Oklahoma Whitetail Deer Hunting and Tough Decisions

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The small buck had been in front of me for 30 minutes, hoovering up the kernels of corn that had spun from the feeder just before daylight. I was alternating between watching it and scanning the surrounding brush, hoping a bigger deer would show up. My rifle lay tilted against the side of the blind as I used the shooting sticks as a rest for my binoculars.

Suddenly, as if it had ghosted out of the ground, a large-bodied buck appeared. Muscled up and thick necked, the buck stood facing me, surveying the grassy flat between us, before hopping into the hog-panel fence set up to protect the feeder from roaming bands of hogs. The buck had a solid frame, with five points to a side. Looking back, there should have been no hesitation on my part. In body size alone, the deer was a trophy. Instead of reaching for my rifle, I strained my eyes on the rack, measuring inches as if that really mattered to me. (It normally doesn’t.) Here it was, 30 minutes into opening day, and I wasn’t sure I wanted my hunt to end so early.

Finally, after deciding yes, I did want my hunt to end just as it was beginning, I tucked my binos into my harness and reached for my rifle, leaning a little to my right to grab it. Although the buck had been focused on eating, it must have caught the slightest hint of movement. When I looked back up, all I saw was a bouncing white tail disappear into the woods. It was a harsh reminder to always be ready, and more evidence big deer get big by being smart.

Return to the Red Dirt

I was hunting familiar territory, just a few miles from Oklahoma’s Black Kettle National Grasslands. More than a decade before I killed an ancient, swooping six-point here with my bow. And, just two years ago, I shot a classic eight-point with my muzzleloader across the highway with Todd Rogers of the legendary Rut N Strut Guide Service. It’s safe to say, I enjoy hunting deer among the Panhandle’s osage orange thickets and red dirt bluffs.

On this trip I was hunting with Sandstone Outfitters, which happens to be operated by Todd’s sons Caden and Cole. The boys primarily guide waterfowlers in western Oklahoma, but the young men grew up helping their dad guide deer hunters, and are well-versed in the ways of the whitetail. With Rut N Strut perennially booked full, Caden and Cole take out a few deer hunters before bird season starts.

Raised right, the boys are polite and respectful, if not a bit soft spoken. They get that reserved determination, and their hunting chops, from their father. They know their deer and Caden was spot on when he put me out that morning with the understated mention of “a few good deer” they’d been seeing on this particular property. He also let me know I was free to roam from the blind if I wanted to and laid out the boundaries on my mapping app.

After spooking the 10-point, I sat in shame for the next few hours. A few more small bucks showed up to the feeder over the course of the morning, but I was really fixated on a big field beyond the tree line where I could see several does running amok, as if they were being chased by a buck. Watching the show kept my mind busy while I waited for any kind of dressing down I deserved from my guide for not shooting the big buck.

Luckily, I have a lifetime of experience with the quiet kind, having a father who had much the same personality as the Rogers family. While relaying the story to Caden on the ride back to the lodge, he didn’t have much to say other than “Yeah, we know about that buck.” Maybe I was just imagining the next part of the sentence, which I heard in my head as “So why didn’t you just shoot it when you first saw it?” Actually, that’s probably unfair to Caden, who is much too nice to make anyone feel bad. In reality, I was deriding myself with imaginary scenarios, a personal form of punishment I also have a lifetime of experience with.

Stranger Things

While Caden presented a few choices for the next morning’s hunt, I opted to sit in the same blind. Both of us had high hopes the big 10-point would return. To up my odds, I tied a rag soaked in Golden Estrus to my boot and made a wide circle around the feeder. The big buck’s rutted up neck and the chasing I’d seen the day before told me the rut was about to kick off, so maybe the extra odor would drop the deer’s defenses enough for me to get a shot.

I also learned my lesson from the day before and propped my rifle on the shooting sticks in front of me, keeping it at the ready should the big deer show. There would be no repeat of my prior fumble. Or at least, I hoped there wouldn’t be.

