Even though my wife is far from being the jealous type, she’s growing darned tired of watching me moon over this blurry photo of Barb Brewer that was faxed to us.
I just can’t take my eyes off this woman from Downstate Carmi and her record whitetail deer rack. Shot on the last day of the Illinois firearm season two weeks ago, Brewer’s non-typical buck has been green-scored at 253 6/8 Boone & Crockett points, by far the largest rack ever taken by a woman in Illinois.
It also ranks third on the all-time Illinois list and, according to Boone & Crockett, 38th in history.
Conversations in our household now sort of run like this:
Wife: “So what are we getting the kids for Christmas?”
Me: “Doesn’t matter. . . . Do you see those four drop tines over here?”
Wife: “Oh, please shut up about that deer.”
Brewer’s husband, Jim, a transplanted Kentuckian who has been trying all his life to waylay a record-book deer, said he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the rack.
“I heard the shot, then 20 minutes later I heard her give a kind of a war whoop, so I knew she had a deer down,” he said. “A little while later, I heard her brother’s voice and figured she had some help. But then they came stomping over to me, scuffing up the area around my tree. I was fuming. They knew I had an hour left to hunt and here they were saying they needed help to track a little doe.”
He sighed in reflection.
“I couldn’t believe they’d do this to me,” Brewer said. “Yet, if I’d been thinking straight, I’d have realized that Barb never would have bothered me about a doe, or even an ordinary buck. When I got there, I knew this was special. They tried to hide the rack under her brother’s jacket, but there was no way you could cover a set of antlers like that. This was the greatest deer I’ve ever seen. And the thing is, there might be another one like it out there.”
For a year now, Jim has scouted a pair of bucks he saw jousting in a thicket on brother-in-law Brad Braden’s 100-acre overgrown pasture and scrub woods just inside Hamilton County.
“While I couldn’t say for sure if either was the one that Barb got, they both were in that league,” he recalled. “One of them took three jumps and got stuck in the brush. He had to back out because his rack was too big to move forward. He has haunted me for a year. The other one took off through 12- to 14-foot saplings like he was a tractor. All you saw were the trees bending down.
“I tell you, you see big deer, but when you see one in this caliber, you just can’t convey it to someone else in a meaningful way. That’s how good that deer was.”
Barb, a 39-year-old emergency medical technician, is a veteran deer, quail and squirrel hunter and club-champion basser. She killed a respectable 11-pointer last year, but nothing like the buck she saw this season on opening day.
“I shot at it and missed,” she said. “I was standing near my ladder stand watching a doe act sort of funny on top of the ridge. She kept looking back as if something was going on. Then I saw this enormous buck, and he saw me.”
This deer was so brazen he dropped down and tried to sneak past Barb to reach the doe for mating.
“When he popped his head up, I took a shot, but I missed,” she said. “I was sick. He ran off a little ways, but I never had another shot.”
Her husband shook his head.
“I heard that shot, and by the time I got to her, she was beside herself. `You don’t know,’ she kept saying. `You don’t know how big that thing was.’ And I said to her, `Yes I do. I’ve been trying to tell you that for a year.’ “
Barb, who had only one permit, saw no more trophy racks that weekend. She asked Jim to move her stand closer to that ridge. He erected a 14-foot Texas tripod stand squarely amid the thicket in what he judged to be the highest spot on the land.
Barb didn’t hunt the first two days of the second season, however, and stayed home Saturday because she couldn’t tolerate below-freezing winds. Jim used her tripod stand instead, but never saw a decent deer.
“I could see what she meant about the cold,” he said. “You sit up there like a hood ornament, totally exposed. I nearly froze to death.”
Barb finally came out Sunday afternoon for one last try, and by 3 p.m. she heard a racket in the thicket of wild plum, dogwood and other brushy overgrowth.
“This went on for 10 or 15 minutes,” she said. “He was doing whatever bucks do in the rut. He finally turned sideways for me and I saw it was him. I had this grunt call around my neck and I bumped it when I raised the gun and he heard that. He froze, then threw his head up and tried to smell me, but I had the wind in my favor.”
Her first shot from 30 yards pierced both lungs and she shot again as the buck jolted into a run, hitting the liver and kidneys. The deer died less than 100 yards away.
“I waited 20 minutes, then went down and found it,” Barb said. “That’s when I let out the whoop. But my legs were rubbery and I was shaking when I came out of the stand.”
She used a light Browning 16-gauge shotgun with no scope and open sights, designed more for quail than deer. Jim had bought her a 12-gauge rifled deer shotgun, but she traded it for a .44-caliber pistol so she could hunt in the handgun season.
DNR wildlife biologist Tom Micetich said he spent nearly 2 1/2 hours measuring tines and triple-checking his mathematics for the preliminary score. He counted 24 antler points, with an outside spread of 29 1/2 inches. Both main stems had thick 6 1/8-inch circumferences, indicating the deer was at least 4 1/2 years old.
“The thing is, this deer had been badly wounded and probably wouldn’t have lasted the winter,” Jim observed. “It had been either shot or in a humongous fight. Its jaw was broken in three places and a deep gouge behind the eye was seriously infected. It had lost a lot of weight and couldn’t have been more than 160 pounds. And yet its stomach was full. That, to me, was amazing.”
Barb said she intends to enter her rack in next spring’s Illinois Deer and Turkey Classic in Peoria. At this point, she wants to keep it instead of yield to offers that could reach $100,000.
“Right now we have it in a friend’s gun safe in Kentucky, insured for $80,000,” Jim said. “My buddy has to keep all his guns under the bed for a while, but he says he doesn’t mind.”
