SuperCore Tags The Monarch

SuperCore had been having a good season so far. In the first two weeks of season he’d matched what he had pulled out last year– a doe and a button. This was the last weekend of Kentucky Rifle Season. He wanted to come back out and try one more time for something with antlers. I sent him out to Midway. I’d seen two bucks hanging around the Garden of Stone, a 4-pointer and a 6-pointer. I was tagged out, so I stayed in bed.

The Garden of Stone

Along about sunrise, I went out to the Thoughtful Spot with my coffee and enjoyed the morning. I had a treat down in the bottoms: a young hen and a young gobbler were playing like it was Spring. She would tree-yelp, and he would gobble. You could tell he was young and had not gotten his gobble down pat yet. They stayed up there calling to each other for most of that first hour. The sun came up, and promptly went behind a bank of low clouds. The world suddenly seemed to turn sullen and cold, and I decided to go in and warm up. I’d just sat down to write something on the D&DH forum when I heard a shot coming from Midway. I wondered about it for a moment and then went back to work.

“SuperCore to Earth.” SuperCore was calling in. He said he needed the truck. I asked him if he had anything. “A six-pointer,” came the reply. He sounded a tad disappointed.

I drove out to see. Out in the Garden of Stone lay a dead deer. I started calling it the Garden of Stone, because a few years ago we started taking deer out of this one spot in the middle of one of the pastures. Every time I bagged one, I put a stone next to the place the deer was shot so I could step off the yardage later. This one was smack dab in the middle– a 140 yard shot from Midway.

What I wasn’t expecting was the size. This was no 6-pointer. SuperCore had not really sized it up. It had surprised him by walking out in the middle of the field. When it paused, SuperCore nailed him with a 180 grain 30-06 from his Remington 7400. The buck had run all of 10 yard before piling up. He was still twitching when I got to him, but I checked– nobody was home anymore. The big buck had done us the favor of dropping right where I could get the truck next to him. I dropped the tailgate and Supercore was able to just slide him right on in.

Back at the meatpole, we measured him. 188 lbs live weight. He had a wonderfully symmetrical 10-point rack, loaded with cedar bark from all his rubbing. He was a nice, relatively young buck, rather lean for what we had seen.

Both SuperCore and I had deer already at Mike Jett’s place, Salem Ridge Deer Processing. We threw some coolers in and went over. Mike and Stacey were all excited about their big 9-pointer Mike shot Friday night– nice buck. We were mighty impressed with the rack– a few broken tips and a head wound. This guy had been fighting. Mike had shot it at 200 yards with his 7400 in 270 WIN. Great shot. Great Buck.

Us? I opened the tailgate and started pulling coolers out. All of a sudden this big head flops out. I felt a little sorry for Mike and Stacey, after showing us their nice buck. We had to go drag out SuperCore’s “6-pointer.” What a buzz-kill.

This buck will probably go over 130″ gross. It ranks as the #2 buck here at the farm. With this, SuperCore has officially graduated the Shamanic School of Deer Hunting. It did not take much arm twisting to get him to agree to have Kelly at Off the Wall Taxidermy in New Berlin have it for the mount. It promises to be gorgeous when its done.

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