The Trophy

He was easily the biggest buck I have ever seen in the Ozarks if you are talking about antler size. And there he was filling up the scope of my rifle at 45 yards, broadside and stone-still. I watched him for more than a minute, until he turned and walked back into the woodlands. I didn’t fire because less than thirty seconds before he walked out into the open, I had dropped a smaller buck at the edge of a small pond. I was looking over from my tree stand at a waterhole deep in the woods. It was getting a lot of attention from deer during that dry year, probably 25 years ago.

I remember him well, a gray-muzzled old guy with thick-beamed, high spreading antlers, perhaps with several more tines than ten. I don’t know what the Boone and Crockett measurement numbers would have been; I have never gone in for that kind of thing. He was actually no larger in body than the buck I had just killed. That deer was a young one, and fat. What I wanted wasn’t more antlers but some good loin steaks, a smoked ham, ground venison to combine with pork to make summer sausage and chili, and maybe some good jerky for the rest of the winter. I had that in the seven-pointer that had dropped in his tracks.

Who knows what happened to that big-antlered rascal. I only wish I had been able to get his photograph, because I would rather get pictures of live big bucks than dead ones. Especially now, and it has been that way for four or five years. I will hunt keep hunting deer… but likely never again with a rifle or bow, as I have done for five decades. I shoot lots of wildlife now, with my camera.

A ten point deer I shot with a camera in the wild (Left), and a picture of a 22-point deer-farm tame deer fed a diet of animal by products that will be sold to a hunter for 40 to 50 thousand dollars.

Oh yes, I have seen some monstrous record-book wild bucks, but they were in Manitoba, Canada, where deer live in the bush country to the north of the great flat croplands there where I once went to hunt ducks and geese. I saw deer there that were 60 to 80 pounds larger than any I have ever seen in the Ozarks, or even Iowa or Nebraska. I found a shed antler there once while hunting snipe, that I could scarcely believe. It had 6-points with a beam like a hickory fence post.

I have many good friends and even relatives that are trophy hunters and they would give anything to hunt deer like that, but to go there and do it you would have to have permission to hunt private land and the trip and tags will cost you a fortune. I could have done it but I was so into waterfowl and goose hunting that it was all I wanted to do when I was up there.

I have seen monstrous antlers on deer in the south too. There are oodles of them in deer farms where people raise them from little tame and bottle-fed fawns to be slaughtered via rifle, much as you would do a hog or steer. Some of those bucks bring tens of thousands of dollars. The biggest of them are raised in Texas on hundreds of deer farms, by people who have made a fortune because of it. It comes down, I guess, to what you want to do with your life. And it is the deer farms that created Chronic Wasting Disease by feeding deer animal by-products, although some I have interviewed say they don’t do that.

I talked once to a man by the name of Larry Bade who worked on a deer farm in the Ozarks who told me it bothered him to bottle feed a little fawn and watch it be turned loose in a killing zone four years later to be shot by some millionaire’s kid from a tree stand overlooking a corn zone emptied only a day before they arrived.

“Those who kill the deer seldom eat them anyway,” he told me, “some are just thrown away in hot weather or the MDC takes the meat and it is put into a program they call ‘share the harvest’. The people who eat that meat have no idea how many chemicals I have injected into those nearly tame bucks, with bottles that clearly say, ‘not for human consumption’.” Bade quit the job because of that.

All around the Ozarks this deer season there will be hunters going after bucks with big antlers! Me too I hope… with my camera. If you are a deer hunter you need to read some articles I am putting on a website this week. They concern the Mo. Dept. of Conservation and cannot be printed in the news media. Go to my blogspot larrydablemontoutdoors, and read about those things that can save you from fines you do not deserve, and keep you from losing deer antlers and even firearms to MDC agents.

I have joined some outdoor podcasts for a couple of hour-long programs which you might enjoy seeing. They concern the history of the Ozark johnboat and then the life in the outdoors, (79 years now) as an outdoor writer and naturalist. They can be found at Kyle Viet’s podcast or Ozark podcast-Larry Dablemont.

Dablemont contact information… P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613…email… lightninridge47@email.com Books and magazines… www.larrydablemont.com.