On the first day of deer hunting season, Stephen Tucker, a 27-year-old farmer in Tennessee, shouldered his muzzle-loader and aimed at a whitetail with an extraordinary rack, one so big that it would be a world record if his aim was true.
The antlers, a spectacular protrusion of bones that splayed into dozens of points, were the stuff of hunting lore. The buck had clearly lived long and lived well.
“I’ve never ever seen anything like that,” Tucker said.
He pulled the trigger.
“When I squeezed, all that went off was the primer cap,” he said.
The deer fled.
However, two days later on Nov. 7, Tucker got another chance when he spotted the deer at dawn. This time, he got his buck.
It was big, but how big?
“I thought maybe a state record, but not a world record,” he said.
Deer are judged by a complicated method that includes measurements of numerous aspects of the antlers, including the length of each point; the length, width and circumference of the main beams; and the width of the whole rack.
Tucker’s whitetail had an amazing 47 points, but its final score and whether it qualified for a record had to wait until this month. Antlers shrink as they dry, so official measurements are not taken for 60 days.
On Jan. 9, a team of five judges convened at the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency’s headquarters in Nashville to determine the buck’s score. They took measurements with a flexible steel tape over several hours.
The final score is expressed as a single number.
“Anything over 200 people get excited about,” said Barry Cross, the information and education coordinator at the state agency.
After half of the rack had been measured, one of the judges exclaimed: “Holy cow, I’m up over 150,” Cross said.
When the full rack was scored, the total was 312.38 inches (793.45cm), the highest-scoring buck ever shot by a hunter.
The previous record, 307.63 inches, was set in Iowa in 2003 by 15-year-old Tony Lovstuen, also with a muzzle-loader.
The biggest rack ever measured was 333.88 inches on a deer in Missouri, but that was a pickup, or found deer, not one shot by a hunter.
Tucker first spotted the deer before rifle season began, on land his family leases to farm in Gallatin, northeast of Nashville.
“When I first saw him, I said I wanted to hunt it,” he said. “I was blown away.”
Big bucks are not common in Tennessee.
“It’s a great state to hunt deer in; we have liberal limits and a long season,” Cross said, but added: “Tennessee has never been known as a big buck state.”
Midwestern states such as Illinois, Iowa and Kansas would be more likely spots for a 300-inch deer, Cross said.
A 300-incher in Tennessee?
“For deer hunters, you hear things like that and go, naaaah,” Cross said.
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