Old School
By Mike Handley
Guy Draper’s 2024 buck didn’t have a name. There are no known trail camera images of it, and he had no history with the giant whitetail that occupied the No. 2 spot on the leaderboard during most of the recent Illinois Deer Classic.
The lack of background, no trail camera photos and only a handful of harvest photos would usually keep him out of hunting magazines. His unique story, however, is a reminder that old-school tactics still have a place in the age of cell camera contracts and rutcations.
The 39-year-old state trooper and part-time baseball coach from Carterville had only a couple of opportunities to hunt last season. The first window was Veterans Day.
Guy wasn’t targeting a specific buck. While he once employed trail cameras to help reconnoiter his parents’ 300 acres, he’d grown weary of constantly checking memory cards and tainting his best spots with human scent.
Instead, he relies upon intelligence gathered by his parents and from shed hunting with his two children, which he treats as more of an event than a chore by bringing snacks and arranging picnics.
Two years earlier, daughter Morgan, then 8, found a pair of massive sheds that would later tape out at a combined 159 inches (without adding a spread). She spotted the first antler in a hay field from the truck, and the second during another last-minute look before going home.
“I told her she’d found something greater than a pot of gold,” Guy laughed. “Since it was near St. Patrick’s Day, we called it our Irish Miracle.”
When he drove the 45 minutes from his home to the family cattle farm on that sunny Nov. 11, the temperature was already 61 degrees. “Not your typical good day for deer hunting,” he noted.
Guy had an idea of where he wanted to go, but he ditched the plan when he jumped deer en route.
“I really didn’t know where to go after that,” he said. “I was suffering from analysis paralysis. I just kept walking until I finally stopped near a thick area affording only close-range bow shots.”
He was carrying a bow in one hand, gear bag in another, and his climbing stand was strapped to his back.
After spraying the area with doe-in-heat scent, he chose a tree and shrugged out of his sweat-soaked jacket. Once aloft, he realized leaving it on the ground was a rookie mistake, so he got down to retrieve it.
When he was back up the tree, he decided he’d gone too high, well into the canopy, so he inched himself down again to maybe 15 feet.
“I was checking all the boxes of what not to do,” he admitted.
After about 40 minutes, he set the stage with a well planned series of grunts. He carries three different calls on a lanyard around his neck, all with different pitches and capabilities. He began with a loud grunt, followed later by a snort-wheeze, and then he offered up a softer, more throaty grunt.
After that, he rattled and closed the session with a couple more urrrps.
He did this full stage production four times, between 35 and 40 minutes apart, a script he’d learned from watching videos of a successful Michigan hunter who preaches, “Make it sound like deer are out there.”
Soon after the fourth sequence, he heard something running toward him and eventually spotted it at a fence, 70 yards uphill.
“It was a buck, and it was looking everywhere,” he said. “It then jumped the fence and began coming down the hill. That’s when I noticed the rack’s mass and a tall tine on the left side.
“I stood at that point, but the deer saw me. Or it saw something. I don’t really think it could tell what I was because the sun was at my back and the North wind was in my face,” he added.
The buck continued to the bottom of the hill and paused to drink from a creek, allowing Guy to clip on his release. The animal drank without pause for three or four minutes, long enough for Guy to unclip and dig out his rangefinder to confirm it was only 19 yards from his tree.
When the buck finally got its fill and resumed walking, Guy stopped it with a mouth bleat.
“I believe the buck had heard me all day, until it just couldn’t take it anymore,” Guy said. “Because of that, it had pinpointed me just like a tom turkey does.”
The quartering-away shot was perfect, although Guy noticed about 6 inches of arrow protruding from the buck’s side as it wheeled.
“I could hear the arrow sloshing around in its chest cavity, and blood was everywhere,” he said.
The deer collapsed as Guy watched. He was standing over it by 3:30.
The Union County buck wears one of the most impressive 4x4 mainframes ever seen — 179 1/8 inches, to be precise. With the eight sticker points added, the score jumps to 190 5/8. Kentucky measurer Randy Mathis did the honors for Buckmasters.