Seventeen-Minute Buck

With archery deer season winding down, many bowhunters and crossbow hunters are still in the woods, hoping to add some venison to their winter larder. With the rut near or at its prime, mature bucks are roaming around during daylight hours and in places that they do not frequent during the rest of the year.

With us turkey hunters out of the woods and nearly no one hunting small game, at least in our wildlife management unit, archery hunters should not have other hunters interfering with their hunts, which is an obvious strategy of the PGC's hunting policies. Bowhunters and crossbow hunters should now have their best opportunities to tag mature whitetails, like one local sportsman who regularly harvests a November buck.

This isn't to say that bucks cannot be taken prior to the rut. Take the buck my brother-in-law, Bruce Houck, harvested on the opening day of the archery season. Bruce became interested in bowhunting more than 25 years ago. He became so involved that he and his friend, Jim Yost, opened a bow shop and operated it for 25 years before retiring after the 2020 archery deer season. This duo traveled throughout the country in an effort to obtain high-quality products for the shop. In addition, they sometimes participated in contests, once winning a state championship in the traditional archery division.

Bruce has always put forth the effort to perform well at any activity in which he participates. In high school he spent countless hours pounding and shooting a basketball; and during his senior season he became an all-state player who captained the 1967 Williamsburg High School team to a 25-1 season. He put forth the same kind of effort to develop his bowhunting skills and has killed a number of fine bucks, including one that scored nearly 140, a true wallhanger.

Anyhow, this season he decided which stand he wanted to hunt from on the archery opener and arrived at daybreak. He climbed the ladder to his stand, roped his equipment up, and harnessed himself so that he couldn't tumble from the stand. He had no more than completed this than a doe and two fawns appeared 30 yards away. A rack buck stood in some brush behind them. For no reason that Bruce could discern, one of the fawns rambled into the brush, causing the buck to jump out into an opening 25 yards from Bruce's stand. Bruce had his bow ready and loosed an arrow, killing the fine buck. This occurred only 17 minutes after Bruce had climbed into the stand.