Brady 20" Management 8

My dad and I decided to drive down to Brady on Thursday night for a weekend hunt. There was a cold front moving through and the deer were in full rut, so we figured it was going to be a good weekend. When we arrived at the lease at about 1:00 am the temperature was about 30 degrees.

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The next morning when we woke up it was even colder, the thermometer in my jeep said that it was 24 degrees. I decided to go to my honey hole that I have had so much good fortune in seasons past. I knew that there was a big eight point hanging out in the area. I had a few trail camera pictures of him from late summer when he was in velvet, in fact I posted them on the blog back in September. Click Here To See The Blog Post.
So far I had not seen him, but the weekend before my cousin Tyler sat in the stand and got him on video. He was very wide, we estimated him to be about 20” inside. Up to this point I had not seen any deer that I would consider a “trophy” by our lease standards, so I decided that I was going to focus on taking a mature eight point management buck. From the video I could tell that he was a perfect management buck, he probably was not going to ever be any better than an eight point.

I got into the stand at about 6:45 am. As I was getting everything situated and my camera set up I noticed a small doe walking toward me at about 30 yards. Well, as usual I dropped something out of my back pack and she ran off. After getting set up, the sun was just starting to rise over the trees. I pulled out my grunt tube and rattle bag. I hit the grunt tube once, and then proceeded to lay down a pretty aggressive rattling sequence. As soon as I stopped rattling I noticed movement out to my left. Then I noticed movement to my right, then straight in front of me, and the whole time I heard movement behind me. Within a minute of finishing my rattling sequence I had five different bucks in my area.

It was still too dark to shoot, and really too dark to see, but I could tell that the big wide eight point was coming in at 10 o’clock from my position at about 60 yards away. I watched as he continued to make his way to about 30 yards from me. The whole time the other four bucks (all of them smaller) where chasing does and carelessly walking right into my setup. I watched all of the deer for about 20 minutes, even though I had decided that I was going to take the eight point, I was still holding out hope that something bigger would come in.
At 7:30 the feeder went off and temporarily scared all of the deer out of bow range. About 5 minutes later the big eight point made his way back to within 25 yards of me. I decided that I should go ahead and take the shot. I grabbed my bow and focused my camera on the buck. Just as I got ready to draw back he moved out of the cameras view. This happened several times. I finally got the camera focused on him long enough to allow me to draw back and take the shot. I touched the trigger and watched the Easton Full Metal Jacket arrow disappear right in the boiler maker.

The buck darted away like a scalded cat, and I tried to refocus the camera on him, but could not find him in the view finder. I could see him, just not in the camera. I watched as he crashed to the ground about 60 to 70 yards from my stand. There was not going to be any tracking job on this deer, which was a huge relief. I have had some very long tracking jobs on deer I have shot out of this stand in the past. I actually had to hire a tracking dog to help me find a buck last year.
I watched the deer for about 10 minutes and decided he was down for good. I decided to get out of the stand and go check him out. While making the short walk to the deer , it was very obvious that the deer had been hit very well. There was blood everywhere. So many times in the past I have had deer that did not leave a blood trail at all. That was not the case with this deer, Stevie Wonder could have probably followed this blood trail. I have to say that the 100 Grain Grim Reaper broadhead is worth every penny. It does some serious damage and makes for a quick and humane kill.

As I got closer to the buck, I could immediately tell that he was definitely the widest buck I had ever killed. His inside spread measured 19 3/4". He had decent mass, but was not anything special. After removing his jaw the wear on his teeth showed him to be 5 1/2 years old. He was the perfect management type buck to remove from the heard in order to let the younger bucks grow up and breed the does.