The Story of the “Lodge Eleven” Buck
As any bowhunter will tell you, deer hunting will bring you to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Here at Lil’ Toledo, we become so involved in figuring out how to provide our hunters with the best opportunities with hours spent looking through trail camera pictures, looking at Google Earth, hanging stands, and scouting for deer, that we share with our hunters these same roller coaster of emotions. This deer story gave us the ups and downs with a little bit of everything thrown in between.
A gorgeous main frame 11 point showed up on one of our cameras late summer.
Sticking around through September and October, we knew that once the rut hit we would probably have a good opportunity to harvest the 11 point.
On November the 10th around 8am in the morning one of our hunters (sitting in the tree stand in the photo above) had an encounter with the Eleven point coming to scent check does at one of our sites (notice the buck at the base of the stand). Unfortunately, with a mishap between his bowstring and safety harness, the deer was hit poorly.
Fortunately, though, the buck’s wound was only superficial and the buck made a full recovery. Actually, the buck still participated in the rut chasing does and fighting (breaking off the split brow on his left antler).
The “Lodge Eleven” wise from his early November encounter made him difficult to hunt. He would only show on camera under the cover of darkness or would completely circle the stand location to catch the scent of anything that may not be right. This led to several distant encounters with the wily buck, but none close enough for a shot. Cope and his guide, Trace, set up another stand location for the eleven, specific to that day’s wind direction and ended up encountering the buck scent checking the original stand location.
Cope was able to intercept the buck making his circle around the original stand site and made a great shot to put the 162″ stud on the ground! Congratulations Cope on another Kansas bruiser and a happy ending to a great story!
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