Also, something quite out of the ordinary occurred: The hunting party saw four bears traveling together on Skyline during the hunt. That made Keith Beasley question the wisdom of hunting exclusively with a single-shot muzzleloader -- but it didn’t dissuade him from doing it!

After the Skyline hunt, Beasley went back and scouted his private land some more. What he found would help him end up taking the bruiser later in the season.

“There was a hurt doe on a hill in there,” he said. “She was limping pretty bad, and I knew she wouldn’t go far if no one bothered her.”

Beasley pulled out of the area and filed that bit of information away for use during the rut. With a doe that was sure to be there, and the rut coming, he figured that a buck would be sniffing around the hurt doe’s neighborhood.

Christmas came and went; it was time for Beasley to go back to check on the doe. “I slipped in one morning to hunt it, but the wind wasn’t right,” he explained.

He ended up hunting a different spot on the farm, not wanting to taint the hill that held the doe. He went back the next afternoon, which was Jan. 16. The wind still wasn’t right, and he again moved to an alternate area.

One odd thing happened during this day in the woods that actually played a crucial part in Beasley’s later encounter with the big buck: A coyote appeared about 150 yards away and Beasley decided to try a shot at the wild canine -- and the muzzleloader failed to go off. “I’d hunted with it in the rain and hadn’t been real particular about cleaning it,” he admitted. “The bolt wouldn’t work.”

Beasley trudged back to his truck after the botched shot, oiled the mechanism well and worked out the kinks. “I must have pulled the trigger 50 or 100 times after I got it oiled up,” he said.

Problem solved, the hunter headed back to his stand. By now, the wind had changed, and he hustled to the powerline near the hill with the limping doe.

Beasley shies away from shooting pellets, preferring 100 grains of Pyrodex powder. He also likes relatively light bullets, such as the Knight Red Hot in 220 grains or the Hornady 180. He sights in to hit an inch high at 27 steps, putting him dead-on out to 125 yards. But he can hold an inch above a deer’s back with his pet load and hit a deer out to about 230 yards.

On this day he was out of his preferred 220-grain bullets, so he loaded a 180 in his gun for the afternoon hunt. He set up below an old pond looking back up the hill that his doe used, and along the powerline. “I had a good view,” he said. “If a deer came out, I’d have a good clear shot.”

Beasley blew a grunt call and then heard a deer walking down the hill in the woods. The sound got to the same level the hunter was on, but he never could see the deer in the thick cover. He feels sure it was the big buck that would appear shortly.

“After three or four minutes, I heard it walk back up the hill,” Beasley recounted.

The hunter next let out a long, low grunt and watched as a doe went through the clearing of the power line. Then a smaller deer went across.

“I knew a buck was following them,” he said. “I held the gun up for five minutes waiting on it.”

But his arms got tired and he had to lower the gun. Still, he didn’t have long to wait. The buck soon appeared in the powerline.

“He was a black deer,” Beasley pointed out. “And I could see his horns without my scope even though he was a long way off.”

From the time he first saw the deer until he executed the shot was only three or four seconds. Just after he squeezed the trigger, he saw half the deer’s rack, along with its white belly, sticking up above the brush.

It was only about 4:00 in the afternoon when he shot the buck. He waited about 30 minutes before approaching it to make sure it was down for good. “I thought I’d killed a good 10-pointer,” Beasley recalled.

When he got to the buck and began to count points, he realized it was even bigger than he’d hoped. He called his brother Doug in Michigan and told him about the deer. The brothers have always had a friendly rivalry about deer hunting and a big 8-pointer that scored 137 B&C and was taken near that very spot had given Doug bragging rights over his younger brother for years.