14-point deer green scores at 184 inches Boone & Crockett.
Dewayne Wiggins and his father Bernard had been hunting hard all season, but just hadn’t had any luck.
“We had been hunting box stands on food plots, and just hadn’t been seeing anything,” Dewayne Wiggins said. “The acorn crop is incredible, and I told my dad, ‘We’ve got to get off the fields and get in the woods.”
That decision turned out to be the right one, with the younger Wiggins killing a huge buck the duo had been hunting since it first appeared last season. That animal, bagged on Nov. 25, carried a 14-point rack that has been green scored at 184 inches.
The kill came the very first morning the Wigginses changed tactics.
“I didn’t even have a stand,” Dewayne Wiggins said. “I just sat on the ground.”
The Carrollton hunter didn’t have to wait long. About 6:45 a.m. a doe popped into view, and Wiggins was excited to see a buck right behind it.
“He came out trying to cut her off,” said Wiggins, who goes by his real name on the MS-Sportsman.com forum.
Hunters on the lease try to shoot only mature bucks, so Wiggins took time to check out the antlers crowing the buck.
“I couldn’t tell how big he was,” Wiggins said. “I could tell that he had real tall tines, but I would have never believed he had such mass.”
That first glance told him the buck was a shooter, but his opportunity quickly passed.
“He dropped into a ditch, and I couldn’t get a shot,” Wiggins said.
The hunter searched frantically for the deer, and Lady Luck proved to be on his side this morning.
“He could have come out (of the ditch) anywhere else, and I wouldn’t have had a shot,” Wiggins said. “Just a stroke of luck, he came out of the ditch directly in front of me and stopped.”
Wiggins didn’t hesitate, putting the crosshairs and dropping the deer with a 75-yard shot in the neck. The buck fell in its tracks.
Although his heart was thumping with excitement, the hunter still had no clue exactly which deer he’d just laid out.
When he walked up the downed animal, however, Wiggins almost passed out: It was the big buck he and his father had been chasing for two seasons.
“When I saw that extra point sticking out from under the right beam, I knew it was the same buck,” Wiggins said. “He had that last year. That extra point measures 8 1/2 inches long”
The buck, which had never showed up a single time on any trail camera set up on the property, carried a staggering growth of calcium.
The main beams stretched 25 ½ inches, and 10 main-frame points sprouted from them.
“It’s got 14-inch G2s,” Wiggins said. “The G3s are 11 ½ inches.”
But what was so staggering was the thickness of the antlers.
“The mass is just amazing,” Wiggins said. “It has 7 ½-inch bases.”
And the mass hold up the length of the beams, with the right side being especially heavy.
“I’m a pretty big guy, and I have big hands,” Wiggins said. “I can’t wrap my hand around the right side.”
Surprisingly, the deer was especially large in terms of its body, weighing in at only 180 pounds. And a good portion of that was above the neck.
“When we caped him out and cut his antlers and head off, he weighed 150 pounds,” Wiggins said. “So he had 30 pounds of horns and head.”
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