Tennessee Hunter Takes 29-Point Buck on Public Land

When Josh Robbins and his son Brady were drawn for a quota muzzleloader hunt on an undisclosed piece of public land in Tennessee, they first talked over their game plan. “I told Brady that we had to outsmart both the deer and the other hunters,” Robbins said.

The weekend before the hunt, the pair headed to the tract for an all-day scouting mission. “We went in deep. Way deeper than I figured most of the other hunters wanted to go,” Robbins said. “We had seen several decent looking areas when I remembered another spot I had hunted years ago. We hiked over and the first thing we saw was a giant fresh rub on a cedar and several active scrapes. I told Brady that this looked like the spot.”

An all day scouting trip turned up an area deep in the WMA that had lots of good sign. All images by Josh Robbins

The following weekend, the pair went in early. There were a lot of hunters, with multiple trucks sitting in most parking spots. Josh and Brady grabbed their stands, packs, and muzzleloaders and started the mile-long hike back to their spot, but the morning was slow. Brady saw just two deer, and Josh had seen nothing. “As it got later in the morning, I texted Brady that other hunters should be heading out soon and might run some deer to us,” Josh said.

Robbins knew they would have to go deep to avoid other hunters.

At 10:13 that morning, Josh caught a flash of movement 40 yards to his right. A glimpse of one side of the rack was all he needed to know that he was looking at a definite shooter buck. His rifle was pointed to his left and he had to get turned toward the buck to get a shot. By this time, the deer was only 20 yards and moving steadily.

Josh tried grunting to stop the buck, but it didn’t work. The deer was still moving, but was so close that Josh felt confident in the shot opportunity. He aimed and fired his muzzleloader, and as the smoke cleared, he saw the buck bolt out of sight. “He was running fast, maybe as fast as I’ve ever seen a deer move. I started to question whether I’d even hit him,” he said. But at 50 yards the buck crashed into a tree and then disappeared from sight.

At the shot, the buck took off at breakneck speed before crashing.

Brady was hunting close by, and he texted his dad when he heard the shot. “All I could text back was ‘Monster’,” Josh said. Brady immediately called his dad and asked him to wait till he could get down and get over, but Josh laughed and told him “no way, he was going to look.”

The two met in the woods near where they thought they had last heard the deer. Josh thought he had gone one direction, Brady thought he heard a deer crash in another. In the excitement, they both started looking in different spots. “I finally calmed down and told Brady, ‘let's stop and do this right, just like we’ve done a hundred times before. Let’s go to the spot of the shot and start looking for blood.’ As we started back to the spot the buck where the buck had been standing, we looked up to see a white belly shining just a few yards away.” It was the buck, down for good.

The massive buck had gone only a few yards after the shot.

“We laughed and danced and high-fived each other right there in the woods. Taking this buck was special, but it was even better because one of my sons was there with me,” Josh said.

Once they got to the buck, they couldn’t believe what they saw. The side Josh had seen from the stand was actually the smaller of the two, but still had 12 points. The other side featured a whopping 17 scorable points. It was the biggest buck either of them had ever seen while hunting.

Now it was time for the work of getting the massive deer out. Not wanting to leave it there, Brady stayed with the buck while Josh hiked out with his stand and as much of their gear as he could carry to the truck to retrieve a deer cart. When he got to the truck, he asked some other hunters parked nearby if the TWRA biologists were still around. They told him they were, but they were getting ready to pack it up for the day. Josh wanted them to see the buck and give their opinion on how it might score.

The buck has a total of 29 scoreabe points and no true main beam on the right side.

By the time he got back with the cart and got the buck out to the truck, the biologists had left, but several hunters were still around. They immediately gathered to admire the buck. “I asked everyone’s opinion on just how many scorable points the buck had, just to make sure we weren’t overestimating on our count, they all came up with the same answer,” Josh said.

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As the two were driving home, Brady’s phone rang. He is an assistant coach for the local high school basketball team and it was one of his players telling him he had already seen pictures of Josh’s buck circulating on the internet. “I couldn’t believe that the photos from the handful of hunters that were there when we came out were already circulating. That’s when I decided I better go ahead and post photos myself before someone else claimed it,” Josh laughed.

He is currently waiting on an official Buckmaster’s scorer to take a look at the buck. “Since there isn’t a true main beam or any good place to get circumference measurements on that right side mass of points, I’m waiting on the official score before even mentioning it, but my processor and a taxidermist both looked at it and estimated right at 200.”

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