Rather than ring in the New Year in Pass Christian shooting fireworks, 16-year-old Jonathon Allen opted to celebrate by spending the holiday weekend with family and friends at their 2,400-acre hunting lease in Yazoo County near Vaughan. It had been six long years since Jonathon had scored on a buck, and he was more than ready to change his luck.
Allen knew the property was home to a number of very large bucks. The day after Christmas his dad had missed a monster buck that was farther out in the field than he had estimated. And Jonathon’s uncle had been hot on the trail of a giant 9-pointer he had spotted earlier in the season.
Although he dreamed of shooting a buck with a massive set of antlers, the young Allen would have been more than happy with any buck just to get out of his slump.
Everyone in camp had been hunting hard with not much success. So when the alarm went off on New Year’s morning, Jonathon was actually ready to roll over and go back to sleep.
Fortunately, his dad convinced him to give it another shot. A front had moved through bringing cold, windy, overcast conditions: Perfect deer-hunting weather.
Having hunted the same stand for several days in a row, Jonathon Allens’s uncle decided to give up and try a different stand.
“I figured that I may as well give the stand my uncle had abandoned a try,” Jonathon Allen said. “I was hoping that I might get lucky and see the big 9-pointer.”
Arriving at the box stand just before daylight, the high-schooler didn’t have long to wait before the action began.
A small herd of does entered the wheat field to the right of his stand and began feeding. Using his binoculars, Allen was watching the eight nannies in hopes that the big 9-pointer might follow them out into the field.
About that time, Allen glanced to his left and was shocked by what he saw.
“All I could see was a mass of antlers,” he recalled. “Even though he was angling away from me and I could only make out the right side of his antlers, I knew instantly that he was a shooter.”
Jonathan reached for his Thompson Center Encore and turned the scope to its full 12 power magnification because the buck was over 200 yards away.
Although he was shaking from being so nervous, Allen was finally able to get the gun barrel out the window of the stand, cock the hammer and find the buck’s shoulder through the scope.
At the shot, the giant buck wheeled and ran back into the timber. Sensing that he may have missed, Allen called his dad to ask for direction. His dad told him to wait in the stand, assuring him that even if he missed the buck might come back out with all the does around.
Next, the younger Allen sent a text message to his friend, who was on his way up from the coast to join them for an afternoon hunt, to tell him that he had shot a big buck. His pal immediately called him to get all the details.
“I was still on the phone when a pair of does stepped out of the woods only 150 yards from my stand and started drinking water out of a mud puddle,” Allen said. “Right behind them was the same big buck that I had just missed.
“I told my friend to hold on and laid the phone down beside me.”
Waiting for the buck to turn broadside, Jonathon put the crosshairs on the bucks shoulder and squeezed off another round.
The 150-grain Hornady T/C ballistic-tip bullet found its mark and dropped the buck in his tracks.
Jonathon picked his phone back up and told his friend that the big buck was down. Jonathon then called his dad back to let him know about his good fortune.
Once his dad arrived and the pair shared hugs and high fives, they took a closer look at the trophy.
The elder Allen instantly recognized the 15-point buck as the same deer he had missed a week earlier.
After taking a few photographs, they loaded the trophy and headed for the local convenience store to have him scored and his photograph added to the store’s Deer Wall of Fame.
Jonathon’s monster buck grossed 170 2/8 inches of antler and netted just over 156 inches. The massive rack is a main-frame 11-point with four kicker points and an 18 ½-inch inside spread.
The 25-inch main beams and tines over a foot long only add to the buck’s impressive headgear.
No matter how you look at it, scoring on a buck of this caliber is a heck of a way to ring in the New Year.
Visit the Nikon Deer of the Year contest gallery to see more big bucks killed this season and to post your own. However, only registered users are eligible for contest prizes so be sure and sign up today!
Also, don’t forget to post your reports and check out other user reports on our deer hunting forum.
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