New North Carolina Record Buck?

North Carolina's Davidson County isn't exactly a hot bed for big bucks.

The county has never produced a buck -- typical or non-typical -- big enough to make the Boone & Crockett book. But Steven Davis may have just changed that.

On Sept. 18, Davis tagged a giant whitetail that green-scored 190 1/8 inches as a non-typical and, if the score holds, will top the state's archery record by 13 inches and is 30 inches larger than the record for crossbow-killed bucks.

The buck was well-known in the area, as he had a large home range.

Five miles in each direction from my house, the buck was showing up on trail cameras all the way back to 2011, Davis said. Many hunters have photos of him, but he was mostly on the move at night. Many people have talked about seeing him on the roadway; however, I did not have any pictures of him on my property.

Davis believes the buck's core area was across the road from his property, but the buck did not use his side of the road much, and so the hunter didn't think he had a chance at killing the deer. Then some road construction began and the buck totally changed its habits.

They trashed his bedroom, Davis said. They dumped a bunch of stumps all through the area and the buck moved to my side of the road. I got 640 pictures of him in four days!

I saw him twice a day every day, but never got a shot at him, the wind was wrong.

The buck was traveling with a younger 6-point buck most of the time, and Davis learned a lot about watching the two deer interact. He even watched the younger buck eat the velvet off the larger buck's rack.

The big buck would even tilt his head around so the small buck could get at the velvet. On Sunday, he was in full velvet. On Monday and Tuesday, he had velvet hanging from his horns, and it looked like he had even more points than he did," Davis said. "By Wednesday, his antlers were clean, and when I killed him Thursday, they were bone white.

After seeing the buck every day of the week, the buck finally made a mistake and walked within 40 yards of Davis and his Horton Crossbow on Thursday morning.

The shot was good and the buck ran over the crest of a small hill in the soybean field, down the other side and fell dead into a creek. By the time he finally shot the deer, the excitement of laying eyes on such a big buck had worn off, but once he walked up to the dead deer, he was in shock.

By the time I killed him, he was just another buck to me, but after I got my hands on him; that changed. Boy, he was a big deer, he said.

Yeah, no kidding.

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