Weatherford woman lands freakish buck on final morning of muzzleloader season
By ED GODFREY, Outdoors Editor, egodfrey@opubco.com
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Published: November 8, 2009
"Girls rule and boys drool.”
That’s what
Mandy Hayes of Weatherford wrote on the photograph of her freakish buck that is posted at Matt Smalley’s Taxidermy in Weatherford.
Mandy Hayes of Weatherford took this non-typical trophy on the final day of deer muzzleloader season in Roger Mills County. Photo provided
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"He’s just kind of strange enough that everyone wants to look at him,” Smalley said of the buck. "Anything with a 13½-inch brow tine is kind of impressive. It’s just a real neat deer.”
Hayes, 21, shot her trophy last Sunday in
Roger Mills County on the final morning of Oklahoma’s deer muzzleloader season.
"Nobody saw it before,” said Hayes, who was hunting with her fiancé,
Stephen Palesano of Hydro. "We had no idea something like that lived out there.”
The 13-point non-typical whitetail had a split main beam and drop tine. It field dressed at 170 pounds.
Hayes, a pharmacy student at
Southwestern State University in Weatherford, was hunting in a ground blind with Palesano, who had taken an 8-point buck the day before off the same place.
Hayes had been surrounded by does Sunday morning before the buck suddenly walked out from some trees.
"We thought it was a tree branch hanging off his head,” Hayes said. "It was hard for your brain to realize what you were seeing. It looked so strange.”
The buck kept walking slowly toward Hayes, rubbing his head on some branches.
"I let him get pretty close, about 75 yards, and that’s when he turned broadside and I shot him,” she said.
Hayes shot the buck in the shoulder but he just took 10 steps and stood there motionless. It took a second shot to put the buck on the ground.
"It took two shots to kill him,” she said. "It was a buck of a lifetime. I am pretty excited about it.”
Hayes has been a deer hunter since she was 12 and now holds bragging rights in the family.
"I out-did my dad and my fiancé this year,” she said. "But there is still rifle season left. They still have a chance.”
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