A lot can happen in nineteen years, and a lot can not happen in that same amount of time. These two truths have a home on The Farm w. No Name, the 80 acres of Appalachian paradise my parents bought in October 2004. Within hours of the closing, I hung a stand on our north ridge and had a great encounter with a borderline P&Y 8 that I would have happily shot had he given me the opportunity. I can still see him walking away from me on the oak flat and thinking, very naively, “I’m going to be the Mary Drury of SE Ohio.”
I still laugh at the combo of arrogance and ignorance that led to that belief, particularly in retrospect two decades later. My trials and tribulations on the farm are well-documented throughout the nooks and crannies of TOO. But there’s no better way to sum it all up than to point out that it took 15 years to kill a buck on the farm. In 2019, I finally broke the ice and killed the Wide 8. The next year, I killed a buck in October for the first time. In 2021, I killed the buck I call Lunchbox and I finally achieved a long-time goal of killing an Ohio Big Buck. I spent all of 2022 hunting a huge droptine buck behind my house and I willingly ate a tag holding out for him. When the big droptine was killed in early November last year, I turned my focus to the buck I called Kyle, killing him on December 13th. Ending 2023 on a high note felt great and I rolled into ‘24 feeling fairly content with how things were going after those 15 years of agony.
But, despite the hot streak, it was always in the back of my mind that I still hadn’t executed the textbook Mark Drury moment: Pick up sheds of a deer in your food plot, have him be your #1 the following year, spend the offseason planning and working to kill him, and then have multiple “Made for TV” moments leading up to an epic kill. Then, on a beautiful spring morning in March, I found my first matched set of sheds in 30 years of picking them up, and the first set found on our farm since we’ve owned it.
As soon as I picked them up, I knew they belonged to a deer I’d nicknamed Lincoln, now known as the Big 6. Within hours of killing Kyle last year, Lincoln moved in and set up shop on the south end of the farm. Finding his sheds in the clover plot I’d planted on that end of the farm was confirmation that 19 years of habitat management was starting to pay dividends. As spring turned to summer and summer to fall, it was clear that the Big 6 was the oldest (4.5) and biggest buck on the farm this year, and unless something else wandered by during the rut, he was my #1 target heading into the season.
A key part of turning things around on our farm is not hunting it until late October, so I stayed out and didn’t put any pressure on this deer until November 2. With several east winds in the forecast, the conditions were right to hunt the edge of our sanctuary. That evening was a hang-n-hunt that resulted in seeing 4 does and 2 bucks, which made it easy to head back to the same stand on Sunday the 3rd.
Looking back on it, that morning’s hunt is the single best hunt in 19 years on the farm and battles Veteran's Day 2003 as the greatest deer hunt of my 24-year archery career. What I witnessed in that chase sequence was true “Made for TV” drama. I passed 3 solid three-year-olds, only to see them AND the Big 6 dogging the same doe, with another promising young buck thrown in the mix. It was pure chaos with him eventually sprinting past me at 3 steps grunting up a storm, while defending and tending his doe with a rut-crazed fervor that I’ve only seen on hunting shows. He would eventually come back with the doe an hour later, but she would save his life by going left instead of right. Ironically, six days later, a new doe went left instead of right and it cost him his life.
Weather conditions conspired with work and family obligations to keep me out of the sanctuary stand until Saturday the 9th. While I was gearing up for the day, one of my cams sent me a video of him by himself on the south end of the farm, not far from where I found his sheds. Good. I knew he wasn’t locked up with a doe and he was still alive, so I was fairly optimistic about my odds of at least seeing him. Then, an hour after sunrise, one of our neighbors decided it would be a great morning to fell a tree.
I listened as they sawed, silently judging how dull their chain was. I listened as they drove a wedge in the tree, which is when I figured out it wasn’t a causal firewood cutting mission. Then I listened as they drove a diesel truck into the area and started slinging logging chains around. From where I was sitting, it sounded like they were right where I expected the buck might be bedded, or might be cruising to/from in search of his next doe. As the minutes passed, I couldn’t believe no deer had fled the activity, and then, there he was. Methodically working his way down the ridge, eventually stopping in the ravine 100 yards upwind of my setup. I tried grunting to no avail thanks to him having a doe in his vicinity. While watching him, two more does came trotting down the ridge, all four clearly choosing to relocate due to the ruckus. Eventually, two of the does worked their way up to me, with the other doe leading him down the ridge and away from me.
