At first, it regarded like a stick. Then, Louie Mozurak realized there weren’t any massive timber immediately overhead. That’s when he obtained excited and took out his cellphone.
“That’s a freakin’ whopper!”
He walked nearer and realized that what he had first thought was a stick, was the truth is the most important four-point whitetail shed Mozurak had ever seen. That was in April 2021. Mozurak, a Pennsylvania resident, was shed searching an Ohio beanfield the place he had permission to hunt that fall.
“I know there’s huge deer in Ohio. But to get my hands on something that big was pretty awesome,” Mozurak says. “There’s definitely no missing that antler.”
It can be one other yr and a half earlier than Mozurak would get a shot on the buck that dropped the shed. In the meantime, one of many 4 factors receded a bit, making the deer a near-perfect 3-by-3. When the 2022 season rolled round, Mozurak’s fortunate area was planted in corn. This meant there was sufficient cowl and thick progress to funnel massive bucks, a profit the sector had not yielded the yr prior when planted with low-creeping beans.
“It’s a really hard farm to hunt. There’s no pinch points, you’re just in thick, thick woods,” Mozurak says. “I didn’t see him [the season prior], I think he was wintering somewhere else. But I immediately got trail cam pictures proving he was still alive in the spring. I went out there in the summer, set out some more trail cameras, trying to get a good pattern on this deer.”
Mozurak discovered that the buck moved calmly by trails within the corn. He determined to hunt as early within the season as attainable, hoping to catch the buck nonetheless sticking to its summer season sample. After a number of days, he determined to maneuver nearer to the place the buck would usually come from. The thick forest made for a tough strategy, particularly because the strip of woods subsequent to the corn area was so slender. But Mozurak hoisted himself and his saddle into an immature tree.
One additional complicating issue was the shot angle. The manner Mozurak was oriented, the buck would in all probability stroll straight at him. Mozurak had little interest in taking a head-on shot and knew he’d have to attend till the buck walked previous him to get a good broadside angle. He determined the sit can be extra for observational functions and he’d come again the subsequent morning with higher data on the buck’s routine.
But as quickly as that call handed by Mozurak’s thoughts, the buck materialized.
“He did exactly what I thought he was going to do, walking right toward me,” Mozurak says. “To this day I still don’t know exactly where he came from. But he ended up turning his full body and smelling where I came in from. He turned enough that I could shoot him.”
Mozurak let an arrow fly, hitting an ideal pass-through shot. The buck ran about 50 yards towards a street and went down.
“It was super quick,” Mozurak says. “From the time I shot him to the time he dropped was probably about 10 seconds and he never moved after that.”
Mozurak doesn’t normally battle to tug bucks out of the woods, however this one offered a problem. He estimates the buck weighed about 260 kilos on the hoof.
“He was an old deer, lots of scars on him,” he says. “Scars on his neck, scars on his ears, he had a couple wounds on his back, maybe barbed wire. But I just feel really lucky to be able to harvest a deer like that.”
The 3-by-3 rack measured 140 inches on the dot with 26-inch major beams and 14-inch G2s. Mozurak is uncertain why the buck didn’t develop extra tines, because it positively had the room on the principle beams to take action. But as Mozurak factors out, a six-pointer of this dimension is very uncommon. The one receded tine stands at simply lower than an inch lengthy, so Mozurak isn’t certain if the buck will really measure as a 3-by-3.
“It’s really close to an inch,” he says. “It’s a really swirly point, so I don’t know if it’s really going to be a true 3-by-3, but you can’t even see it in pictures because it kind of comes out at the end.”
Mozurak says the trick with outdated, cautious bucks like this one is to maintain your distance and go away them room to really feel snug till you make your transfer.
“Sometimes it’s good to sit back and observe before going in there and busting all the deer out,” he says. “The day you go in there is the day you have to kill them. They know you’re there and they know to stay away.”