On that memorable morning Andy didn’t see anything until around 10 a.m. “I thought I heard something behind me, so I stood up and here came two does. The does kept looking back. Following them were four small bucks.”

The big 10-pointer was bringing up the rear when Andy spotted him. “He was probably 40 yards behind the other bucks,” Andy said. “A doe had stopped and urinated on the ground and every buck stopped to smell that spot. He walked up to that spot and turned, looking right at me. He was about 50 yards away. I had the scope on him but I was shaking when I squeezed the trigger and he jumped and went over the hill.”

Andy waited about 10 minutes before getting down from his stand and walked over to where the buck had been standing. “While I was standing there looking for signs of a hit, I saw the white belly of deer behind a tree,” Andy said. “When I started moving around to get a better look, he jumped up and ran into the hollow. So I popped over the knoll and there he was at 40 yards, sneaking away. I whistled and he stopped, and I dropped him in his tracks.”

Andy was shooting an H&R single-shot Ultra Slug shotgun with a scope. Andy’s great buck was a main-framed 5x5 with one additional 2-inch sticker on his left brow. Both brow tines measured 9 inches. In fact, Andy’s uncle recognized the Adams County giant as being the same 5x5 he had seen in 2005 because of the deer’s long, curved brow tines. With three tines over 11 inches in length, and less than 3 inches in deductions for side-to-side symmetry, Andy’s buck scored 180 1/8 typical points.

GEORGE DOTSON’S “BAD BOY” RUTTING GIANT
George Dotson, who owns a local archery shop in Adams County, shot a massive 10-pointer on Oct. 27 last year. George thinks he first saw his buck in 2004. “I’m not 100 percent certain it was him, but the rack of the buck I saw had a lot of similarities.”

George spotted the buck three times during the 2005 hunting season.

“I had one opportunity during the ’05 bow season, but he was out too far and I didn’t take the shot,” said George. “I hunted him the rest of the year and jumped him once, but I didn’t see him again until gun season. Some guys were shooting at him and I saw him run across a field. Luckily, they missed!”

The farm George was hunting consists of rolling hills, open cropland and several weedy hollows that are all connected with brushy fencerows. These fencerows are favorite travel routes for deer. “When I saw that buck bolt from a thicket last gun season and run along the fencerow, I made up my mind right then that I was going to put a stand there.”

George saw the deer six times in 2006. The buck was using a standing cornfield as a bedding area. “I saw him coming across an open area early in the season and he was always going into the corn,” said George. “The closest I ever got to him before I shot him on Oct. 27 was probably 80 yards as he was coming out of the corn.”

George finally caught up with the huge buck on a foggy, overcast morning in late October. “I put some buck lure in several of his scrapes and got in the stand with a set of rattling antlers that morning,” George said. “The antlers were big and loud, but by 8:30 I hadn’t seen a thing. Then I thought I saw a coyote. I left my field glasses at home, and I couldn’t tell for sure because the object was probably a quarter of a mile away.

“I rattled the horns pretty loud to try and bring in the coyote (if it was a coyote). The animal would stop and listen but it never got far from the edge of the corn. When it got to the end of the cornfield it came running across the open area, and that’s when I realized it was a big buck.”

The buck started closing in on George, and every few steps he would tear up some brush and saplings.

“I couldn’t see him anymore when he got into the thick stuff, so I started using a grunt call,” George said. “I used that for several minutes, but after 15 or 20 minutes I still couldn’t see him, so I gave up on the grunt call.

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