WANA, W.Va. — Chris Clovis is the guy everybody loves to see coming up to their front door. Clovis works for the U.S. Postal Service and enjoys his job. But even he will tell you the increased shopping online had made his work much more complicated and much more difficult. By now, he’s pretty tired of seeing boxes with the markings of Amazon.com on the side.
“It’s all Amazon packages,” he laughed. “I guess it’s job security.”
While it certainly keeps a paycheck rolling in, Clovis said the heavy workload cut into his time to hunt. He routinely hunts for big bucks which he follows throughout the year on his father’s farm in western Monongalia County. He was particularly enthused this year about the big buck he called “Mile High.”
“I had history of him for three years, but I couldn’t close the gap on him in bow season,” Clovis explained. “I had tons of pictures of him on game camera, his home area shrunk. I but couldn’t get a shot.”
“Mile High”, with his unusually stacked set of antlers, had become Clovis’ most sought after buck for the 2017 season although he admitted it probably would have been a bigger deer in the next few years.
“I name all my deer. I had Kong, the Drop Tine Buck, and Hercules. Sometimes I see them and sometimes I kill them and put them in the man-cave. I just noticed he was a really good deer who had potential and had a mile-high rack as a 2 and a half. As he progressed and got older as a three and a half he got a lot heavier,” Clovis. “But, as you know as five and a half and six and a half is when they reach full potential. He still had growing to do.”
Clovis had a couple of encounters with the buck during archery season and saw him a couple of times during the first week of gun season. He had also spotted the same buck during the 2016 muzzleloader season. All of those encounters ended with no shot. Clovis’ nephew found a shed of the buck after the 2016 season and trail cam pictures produced evidence the big buck had survived another season. By the second week of the 2017 gun season, it appeared Mile High might live to see his fifth season. Ready to give up on this year’s quest, a chance encounter in the second week of gun season produced a different result for Clovis.
“I was in the tree stand and really wasn’t in the mood to hunt. I was just in a bad mood knowing I had to go back to Amazon packages the next day. I didn’t want to be there and figured I’d just come home and get rested up for work the next day,” Clovis explained.
Clovis left his stand and stepped onto his four wheeler, but before firing it up to leave he heard something down the hill below him.
“I looked and it was a spike chasing a doe, and there he was trailing behind them,” said Clovis. “I went from the lowest lows to the highest highs. I had to put shells back into my gun and it was meant to be I suppose. A minute earlier or a minute later and it would have never happened.”