Not long after he disappeared, I heard grunting and he reappeared on my side of the ravine and his doe led him to within 30 yards. For more than 20 minutes, all four deer were inside 30 yards, with one doe working to 9 yards and staring up at me. All of them stared a hole through my soul at different points during that tense standoff, which found me coming to full draw twice, only to let down because I couldn’t get a clear shot. With my hands losing feeling due to the cold (might rethink not shooting with gloves on after that) I watched as all four worked their away from me into the thicket. A massive adrenalin dump sat me down in my seat and I thought it was over, but then the adage of “third time’s a charm” came to fruition.
When I sat down that morning, I grabbed the third arrow out of my quiver. It was my third trip in and I said “Third time’s a charm” when I nocked that arrow. A few short minutes after they all disappeared, the two does that he wasn’t interested in, came back towards me, only to break right off the ridge and down into a thick ravine. I figured that would be the end of it if they did come back. Surely the other doe would follow them and he’d follow her. As I was considering what to do next, I looked down and his doe was angling towards me at 25 yards on an almost identical path as the weekend before when I couldn’t get a shot off. Then, deep big buck grunts. He’s coming!!!
As the doe slipped through, I knew I’d need to be precise in when and where I stopped him because I had one, maybe two soccer ball-sized openings to shoot through. When he got to the same deadfall he chose to run through rather than around the weekend before (which is what saved him), he elected to go around it, which brought him to 20 yards and it gave me one clear shot. When he hit the window, I stopped him right where I needed him. Anchor. Pin. Bubble. Float. With my mantra finished I started to hear @brock ratcliff in my head, but I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say and I let it rip! I knew at the halfway mark he was toast. The shot felt perfect and it was perfect. In 24 bow seasons, I have never seen blood as instantaneously as I did in that moment. His feet hadn’t returned to earth from his mule kick and there was already a blood trail that a blind man could follow.
A call to my wife, then to my dad, and a flurry of texts preceded an anti-climatic blood trail. When I got to him, I sat down with my coffee and enjoyed five minutes of solitude, just living in the moment.
It was in that moment that I realized my suspicion while watching the video that morning of him having funky hooves was true. I'm going to do an old school gun rack mount with these babies!
So, after 19 seasons of trying to be Mark Drury, I had my moment. I'll never live up to the hype, but I'm finding my groove and after 19 years on The Farm w. No Name, maybe, just maybe, I've figured a thing or two out!
This moment is enough to give a man an itchy trigger finger! Bringing home a buck for them to celebrate with me is as good as it gets in my book!
Oh, and yes, I know he has 7 points. The Big 6 is what he is and here he is in all his glory.
I still laugh at the combo of arrogance and ignorance that led to that belief, particularly in retrospect two decades later. My trials and tribulations on the farm are well-documented throughout the nooks and crannies of TOO. But there’s no better way to sum it all up than to point out that it took 15 years to kill a buck on the farm. In 2019, I finally broke the ice and killed the Wide 8. The next year, I killed a buck in October for the first time. In 2021, I killed the buck I call Lunchbox and I finally achieved a long-time goal of killing an Ohio Big Buck. I spent all of 2022 hunting a huge droptine buck behind my house and I willingly ate a tag holding out for him. When the big droptine was killed in early November last year, I turned my focus to the buck I called Kyle, killing him on December 13th. Ending 2023 on a high note felt great and I rolled into ‘24 feeling fairly content with how things were going after those 15 years of agony.
But, despite the hot streak, it was always in the back of my mind that I still hadn’t executed the textbook Mark Drury moment: Pick up sheds of a deer in your food plot, have him be your #1 the following year, spend the offseason planning and working to kill him, and then have multiple “Made for TV” moments leading up to an epic kill. Then, on a beautiful spring morning in March, I found my first matched set of sheds in 30 years of picking them up, and the first set found on our farm since we’ve owned it.
As soon as I picked them up, I knew they belonged to a deer I’d nicknamed Lincoln, now known as the Big 6. Within hours of killing Kyle last year, Lincoln moved in and set up shop on the south end of the farm. Finding his sheds in the clover plot I’d planted on that end of the farm was confirmation that 19 years of habitat management was starting to pay dividends. As spring turned to summer and summer to fall, it was clear that the Big 6 was the oldest (4.5) and biggest buck on the farm this year, and unless something else wandered by during the rut, he was my #1 target heading into the season.
A key part of turning things around on our farm is not hunting it until late October, so I stayed out and didn’t put any pressure on this deer until November 2. With several east winds in the forecast, the conditions were right to hunt the edge of our sanctuary. That evening was a hang-n-hunt that resulted in seeing 4 does and 2 bucks, which made it easy to head back to the same stand on Sunday the 3rd.
