Hunter Dees of Kilmichael went to the woods with his wife to try and find her a crossbow buck. Rachel Dees got into bowhunting last year and wanted to get one to hang on the wall.
On Oct. 1, they got into a ground blind on Montgomery County property belonging to his grandparents and waited for action.
“Rachel tapped me on the shoulder and told me she saw something walking,” Dees said. “I told her to get ready, and then she saw the 10-point I had been after last year, and she said that she was going to let me shoot him. The deer kept feeding towards us, and I shot him at 10 yards with Rachel’s Mathews Mission Sub-1 crossbow when he turned broadside.”
The buck only ran about 50 yards and collapsed.
The Montgomery County buck, Dees’s first with a crossbow, had 10 points with a 17-inch spread, 21-inch main beams and 5¼-inch bases.
“When I saw him run away, I thought I’d made a bad shot,” Dees said. “We waited about 35 to 45 minutes and when out to look for him, and I found about 3 to 4 inches of the arrow. I’d grazed him just behind the shoulder and the arrow was just sticking out the other side. We only walked about 30 yards from the shot when we saw him laying up there dead.”
Improving habitat
Rachel Dees had killed her first deer last year on the same land where Dees had killed his first deer.
“It shocked me that she wanted me to shoot it,” Dees said. “She’s always wanted to hang one on the wall, and she hadn’t killed a good buck yet, but she wanted me to kill him. We got pictures of the buck last year in the first week of January, but I only had a week to hunt, and I never saw him while hunting. The buck was a 10-point with about 120 inches of antler then.”
This year, they put the cameras out the first of August but didn’t get any pictures of him. The next-to-last week in September, they got a nice 7-point on camera but still hadn’t seen the 10-point buck.
“Opening week of bow season, we put up a ground blind out that Monday,” Dees said. “The buck showed up on camera the next day, which was a Tuesday.”
Dees killed the buck on his grandparent’s place, where they’d been improving the habitat the past couple of years. There was a lot of kudzu on a ridge, and the neighbors had an oak bottom with a lot of acorn forage.
“We planted a 3-way game mix in the food plot, and we caught him coming out feeding towards the oak bottom at about 5:30 p.m. I shot him at 5:50,” Dees said.
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