Creed David of Zachary, Louisiana, has been guiding deer, duck, and turkey hunters in southwest Missouri for years. His dad started the Hen’s Landing guide business in Bronaugh over 20 years ago, and Creed has been hunting the area most of his life.
“We have a new 375-acre property to hunt this year and it looked great, so I had cell phone trail cameras monitoring a CRP area for three weeks there,” David tells Outdoor Life. “It took me awhile to learn where the deer were by moving cameras to different spots.”
He finally located a place where bucks were traveling and working scrapes near a CRP field next to some big woods that had been rough cut.
“After I set a cell phone camera there, I had to return home for a while,” says David, 26. “Every late evening or early morning for 10 days straight I was getting photos of a giant buck working those scrapes. He’d bed in the CRP and come to the scrapes near an edge of the cut timber.”
Then it started raining in Missouri, which halted most of the deer activity. David began watching the weather forecast carefully.
“I saw that it was going to stop raining about noon the following day, so I loaded up and drove straight through to Missouri from home – nine and a half hours,” he says. “I was whipped, but I knew when the rain quit, the buck would move to freshen his scrapes.”
When David got to Missouri it had stopped raining. He stopped and hunt camp and showered, then grabbed his hunting gear and headed to the woods where the big buck had been tending scrapes.
He got to the area around 3 p.m. on Oct. 29, a few hours after the rain halted. He’d never hunted the spot previously, so no stand was set. He used a few climbing sticks and set up 20 feet high in a tree sling in a big oak tree near the scrapes the buck had been hitting.
“I saw a couple does as I was getting up in the sling,” he said. “They moved on through, and a 130-inch buck showed that I first thought was the big buck. He worked one of the scrapes and wandered off.”
Shortly after, another smaller buck appeared from the downed timber chasing a doe. About 20 minutes later the little buck tucked its tail and dashed out of the area.
“I knew something scared that little buck,” David explains. “And just five minutes later all I could see were big tines coming through some very thick cover. I knew it was him, and he was going to freshen a scrape.”
The buck came to 34 yards and David had to shoot his 70-pound Mathews bow in an awkward manner from the sling stand.
“There was just a small gap in the cover that I could shoot through, and I grunted to the buck to stop him,” says the young bowhunter. “Luckily he stopped right in the gap so I could slip an arrow to him,”
The buck was broadside and David was sure he’d made a good hit, with his arrow passing completely through the deer. His 100-grain two-blade Rage broadhead produced a great blood trail that David had no trouble following, at least initially.
“Blood was everywhere, but it just stopped,” he says. “The deer ran into some really thick cover near a pond. I didn’t want to make a mistake on such a great buck. So, I called my buddy Jared Viastock who has a drone.”
Viastock lives nearby, and 90 minutes later he arrived where David had lost the blood trail.
“He put the drone up and he found the deer right away,” David says. “The buck had traveled less than 70 yards from where I’d hit it.”
The two men dragged the deer through some tangled downed timber, through a muck-and-mire ditch, and finally to a place where they could get it out with an ATV. Then they took the estimated 220-pound whitetail back to David’s hunt camp, dressed and caped it. It will be made into a pedestal or shoulder mount by a taxidermist.
David says the 13-point buck has a 17.5-inch inside antler spread, with 24-inch main beams. It had a rough green score of 175 3/8s inches.
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