PREMONITION
Though Dillon’s wife Cori isn’t a hunter, she’s very supportive of her husband’s outdoor pursuits. She was extremely encouraging after he’d shot and lost the buck.

“She told me that I would look this deer in the eye again,” Dillon remembered. “I thanked her for the consolation, but wasn’t as confident as she was.” He said that he knew in his heart that the buck was still alive, and that he longed for the saga to come to a successful conclusion.

Meanwhile, the business of deer season went on. A couple of areas at the club had the potential to hold the buck, and when the wind was right, Dillon would hunt them in hopes of seeing the 8-pointer. “I guess I hunted those areas maybe four or five times,” he said.

Dillon’s father and his cousin Brad Avery’s mother were brother and sister. When the senior Dillon passed away in 1988, Avery’s father always included Daniel on weekend trips to Twin Rivers Hunting Club in Sumter County.

Said Dillon, “I’m the youngest of four boys, and B.A.” -- which is what Daniel affectionately calls his cousin -- “is like the little brother that I never had. We were always together on trips growing up. He is my first cousin, my best friend, my business partner, and last but not least my favorite person to break day with.”

The two kinsmen, who’ve killed some great deer at the club in Sumter County, have also chased turkeys, ducks and deer together for over 20 years. Early on in their combined hunting careers, the duo learned that getting way off the beaten track into low-pressure areas would quite often lead to success.

Dillon and Avery discussed the possibility that the latter and not the former might get the buck. Dillon had a kind of feeling that it might well play out that way -- but of course he had no way of knowing for sure. Still, they talked about the buck a great deal as the season wore on, and Daniel found himself wishing that B.A. would kill that buck that got away. He even frequently told his cousin so.

THE END COMES
January arrived, and on the last weekend of the season, a large crowd of members and guests descended on the club for the occasion.

“There were two different fields where we thought the buck could be killed,” Dillon said. But he made the decision that he was going to a location pretty far away from where his bow buck was thought to be living.

“I was the last one to leave the camp,” he said. “As I pulled down the road, I met B.A. He asked where I was going and I told him I was going to 14. I told him he ought to go to 16, that the wind was right. 16 is one of the fields where we thought we might see the bow buck.”

Avery initially told his cousin that he’d be going somewhere else. But then, as Dillon was on the side of the road putting on his Scent Blocker clothing for the afternoon hunt, B.A. drove by and told him that he would in fact be heading for 16.

“I told him to go kill a buck with an arrow sticking out of his back,” Dillon said.

Dillon didn’t hear his cousin shoot that afternoon, and, indeed, didn’t realize that anything at all had happened until he got back to camp -- and Avery told him that he’d shot a nice buck running a doe.

“I just had a hunch that buck had an arrow in his back,” Daniel said.

Talk of forming a large search party to look for the deer gave way in the end to agreement that Avery and Dillon would do the chore alone. “We drove a Mule close to where B.A. shot the deer,” Dillon said. “On the way in, we stopped at a creek crossing and prayed for a clean kill. There was a lot of sentiment.”