Persistence paid off for Levi Holden. (Photo courtesy of Levi Holden)
March 02, 2022
By Blake Garlock
After Saskatchewan’s whitetail hunting season ended, Levi Holden began watching his target bucks that had lived through the season, waiting for them to drop their antlers. One morning in early February, Levi woke up early to see a buck that had shed its antlers standing outside his window.
“I put on my snowshoes and ran out the door,” says Levi. “In about 15 minutes, I picked up three sheds.”
The quick success motivated Levi, and he decided to ask for permission to look for sheds on a property where he knew some of his target bucks frequented. After obtaining permission, Levi set out searching.
Levi was walking across a pasture when he saw something odd-looking in the distance. It looked too big to be a whitetail shed, and he thought it might be a large stick lying on ground.
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However, Levi soon realized that it wasn’t a stick lying in the snow.
“The closer I got to it I started to realize that it was a shed,” Levi remembers. “The closer I got to the shed the more I became amazed by its size.”
Levi was proud of the impressive antler he’d just picked up, but he naturally began to wonder: Where is the other side? Levi scoured the property for the shed’s match but never found it.
Levi searched the property again the next day and never found the buck’s other side. He became discouraged and thought that maybe the antler had been buried in the snow and out of his view. However, a week later he decided to give the property another look.
Although it took him multiple days to complete the set, Levi never gave up until he matched up these impressive whitetail sheds. (Photo courtesy of Levi Holden) During his third trip looking for the shed, Levi walked the entire fence line near where he’d found the first antler, but he still didn’t find the matching side. Although he’d been determined to complete the set, Levi’s lack of luck discouraged him, and he decided to head back to the truck. But unlike the other days, Levi walked through a new field toward the truck, and it put him on a path that provided a new view of the area. It paid off.
“Traveling through this new way let me see on the opposite side of a little knoll that I hadn’t noticed before,” Levi says. “The matching side was lying just on the other side of the knoll!”
After finding the shed, Levi realized that he had walked within 50 yards of it twice before. And the shed ended up only being 300 yards from his truck.
For more shed hunting stories, keep following along with North American Whitetail’s Just Dropped campaign through shed season.