Like clockwork, the little buck showed up before sunup, hell bent on getting more than its fair share of feed before the rest of the herd came calling. He crossed my doe-pee path, but paid it no mind. Today hunger won out over other biological urges, at least for this deer. Another small six-point I had seen the day before, however, had the need to breed on his mind. He came down the same path as the prior morning, but stopped when it caught a whiff of the scent drag I had hung from a branch upwind of the feeder.

Changing course, the buck made for the tree and then displayed all the rut behaviors you read about in magazines, scraping the ground, raking the hanging branch with its antlers and rubbing its preorbital glands. As the buck lifted its head with a lip curl, I happened to catch some movement out of the left barrel of my binoculars.

This new buck was big bodied. As I dialed the binoculars into focus, a fine crown of antlers separated from the surrounding branches. The buck stood at the edge of the tree line, watching the other two bucks, then walked stiff legged into the opening. The light was still low enough to make a positive I.D. difficult, but things were looking good for a return engagement.

I pulled my knees up, braced my elbows atop them and took a breath to steady my nerves. There was just something a little off about this buck. Then it hit me. It only had one full antler. The right side was broken. Had the big 10 point been in a rut-fueled fight in the 24 hours since I’d last seen him?

The increasing daylight gave me a better look and I realized this was a different buck. Smaller framed with four solid points on its left side, it still would be what most considered a shooter had it carried a complete set. The more I watched, the more I questioned if the main beam was really broken. Maybe the deer had a deformed antler, which upped its trophy quality in my eyes. At the feeder now, it kept its head down, not allowing me a good view.

As I mentioned earlier, I am not a guy who measures antler inches. I believe, like beauty, trophy quality lies in the eye of the beholder, and in my eye, a deer that is different in some way is much more desirable than one that wears a matched set of antlers. But was this one of those, or just a buck who had broken his antler in a fight? I didn’t want to shoot a one-horned broken buck who would likely survive the hunting season and grow even bigger next year.

There was also the idea in my head that a big 10-point was out there lurking nearby. It was still early in the morning. Should I wait it out, or take the Faustian bargain presented to me? And still the nagging thought: Was I really sure it was a non-typical antler and not a busted beam? Though the deer was just 100 yards away, I wished for a spotting scope, or an optic bigger than the 10x Steiners I wore around my neck. Finally, the buck gave me a clear view. The right antler grew from his head in the shape of a dancing flame with no clear indication of a fresh break.

I leaned into the Lupo, steadying the crosshairs behind the buck’s shoulder. With a Silencer Central suppressor screwed onto the end of the barrel I clearly heard the bullet strike, but you wouldn’t have known it from the buck’s reaction. It merely ran out of sight at a quick trot before I could get a second shot off.

After 30 agonizing minutes, I followed fresh deer tracks along a well-worn trail that ended in a dead buck piled into some downed timber. I pulled the head from the brush, revealing a deformed right side grown into a fiery crown of points. When Caden and Cole showed up a bit later, I could tell they thought I was a bit crazy for not waiting out the big 10-point. Now that the rack was in my hands, I realized the decision had been easy.

Rifle Setup

Although the Lupo is only a few years old, Benelli’s big-game gun has already garnered a reputation as one of the most accurate factory rifles available. With the HPR, the company has upped the ante even more, guaranteeing five-shot groups that measure within ¾ of an inch. On the bench, my rifle, chambered in .308 Win. and shooting Norma Bondstrike ammo, lived up to the guarantee, often putting bullets in the same hole.

The HPR is not what you’d probably call a typical deer-hunting gun, although I imagine it would be a perfect choice as a “beanfield rifle.” It’s heavy, with a target-style stock. Hunters sitting in a shooting house expecting long shots at distance bucks could do a lot worse than the HPR. Really, it’s most at home on the range, where the chassis design paired with the smooth action and heavy-contoured barrel can ring steel at great distances. At around 9 lbs. bare bones, it’s a bit heavy for hiking through the mountains, but I could see Western big-game hunters who like to extend their range using the HPR as the base for a long-range hunting build. $2,950 | benelliusa.com

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