Tate County 16-point has amazing tips

Sowell’s trophy hasn’t been scored, but its attributes are impossible to miss

A quick look at the 16-point buck Jeffrey Sowell killed Dec. 4 in Tate County always brings the same reaction.

“They say, forget the points, look at those main-beam tips,” said Sowell, who lives in the Greenleaf community in the same county. “The tips … they almost touch.”

It is the quirkiest feature on one of the quirkiest-looking racks you will ever see. So odd were they that Sowell said people were following him home from the hunt.

“Everybody I showed it to, and everybody that saw it in my truck, they had their cars and trucks behind me going down the road,” he said. “They all wanted to get a closer look at the antlers. It is amazing looking.”

Included is one spur sprouting from the base of the left main beam that points back down the forehead of the deer.

“It’s not but about an inch long, but it gets your attention,” Sowell said.

The buck has not been scored, and attempts to reach the taxidermist that is in possession of the head went unanswered.

“I don’t know how to score it and I didn’t have any way to store it, so I called the taxidermist and he said he’d clean out his cooler so I could bring it,” Sowell said. “He said he’d score it, but I haven’t heard from him. But as long as those beams and those points are, it will score a lot.”

It will likely be scored non-typical, since half of the 16-points indentified as scorable by the taxidermist (upon delivery) are irregular. It is a main-frame 8 point. The G2 on the right side appears to have four stickers of its own.

“Strange,” Sowell said.

The hunt itself has its own peculiarity. It almost didn’t happen, at least not where the buck was.

“It was raining and I was actually going to hunt this other stand,” Sowell said. “The one I wanted to hunt was a ladder stand, but it was raining pretty hard and I didn’t really want to get all that wet, so I changed directions and went to this box stand so I could have a roof over my head.

“The box stand looks down this long power line. It isn’t planted like a food plot, but the power company does a good job bush hogging it and it has a lot of natural browse like clover and fescue.”

Sowell said he knew bucks were chasing does already in that far Northwest Mississippi county, so he went early in the afternoon prepared to stay all day.

“I got in the shooting house at 1 o’clock and I didn’t see anything for about 2½ hours,” he said. “Then two does walked out of a thicket into the power line and started walking down the line away from me. They went about 100 to 150 yards and turned and walked into a thicket.

“I kept sitting there, and about a half hour or an hour later, I see this guy walk out there. I got my range finder and ranged it at 250 yards, but in the rain, even with my Nikon Pro Staff BDC 3x9x50 scope, I could only see that it was a rack buck. I had no idea it was anything like this, but I knew it was a shooter so I immediately decided to shoot it.”

With that, Sowell firmly shouldered his 7mm mag.

“My scope is zeroed at 200, so I put the crosshairs just behind his shoulder, raised up a few inches and squeezed the trigger,” he said. “He went down right there. That 7 mag doesn’t cut them any slack. It doesn’t play around. The bullet (a 150-grain Core-Lokt) hit him between the shoulder and back bone and it was over.”

Sowell had his trophy, the best of his life.

“I killed a big 11-point last year that was 20 inches wide and I thought he was the boss daddy on the place,” he said. “Turns out, he wasn’t. This one is much bigger, so tall and massive.”

*Don’t forget to enter photos of your bucks in the Big Buck Photo Contest to be eligible for monthly giveaways.

Read other stories about big bucks killed this season by clicking here.