A lot of hunters would have put the buck in the back of a truck and ridden it all over creation showing it off; Woods went pretty much straight to the processor with this one. But he had more fun with it when he got there.

“The processor sees a lot of deer,” he said, “and the first thing he said was, ‘You didn’t kill that buck locally.’ He thought it had come from Illinois. I told him to just feel it. It was still warm.”

His brother Lamar, who’d had more luck with bigger deer over the years, was especially happy about Steve finally getting one. Steve said that he “sort of aggravated” Lamar by telling him that he’d outdone him now. His brother took it in stride, never showing the slightest hint of jealousy.

“I think he was more tickled than I was,” Woods observed. “He was calling everybody we know and showing them pictures. He’d been hunting about a mile away in a pasture when I got the buck. He got onto me for not calling him to help me come load it; I told him I didn’t want to mess up his hunt.”

This hunter counts points the old-fashioned way: If you can hang a ring on it, it’s a point. The man who later scored it came up with 13 scorable points measuring 1 inch or better.

A postscript to our main narrative: Woods’ shot didn’t hit the buck exactly as he’d planned. He’d aimed at the shoulder, but hit the deer more back toward the stomach area. “I guess he must have taken another step right before I pulled the trigger,” the hunter surmised. “That may be why he didn’t jump when I shot. But it put a hole the size of a baseball in his side.”

The Woods brothers’ take on managing their hunting land is also a little different from that of a lot of hunters. “We don’t mess with food plots,” Steve Woods offered. “The land we hunt used to be farmed, but it hasn’t been planted in years.”

Spring growing conditions last year might have had something to do with the big buck ending up in the cutover where a lot of browse was available. “We had a big freeze the previous spring and it killed all the acorns,” Woods said. “There wasn’t a lot for the deer to eat.”

Woods almost got another nice buck in the same place. “I went back the next weekend and hunted it again,” he said. “I would have killed another one, but my uncle had let a young boy come across the pasture to hunt. He shot a big 9-pointer about 100 yards before it got to me.”

The 14-pointer was the very first deer Steve Woods saw last hunting season. It was such a sight to behold coming down the trail that Woods lost track of what he was doing at the moment. “I was eating a piece of beef jerky when I saw him,” he recounted. “To this day, I don’t know if I swallowed that jerky or spit it out or what. I don’t know what happened to that jerky.”

JACKSON COUNTY:
LAND OF QUALITY
Jackson County has given up lots of whitetails in the 120- to 150-inch range over the years, but it has never produced a buck that qualified for the B&C all-time record book.