Park Perseveres to Bag Huge Gee's Bend Buck

He saw the biggest of the two bucks again chasing a doe across one of the clearcuts. A rushed shot failed to find the mark.

"Now at this point I became possessed," Park said. "The planning and hunting devoured almost all of my free time slots. I plotted and schemed and thought constantly. I made up different ways to hunt the property, which again was difficult because it essentially was hunting this clearcut or the green field or the very narrow SMZ (streamside management zone). But the rut was still on, and I was hoping to get lucky. I put out game cameras which I had mostly abandoned because in my mind I like the unknown. I don't like to know there's a deer there at night that I can't see during the day, and I don't like to know if there's not a big enough deer on camera in the area. But I quickly got multiple pictures of my beast day and night. I nicknamed him Larry Longhorns."

On one weekend, Park headed to his area early on an overcast morning when it was pitch-black dark. After a long walk, he got about 100 yards from his stand before he stopped in his tracks.

"I could smell the tarsal glands of a massively in-rut buck," he said. "The smell was 10 times stronger than the scent of the tarsal glands when you're cleaning a heavily rutting deer. The wind was not strong, and I can guarantee you that I was within 20-30 yards at the most of a bedded-down buck. But it was dark, and I didn't know what to do. I was standing in the middle of the road with clear-cut extending at least 70 yards to either side of me."

After several minutes of indecision, Park continued to his stand instead of waiting for daylight.

"I will never know if that was the right decision," he said. "I know I didn't see a deer at daylight or that entire morning or even the rest of the day because I hunted until dark.

"The next week, I decided to do something different, and I went in after daylight. I just walked extremely slowly. I took a step about every minute. I took an hour to get to my stand. When I was about 3 yards from my stand, I took one more step, and I saw something move. I looked to my right. He had spotted me and was running away. I got down on one knee and got my gun up. A lot of times they will stop for a second before they go into the woods. And that's exactly what happened. The second he stopped, I shot."

Park was afraid he missed the 215-yard shot because the deer ran down the trail he was on, curved and ran uphill about 40 yards before he disappeared.

"I thought, he just ran up the hill," he said. "That's not a good sign."

Instead of taking a chance of bumping the buck, Park enlisted the services of Art Powers.

"The wood line the deer had run into was off our property, and I had to get permission from the neighboring club to cross the line," Park said. "I brought in Art Powers and his tracking dogs again for the careful search. I was not even going to look without the deer-tracking dogs. I had made too many mistakes.

"We clambered through the clearcut and went right to where he had stood. I found no blood. For a second, the dogs were not acting excited, and my heart sank. I said, 'Art he went left right down here and took a hard right,' and we followed that path. As soon as we turned right, Art said, 'Chris I have blood, good blood.' And I saw it too. It was every few inches and then on the trees where he had sideswiped the trees with hair, blood, and clot. After that the fresh lung and heart blood was obvious, 30 yards later, about 60 yards total, there he lay. It was such a pleasure to put my hands on him. But I was also sad the chase was over."

When he got back to the camp with the big deer, the other club members were in disbelief.

"Nobody thought there were any deer like that on our property anymore," he said.

The big buck's gross antler score was 171 4/8. That obviously changed Park's mind about Gee's Bend.

"I was getting pretty frustrated," he said. "Gee's Bend is not cheap. But my family and I love it. We have fun. Those big deer are there; they're just not stupid. Another thing is they're not always in your prettiest fields where you see the most deer. This deer was in a clearcut with a field nearby.

"I hunted him probably 24 times, and 20 of those times I didn't see a single deer. It's not that they're in the pretty places."

Park also found out quickly that if he hadn't bagged that buck when he did, he may have never seen him again.

"The next day, they came in and planted the clearcut," he said. "They would have run him out."

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