6 inches to its tally, the buck is a world-class, 180-inch 8-pointer.
The full story behind the hunt will appear in a future issue of Buckmasters.