Chasing Virginia Bruisers - The Blue Collar Way

I've been hunting since I was seven years old. I've also been hunting the same property in King William county in Eastern Virginia since I was big enough to hold a .410...a 300-odd acre farm nestled against the Pamunkey River, owned by a small family that shares a love of hunting and togetherness. The farm is used to grow soybeans and corn and also has large, rolling green pastures for raising beef cattle. On the outskirts of the property, there are hardwoods, pines, deep valleys, trails, small overgrown grass plots and a beaver pond. A true hunter's paradise. The group of us that hunts there is a close-knit crowd of close friends that just enjoy getting together on the weekends and hunting. Hard-working blue collar folks that still see hunting as a hobby and a pastime, rather than a competitive sport.

2010 Buck

2013 Buck

Only a handful large deer have been killed on the farm in the 20 years that I've been around. One of those were killed nearly 15 years ago, another was killed 5 years ago (pictured left), and I was lucky enough to get one 2 years ago (pictured right). Since then, a lot of the bucks have been small or decent-sized, but nothing worth entering into the record books.

The food plots on the farm are overgrown and haven't been planted in years. Instead, the native grasses have taken over and look more like miniature fields than lush food sources. Although we neglect the food plots, it just goes to show that deer will thrive on their own with nature's resources, and as long as the bucks are smart throughout the open seasons and are able to grow into the following year, the potential for a bruiser rack is always there.

Now, we don't know where these bucks come from. Some years they just show up on our cams and we have no way of figuring out if these large 3-year-old 8-pointers were 2-year-old 4-pointers the year before. A lot of our deer don't have distinct markings, torn ears, or other physical anomalies. We start getting cam pics of them around August, and we simply map their locations via these photos up until we get the chance to lay sights on them. We simply take our hunting seasons year-by-year.

2014 photo of Ol' Brutus

The deer I harvested this year was a ghost last year. We only got a few sparse photos of him haunting a large hill in thick hardwoods on the western side of the farm. Another member of our group hunted him last year and says he saw him from a treestand one time during archery season, but after that day, he was never seen again. Until this year.

Pictured right is the first photo I got of Ol' Brutus. He was easy to pattern, as it seemed that he traveled this particular road about every three days. He didn't seem to care what time of day it was, as I was getting both daytime and night time pictures of him as seen in the photos to the right. At this point in time, the rut hadn't quite started yet, so the only thing I can imagine was on his mind was food.

When I started getting regular photos of him I decided to clear a tree and hang a climber treestand on that logging road. I did this the Saturday before bow season was to open in Virginia...literally 7 days before it would be legal to draw a bow on this bruiser. Even after I hung the stand, and well into opening week of bow season, I was still getting travelling photos of the buck in the same area. For whatever reason, this deer was being rather careless in his movements, so I had a feeling his days were numbered.

The morning it all came true...

On the morning of Saturday, October 24th, I was just a bit late waking up and getting to the stand. I arrived at the farm around 6 am, with sunrise that morning being 7:24am. That gave me about an hour to get to my stand, climb the tree, and get settled before the woods woke up. I walked around a corner and stepped onto the road, and there in the middle, staring at me, was a small doe. She stayed there, watched me as I climbed halfway up the tree, and then she just wandered off silently into the darkness. I continued my climb, got settled in the tree, and waited.

Just after 7 am, a little 4-pointer came trotting down the path, grunting, and went on down the trail into the depth of the hardwoods.

About 20 minutes later, I heard a deer come running down the hill, so I grabbed my bow off the hanger. Here comes a doe right behind me, and hot on her tail was a buck, grunting loudly. He got right into the 30 yard range and gave me an opportunity, so I took it.

I missed. My arrow hit a small limb and was deflected right underneath his belly and into the ground. The little buck, unbothered, walked off without a care in the world. I nocked another arrow, and waited. The morning was still young.

About a half-hour later, I caught movement to my left. A deer was coming down the logging road right towards me. I quickly grabbed my bow, noticed that this deer had a nice rack, and drew on him. At quick glance, it looked to be a shooter buck, one definitely worthy of the three buck tags in my pocket. As soon as he stepped from behind a tree at 20 yards quartering to me, he looked up at me. I felt he knew at that instance that he had screwed up.

I let the arrow fly, perfect shot into his vitals. He turned to his left, ran about 50 yards, and stopped. He staggered a bit, looked left and right, then continued down into a stance of saplings with a loud crash.

When I walked up to him, I noticed that it was him. It was Ol' Brutus in the flesh. This buck that haunted my mind for months was finally on the ground at my feet. I finally got my dream buck, the biggest buck killed on the property, the biggest buck I've ever laid my hands on, using only a compound bow, a climbing tree stand, and trail cameras. No baiting, no feeding, no food plots; only the agricultural crops and hardwoods that the farm grows. I'm just an average joe that works hard on the weekdays and spends his weekends in the woods with nature. And it finally paid off with a potential record-book Pope and Young buck, from Virginia, no less!