Last month Jordan Felumlee, 25, had seen a number of great bucks where he hunts. But there was one deer in particular that he focused on.
“The rut was rocking, and I saw a giant buck I wanted two evenings in a row chasing does on a little bench of timberland above where I was hunting in my saddle,” Felumlee tells Outdoor Life. “I hunted my spot that next morning on Nov. 23, but only saw some does. That’s when I decided to move up to the bench where I’d seen the big buck for my afternoon hunt.”
Felumlee had such a good feeling about the afternoon sit from the new location that he told his dad he was going to kill the deer that evening.
“I got back up to my new stand spot about 3 p.m.,” says Felumlee, who’s from Newark, Ohio. “I was up about 20 feet, and it was fairly cold, but [there was] no snow and only a slight breeze.”
That afternoon a large 9-point and a 10-point buck appeared at 40 yards, and he also saw a spike and a doe. They were walking along well-worn trails on the top of the ridge, and followed by even more deer.
“I looked behind me and eight or nine does were headed up to me from an alfalfa field,” he says. “They came into the woods and worked on by me at about 30 yards.”
Thirty minutes later, at about 5 p.m., Felumlee spotted the giant buck following the same trail as the does.
“There were lots of deer all around me, so I had to turn slowly around with my bow to get ready to shoot him,” Felumlee says. “I didn’t want to get busted by a doe, and there were a lot of eyeballs to worry about.”
The big buck was moving quickly toward a scrape, and as he passed into an open shooting lane, Felumlee grunted softly. The buck stopped broadside at 22 yards, and Felumlee released.
The buck ran downhill only 90 yards before falling over from a double-lung shot. After gutting the buck, he hauled it out with the landowner’s tractor, and plans to get a shoulder mount made.
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A week later he took the buck’s rack to Buckmasters scorer Toby Hughes, who officially measured its rack at 189 5/8s inches using the organization’s scoring system.
“There is nothing more rewarding than beating a mature deer at his own game of cat and mouse,” says Felumlee. “It’s truly a lifetime opportunity to harvest a buck of this caliber.”
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