Brad Avery (left) and Daniel Dillon show off the 8-point whitetail that took them almost four months to claim! Photo courtesy of Daniel Dillon.

Apart from being cousins, Daniel Dillon and Brad Avery, of the Birmingham area, have long been best friends. The young men work, hunt and fish together. You could almost say that they’re inseparable.

A few years ago, their boss, Vaughn Rives of Rives Construction, helped them get into his hunting club, a great tract in the Black Belt of Marengo County that’s managed for big bucks -- and that resulted in the pair coming to share a very special 8-point buck!

But before we get on to that story, let’s take a look at the hunt club’s property and its whitetail prospects. All three of the hunters had already taken bucks that sported racks with 150 inches of antlers from the site. In fact, that’s sort of the standard for the club.

Daniel Dillon specializes in finding places on the tract that no one else goes into and slipping into them to hunt -- and it was in just such a place that the story began: a funnel-type spot, discovered through extensive scouting. One of those out-of-the way sites that just jump out at you as you study it.

“If you look at the aerial photography of our property long enough, you see it,” he remarked. “It’s just a perfect funnel. What’s even better is that it hadn’t been hunted in quite a while.”

He eased into the spot on the first weekend of bow season last year; unfortunately, he also jumped a buck going in. “I had seen enough and I was sold,” Dillon said. “I picked a spot on the buck trail for my climber. It wasn’t a great tree, but it was where I had to be.”

The next weekend he was back, and the wind was perfect for his set-up. But his expectations weren’t very high early on that fateful October morning. It was sticky and hot, and he just didn’t think the deer would be moving much.

“In my head I was just passing time,” he recalled. “Then I heard a twig snap.”

Dillon saw a buck at 20 yards -- a striking image, as the deer had only recently shed its velvet and blood still stained his horns. The hunter watched as the whitetail hit a “licking branch” and then slid up through some thick stuff right down the trail on which the stand was set up. The archer thought that the deer would score about 140.

“The buck just kept coming,” Dillon said. “He was only about 10 yards out when I shot, but I was only about 10 feet up the tree. Limbs wouldn’t let me climb any higher.”

The shot went horribly wrong: The arrow hit the buck high in the back, more or less in the tenderloin. “The deer whirled and ran,” stated Dillon, “and I saw most of my arrow sticking out of his back. He got out of there like he’d stole something.

“My heart sank. I put my head between my hands, because I knew I’d blown it. I was just sick.”

Quietly retiring from the area, Dillon went back to the clubhouse, where he sat in the dark in a recliner, waiting for the rest of the hunters to come in from their morning afield. “We waited eight hours,” he said, “then got a friend, Dan Negus, and his champion tracking dog and went back.”

The dog led them to the broken back half of Dillon’s arrow. After another 200 to 300 yards, the trail went cold; no blood was ever found blood. “We never really pushed into what I though was the deer’s core area,” Dillon noted. “We just eased out of there.”

The bowhunter was -- to say the least -- blue. For quite a while.