Looking back on it, that morning’s hunt is the single best hunt in 19 years on the farm and battles Veteran's Day 2003 as the greatest deer hunt of my 24-year archery career. What I witnessed in that chase sequence was true “Made for TV” drama. I passed 3 solid three-year-olds, only to see them AND the Big 6 dogging the same doe, with another promising young buck thrown in the mix. It was pure chaos with him eventually sprinting past me at 3 steps grunting up a storm, while defending and tending his doe with a rut-crazed fervor that I’ve only seen on hunting shows. He would eventually come back with the doe an hour later, but she would save his life by going left instead of right. Ironically, six days later, a new doe went left instead of right and it cost him his life.
Weather conditions conspired with work and family obligations to keep me out of the sanctuary stand until Saturday the 9th. While I was gearing up for the day, one of my cams sent me a video of him by himself on the south end of the farm, not far from where I found his sheds. Good. I knew he wasn’t locked up with a doe and he was still alive, so I was fairly optimistic about my odds of at least seeing him. Then, an hour after sunrise, one of our neighbors decided it would be a great morning to fell a tree.
I listened as they sawed, silently judging how dull their chain was. I listened as they drove a wedge in the tree, which is when I figured out it wasn’t a causal firewood cutting mission. Then I listened as they drove a diesel truck into the area and started slinging logging chains around. From where I was sitting, it sounded like they were right where I expected the buck might be bedded, or might be cruising to/from in search of his next doe. As the minutes passed, I couldn’t believe no deer had fled the activity, and then, there he was. Methodically working his way down the ridge, eventually stopping in the ravine 100 yards upwind of my setup. I tried grunting to no avail thanks to him having a doe in his vicinity. While watching him, two more does came trotting down the ridge, all four clearly choosing to relocate due to the ruckus. Eventually, two of the does worked their way up to me, with the other doe leading him down the ridge and away from me.
Not long after he disappeared, I heard grunting and he reappeared on my side of the ravine and his doe led him to within 30 yards. For more than 20 minutes, all four deer were inside 30 yards, with one doe working to 9 yards and staring up at me. All of them stared a hole through my soul at different points during that tense standoff, which found me coming to full draw twice, only to let down because I couldn’t get a clear shot. With my hands losing feeling due to the cold (might rethink not shooting with gloves on after that) I watched as all four worked their away from me into the thicket. A massive adrenalin dump sat me down in my seat and I thought it was over, but then the adage of “third time’s a charm” came to fruition.
When I sat down that morning, I grabbed the third arrow out of my quiver. It was my third trip in and I said “Third time’s a charm” when I nocked that arrow. A few short minutes after they all disappeared, the two does that he wasn’t interested in, came back towards me, only to break right off the ridge and down into a thick ravine. I figured that would be the end of it if they did come back. Surely the other doe would follow them and he’d follow her. As I was considering what to do next, I looked down and his doe was angling towards me at 25 yards on an almost identical path as the weekend before when I couldn’t get a shot off. Then, deep big buck grunts. He’s coming!!!
As the doe slipped through, I knew I’d need to be precise in when and where I stopped him because I had one, maybe two soccer ball-sized openings to shoot through. When he got to the same deadfall he chose to run through rather than around the weekend before (which is what saved him), he elected to go around it, which brought him to 20 yards and it gave me one clear shot. When he hit the window, I stopped him right where I needed him. Anchor. Pin. Bubble. Float. With my mantra finished I started to hear @brock ratcliff in my head, but I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say and I let it rip! I knew at the halfway mark he was toast. The shot felt perfect and it was perfect. In 24 bow seasons, I have never seen blood as instantaneously as I did in that moment. His feet hadn’t returned to earth from his mule kick and there was already a blood trail that a blind man could follow.
A call to my wife, then to my dad, and a flurry of texts preceded an anti-climatic blood trail. When I got to him, I sat down with my coffee and enjoyed five minutes of solitude, just living in the moment.
It was in that moment that I realized my suspicion while watching the video that morning of him having funky hooves was true. I'm going to do an old school gun rack mount with these babies!
So, after 19 seasons of trying to be Mark Drury, I had my moment. I'll never live up to the hype, but I'm finding my groove and after 19 years on The Farm w. No Name, maybe, just maybe, I've figured a thing or two out!
This moment is enough to give a man an itchy trigger finger! Bringing home a buck for them to celebrate with me is as good as it gets in my book!
Oh, and yes, I know he has 7 points. The Big 6 is what he is and here he is in all his glory.
