Mark Yoder of Wooster, Ohio was at work in early November when he went into a co-worker’s office and saw a nice 10-point hanging on a wall.
“I looked at that deer and said, ‘I think I’ll take up deer hunting and get one bigger than that 10-pointer,’” Yoder, 33, tells Outdoor Life. “My co-worker looked at me and said, ‘Good luck with that.’”
That’s when Yoder began a three-week quest to bag a good buck. He had a 20-acre woodlot to hunt on an 80-acre farm owned by his grandmother in north-central Ohio’s Wayne County.
“No one had really hunted it in 30 years,” says Yoder, a director at an Ohio primary care clinic. “My brother shot a 4-point on the land years ago, but that was it.”
With the help and encouragement of his good friend and fellow hunter Joey Franklin, Yoder scouted the small woodlot on his grandmother’s farm. They set up a portable ground blind and placed a mix of apples, pumpkins, corn and molasses nearby (baiting is legal on private land in Ohio). Finally, they hung a trail camera.
“The first pictures I got at the spot were of a big buck,” Yoder said. “I showed them to Joey, telling him I thought the deer was a good one.”
Franklin went wild when he saw the photos. Others who saw the deer photos were stunned that Yoder had such a massive whitetail on property he was hunting.
Franklin and Yoder hunted the blind together a couple times so the novice hunter could learn the ropes. The pair saw the giant buck a couple times but it never came into crossbow range. Yoder was hunting with a Ravin another buddy had loaned him.
They tried rattling one evening and that drew the buck to 50 yards. It pawed the ground, but was ultimately lured away by a few does.
“That buck was after the ladies,” Yoder says. “There were a lot of does in the woodlot, and several of them were bedding right near my blind.”
On Nov. 29 Yoder was at home enjoying a leisurely post-Thanksgiving day with his family. It was cold and snowing, and they tried to convince him to skip his hunt that afternoon. But he decided to head to his ground blind and try for the buck anyway.
“It was bitter cold when I got to the blind at about 4 p.m. It was my first time hunting alone, and after an hour I was so cold I decided if a doe came close I was going to shoot it.”
Soon a doe appeared and when it was 10 yards from his blind, Yoder raised the crossbow. But just before he pulled the trigger, he looked beyond the doe and saw the massive buck. He was headed straight toward the blind.
“I got excited, nervous, and started hyperventilating. I knew I’d never get another chance like this at a buck like this ever again.”
When the buck got broadside at 10 yards, he settled his scope and shot. Yoder thought he missed the buck. But when he left the blind and inspected his arrow, he found blood on it He phoned his pal Franklin for advice about what to do next.
“Joey told me to be quiet and leave, and he’d meet me when he got off work.”
About two hours later Franklin, with buddies Cody Steine and Zeb Beam, showed up and the four men picked up the blood trail. They trailed the deer for about 100 yards, finding places where it bedded, then got up. Eventually it crossed a fence onto a neighbor’s property.
Yoder called the owner and got permission to track the deer. They followed the track a bit more. But on snowy ground they saw the deer was walking and moving. So, they decided to back out and call Cameron Hershberger’s drone service to help locate the buck.
“Cam came to us that night, sent up his drone with lights and a camera and found the buck in about two minutes,” Yoder said. “The buck was still alive, because the drone showed its head was up. We decided to leave and come back the next morning to recover him.”
The hunters and the drone operator were back out at 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 30. They quickly learned the buck was in nearly the same location.
“Zeb, Cody and I slipped in quietly and I put another arrow in him,” Yoder said. “My second arrow finished him fast.”
Yoder’s first arrow pierced one lung and the buck’s liver. The deer had traveled just 300 yards from where it had been shot at Yoder’s ground blind. But the use of a drone was invaluable in finding the still alive buck, even in a good tracking snow, says Yoder.
The hunters dragged the buck to the truck and hauled it to a butcher for processing.
“The butcher estimated the buck had lost 40 pounds during the rut, since he was so lean,” Yoder said. “He thought the buck may have weighed 200 pounds before the rut. We have no idea of its age.”
Yoder recently took the buck’s rack to Toby Hughes, a Buckmasters master scorer. He measured the deer’s unusual non-typical rack with 24 scorable points at 225 3/8s inches using the BTRs scoring system.
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