LOGAN, W.Va. — West Virginia’s four archery only hunting counties obviously harbor some huge deer and everybody knows about them. Across the country, there are people who are aware of the notoriety of some of the biggest bucks in the east haunting those steep, rugged, and unforgiving hollows. However, hunters who kill most of those bucks didn’t just stumbled across them. Somebody gets lucky every now and then, but the vast majority of the hunters who kill those true coalfield trophy bucks have dedicated months and months of preparation, scouting, and years and years of knowledge to put themselves in the right position.
Perry Bailey is one of those guys who pursues big bucks in the southern coalfields. Through the years, he’s put a few on the wall, but the buck he was after in 2026 offered several unique challenges which made it even more special. Bailey explained he and some friends had first noticed the buck three years ago when he showed up on a camera. While he wasn’t one they were interested in pursuing that year, they saw the potential for a big rack if the buck could survive the coming year.
Then in 2025, he showed up again and looked like it had the same rack, but much bigger. The buck’s consistency ramped up this year when he showed up on camera, but there had been a dramatic change in his appearance.
“We knew immediately which deer it was because he’s maintaining those same characteristics on his rack, however one thing had changed on him tremendously. He had grown a third main beam. We knew he was going to be special, but we didn’t know he was going to be this special,” Bailey said.
Bailey is a native of Logan County, but now makes his home in Jefferson County and works in law enforcement in nearby Virginia. Therefore, he isn’t in the mountains around Logan as often as he would have been when he was growing up. Still, he makes enough trips home and monitors his cameras to have a pretty good working knowledge of what is happening. But a couple of really stressful things happened with the buck he had decided to hunt.
“Around the first part of August I started getting phone calls from back home from guys who are friends of mine and chase big deer. They tell me they are getting a video of this big deer and wondered if I knew it. They sent me the video and I told him I know him very well. It was him!” said Bailey.
The video was circulating around southern West Virginia after somebody caught him on camera from the seat of a side-by-side. Now everybody was aware of the buck and the degree of difficulty just went through the roof for Bailey.
“You talk about a man’s heart sinking. I knew we had special deer on our hands and I had confidence we could kill him where we were hunting. Then all of a sudden I knew there was going to be competition because of that video,” he explained.
Bailey had some vacation time in August to go to the Arctic Circle with three friends for a caribou hunt. However, because of some bad weather and worse luck the friends were in a situation they had to cancel. Bailey used the opportunity to return to Logan County and start putting out more cameras and more boot leather to gain as much knowledge about the buck’s habits as possible. With competition now becoming more fierce, clearly the scouting was going to make a difference.
A month later there was another stressful setback. This year there was a severe outbreak of EHD in the southern coalfields. A lot of hunters found big trophy bucks they had been following and scouting, dead along the stream bank. Between September 5th and the third week of September, the pictures of the double main beamed monster Bailey was after had stopped coming in. He had gone away and Bailey was worried he had lost his big buck to mother nature.
“I’m not going to lie, there were a couple of nights I was doing some praying and asking the Lord to show me a sign,” he said. “The following night he showed up on camera after being off camera 17 or 18 days. He’s super skinny, velvet still hanging off his rack. Clearly this deer has had EHD, but he looks like he’s starting to recover. So now, it’s game on.”
Bailey’s opening day stand proved to be the wrong spot for the deer which showed up on a camera about 300 yards away. Bailey faced a tough dilemma. His vacation days were evaporating, a weather front was moving in which could change everything, and the competition hunting for the deer was growing. He decided to move his stand to the area of the camera where he had seen the buck. He installed a saddle platform about five feet up the base of a scrawny tree on the reclaimed strip job. A day later, the moment of truth arrived.
“This all happened in one, smooth, clear motion. I hear the deer, pick the bow up, turn around, he’s there. I put my release on the D-loop, he pauses then goes back into motion. I draw back and track this deer and he’s so close all of the pins on my bow fill his vitals. I touched off the release. He bounds off 30 yards, starts to slow down, goes into a thick patch of brush, there’s silence, and then I hear a thud,” he said. “That whole sequence happened in about 15 to 20 seconds max.”
The years of history, weeks of worry, countless hours hiking and scouting all came to a head in less than a half-minute.
“It was one of those moments where I thought, ‘Did that just happen?’ There was so much time, preparation, and worry that went into that and it was over in like 30 seconds,” he laughed.