Mandy Singleton and her husband Coty walked a long way to reach their ladder stand on Oct. 24. They were hunting family-owned property near a freshly picked corn field in the Yellow River bottoms of Indiana’s Marshall County.
“It was a long hike in, and we got to a double buddy blind 16 feet in the air about 4:45 p.m.,” Mandy tells Outdoor Life. “The first deer we saw was a doe about 30 minutes later, and in short while another pair of does came into view nearby.”
At 5:45, a huge buck burst into the open field to chase the first doe that stood alone in the corn field. The buck then shifted its attention and started moving toward the Singletons as Mandy raised her Raven crossbow.
“I think the buck saw the does [closer to] us and started for them,” says Mandy, an inventory control specialist from Culvert, Indiana. “He got to 45 yards and Coty grunted at him. The buck stopped broadside at 40 yards, and I took the shot and watched both his back legs kick up.”
The bolt went completely through the buck, and the Rage 2-blade expandable broadhead did deadly work. The buck left a heavy blood trail as it ran out of the corn field.
“We saw him lay down about 60 yards away, and we thought he was done,” Mandy explains. “We waited about 30 minutes before looking for him, but he was still alive. He got up and started toward the Yellow River, so we stopped and backed out.”
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The hunters didn’t want the buck to get into the tangled cover near the river, or into the river itself. So, they waited two hours before returning to the spot where they jumped the buck. From there, they easily picked up the blood trail again.
“We got to where we last saw him, and there was a great blood trail that led to the dead buck just 50 yards away toward the river,” Mandy says. “He’d fallen over a steep bank, so we got a canoe to load him in. Then we pushed the canoe with the buck in it up the hill with the help from a couple of friends.”
Once the buck was hauled uphill in the canoe, they loaded it into a truck and headed to the house. They dressed the deer and then took it to a local meat processor. The estimated 220-pound whitetail has a 12-point rack, with five points on one side and seven on the other. It had a rough green score of around 165 inches, and the Singletons believe the deer was six or seven years old.
While inspecting the antlers, they noticed that the seven-point side had an unusual, curved point. That’s when they realized they’d gotten a night photo of the buck on a trail camera earlier this season. But the picture had only showed the one side of its rack.
“We didn’t think much of the buck at the time, because we only saw half the rack,” Mandy adds. “But he turned out to be a dandy.”
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