MINERAL WELLS, W.Va. — During a year which saw the mid-Ohio valley’s deer herd hard hit by EHD, one hunter managed to find an oasis and bag a giant that lived there.
Chris Ashley of Mineral Wells decided last fall’s outbreak of hemorrhagic disease was too much to expect success hunting around his home in Wood County. However, he discovered his hunting property in Wirt County had not been impacted by the virus.
“Wood County where I have a lot of property, it hit and I refused to hunt. I had shooters in Mineral Wells where I hunt, but I wouldn’t hunt it. Our farm in Wirt County didn’t get hit at all and some of the surrounding farms also didn’t get hit,” explained Ashley in a conversation for West Virginia Outdoors.
While Ashley knew there were bucks in the area, nothing had specifically jumped out at him until a single camera picked up a buck whose rack stirred him. He had never gotten pictures of the massive buck and as it turned out he would only have two weeks worth of history with him by the time he finally laid hands on those massive antlers.
“Obviously I didn’t want to put a lot of pressure on him because I was afraid I would bump him off the property. I had to be smart about how I hunted him,” he said.
Since there were drought conditions, Ashley focused on water and almost immediately got a picture at a watering spot. Trouble was, that strategy was washed out, literally the next day with a torrential rain. He thought about focusing on food sources, but that wouldn’t work since there was a bumper crop of acorns and they were everywhere. Ashley decided cover was the next way he could isolate the deer’s movement and try to form a pattern.
“I started checking my cameras and I was only getting him on certain ones, so I hunted the fringes and tried to be smart about it. I let the cameras lead my positioning,” he explained.
During sporadic sits, he actually had an encounter with the buck chasing a doe. A camera later confirmed it was the buck he was after.
“Really I never did any all-day sits until I found what I thought was his core,” said Ashley.
He found an area with a handful of scrapes within a very small and confined spot. Given the size of the scrapes he surmised he had found the big buck’s home. He settled in for the day in a stand placed to see several of the scrapes. Soon, he heard grunting and activity which he was almost certain was his buck. It was, but he was chasing a doe at the most distant scrape and offered no shot. It was the start of a long and nerve wracking day.
“A little bit later some does came by, but nothing was with them. A little after that here comes another doe down a logging road and there he is right behind her and they go right under my stand. I’m grunting, snort wheezing and I couldn’t get them to stop. They went passed me down into the woods about 50 yards. I was sure she was going to spook because she had to have heard me, I was literally yelling at them. But she goes down about 60 yards and beds down for the next two hours,” said Ashley.
That was about 8:30 a.m. Ashley could see the doe bedded down and his buck bedded down near her. He wasn’t budging. There were some inferior bucks also around the area trying to get in on the action.
“I barely got to sit the whole day. I didn’t get to eat. Him and her, and two other bucks would get up and move just a little bit, but they were locked down,” he laughed.
Finally, late in the afternoon, one of the smaller bucks managed to break up the cycle. He chased the doe back under Ashley’s stand. Grunting and wheezing did nothing to slow them down. They made a full circle and eventually wound up back where they had started. Soon afterward, Ashley explained the doe managed to draw the big buck he was after up into a shooting lane. Then the unthinkable happened.
“I took the first shot that got deflected and they kind of looked at each other as if to say, ‘What?’ It was super windy. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I sat for the entire day and this is what happened,” said Ashley.
But, fate allowed another arrow to be nocked. The big buck wandered through the last possible opening and presented one more shot.
“As soon as he walks through that last window, I let it go and it deflects, but still center punches him and he takes off,” he said.
It’s now 4:30 p.m. He spent the entire day watching and waiting for the shot, which wasn’t as clean as he hoped. Although he felt like he had a good shot, there was a load of self doubt. At first he thought it was a double lung shot, despite the deflection which would have been ideal. Chris gave things some time. He ate a sandwich he’d been craving all day, then climbed down and started to look for the blood trail. The color of the blood was not what he had hoped for. It looked more like a liver shot than a double-lung.
“I went about 60 yards and topped a hill and I thought this buck is too big, I’m not going to push him,” he explained.
He pulled out and called Shon Butler at Longspur Tracking and Outfitting to ask for somebody to come check the area with a drone.
“They came out, set the drone up and as soon as they put the drone in the air and faced the property, I looked on the screen and said, ‘What’s that?’ said Ashley.
A closer looked with the drone lights on showed his buck a short distance away bedded down. The buck tried to get up, but couldn’t and Chris was content he wouldn’t move again, so it was a matter of giving the buck enough time to die.
“They said, ‘Are you sure that’s him?’ I told them it’s a 156 inch deer, that’s him.” laughed Ashley.
They made the retrieval the next day and Chris held the buck of a lifetime in his hands, only two weeks after seeing him on camera for the very first time. The buck turned out to be the year’s Buck of the Year winner on the West Virginia Big Bucks Facebook page.