October 12, 2007
A great buck for a great friend
Yesterday morning I got an e-mail from my good friend Freddy McGuire with this subject: "Wow! What an evening!"
There were files attached so I figured something good was coming. It was -- several pictures of Freddy with this awesome seven-pointer he killed with a bow Wednesday on his property in Franklin County.
This couldn't have happened to a better or more deserving guy. Freddy is one of the most generous, good-hearted guys I know. He likes big bucks and big gobblers, just like the rest of us. But he also realizes that hunting is about so much more than inches of antler or lengths of beards and spurs. When he says "Call me if you need help tracking one," he's not just saying that. He means it. I know because a bunch of us have taken him up on his offer. And, while he's smiling in this picture, I guarantee he would have been smiling just as big -- bigger, probably -- had one of his buddies killed this monster. If his wife, Amy, had killed this buck, Freddy wouldn't stop smiling until next March.
From a purely practical standpoint, he earned this buck, too. Freddy has made a huge investment -- most of it in the form of sweat -- in improving the wildlife habitat on his relatively small property. He's not taking it so far as to make things unfair, of course. He's just done some logging and put in some wildlife plots. His observations and trail cam pictures indicated that his work was paying off as there had been some good deer were around. He had several great pictures of this buck. But we all know that getting trail cam pictures of deer and actually killing those deer are two entirely different things.
Freddy, who puts in his time in the stand, already had a couple of close calls this season with good bucks before this monster walked into a shooting lane 18 yards away. The buck didn't go far after the shot. The antler spread is 21 inches outside; 19 inches inside and the buck weigheed 215 pounds on the hoof. (That's not a guess: Freddy has a picture of the scale to prove it.)
This buck will be tough to top, but I wouldn't be surprised if Freddy gets another big one this year. He's got it coming.
Comments
[October 15, 2007 11:18 PM]
TScottGreat job on an excellent buck Freddy!