'I knew he was a giant': Ohio hunter might have bagged a record deer
Cameras sprout on tree bark as regularly as bracket fungi. Legions of bowhunters perched atop viewing stands surveil surroundings. It’s become rare for a deer or any unusual thing on the landscape to move unwitnessed.
Yet monsters come to human awareness on an unmarked schedule.
Christopher “CJ” Alexander said he never foresaw the buck of a hundred hunter lifetimes on Nov. 9 until the last hour of its life.
“I was in the stand at 5:00 that morning,” Alexander said. “I first saw the buck maybe 120 feet away probably about 4:30 in the afternoon.”
Too distant to take a responsible shot with his crossbow, Alexander waited a bit more.
“It was the rut, and it looked like the buck wanted a nearby doe,” he said. “I knew he’d have to pass close by me to get to it.”
Driven by urges beyond caution that were comprehended by the hunter but only felt by the hunted, the buck strode within about 7 yards. There the intersecting intentions of two animals ended, one opportunely.
“I knew he was a giant,” Alexander, 28, said. “I didn’t know he might be a record.”
A hunting pal alerted him about the possibility.
Should anyone be astonished that an experienced hunter on his sister’s acreage could be surprised by a deer of singular attributes? Maybe so, because most whitetails touching trophy dimensions end up first being spotted during summer, when antlers exploding under velvet stoke visions of autumn encounters.
Longtime deer stalker and scorer Mike Rex, a member of the Ohio Wildlife Council who holds office with the Buckeye Big Bucks Club, has taken a share of record-book whitetails.
Rex said it’s hard to imagine Alexander’s buck could’ve gone unnoticed browsing in the open bean fields of Clinton County. Chances are Alexander killed a marked deer, though he wasn’t the one who’d marked it.
Hunting often reveals itself as another game of chance, no different from most of life.
Buckmasters scorer Ed Waite, a Dayton resident, described the rack as the largest he’s measured this year, fitting both the eye test and the feel test.
“It’s quite an amazing animal,” he said. “The rack and skull cap weigh 9.8 pounds, which is pretty heavy.”
Rex, who represents a traditional scoring system more widely accepted than Buckmasters’, drove from his Athens home to Alexander’s apartment in Wilmington to measure what had impressed him in a photograph.
“It was the biggest set of antlers I’ve ever held in my hand,” he said.
Whether the Alexander buck merits legacy or legend won’t be determined until January after a mandatory 60-day drying period that almost always is accompanied by shrinkage.
The scoring could become knotty if not controversial. Antlers measured under Boone and Crockett standards, which are the standards employed by the Buckeye Big Buck Club, classify antlers as either typical or non-typical.
Typical racks are required to be symmetrical, meaning the tines growing out of the right and left beams essentially mirror each other.
Rex green-scored the Alexander rack at a typical 206 7/8 inches, which would push it 5 inches past the current Ohio record shared by two deer. The mirroring, though, can be questioned.
The official scoring will be done by a panel which might decide, Rex acknowledged, the rack is insufficiently symmetrical to top the Ohio record book in the typical category.
Should the antlers be deemed non-typical, at 230-plus inches it would rank among the top 40 in the Ohio record book. And thus a trophy although perhaps not the stuff from which dreams are made.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: 'I knew he was a giant': Ohio hunter might have bagged a record deer
