“I made the decision that I would hunt Goofy in an area where I’d often seen him on the 1400-acre lease my friends and I had in San Saba, Texas,” 65-year-old Greg Gershon of Clare, Michigan, says. “We’d first spotted this non-typical buck about four years ago. Although he had a nice set of antlers then, we watched his rack decline over a couple of years and decided not to take him, due to his small size. He wasn’t the kind of buck we wanted to harvest.”

Gershon and his friends manage the property for older-class bucks. They agree each year on the bucks they want to take off their land, and the bucks they want to grow for another year or so, based on what they think the average age of each buck is. Although this is a free-range ranch, the hunters do put out deer protein feed and set-up cameras to photograph the deer when they come in to feed. “We don’t hunt over the feeders but rather use them to monitor our herd,” Gershon explains. “So, we knew about the general area where Goofy was living.”

Gershon had named this buck Goofy because, “This buck had the goofiest-looking rack I’d ever seen.” Another member of the lease had named the buck Flat Top, since his rack looked as though something had sat on his rack and flattened it out. Although the members of the lease had trail-camera photos of Goofy for several years, they never could settle on how old the buck was, due to his small body.

When you’re managing a deer herd to produce trophy bucks, no one wants to take a cull buck. But Gershon was interested in how old Goofy was – after estimating his age at about 6-1/2 years.

“In 2018 we sent trail camera photos of Goofy to a wildlife biologist, who said that Goofy’s antlers either would get bigger, or he’d die of old age,”  Gershon explains. “I enjoy hunting one specific buck during a season. In the 2018 season, I’d hunted seven days out of the same stand where we’d spotted Goofy and took another buck that scored 170 inches.”

On the second day of the Goofy hunt, Gershon saw Goofy about 100-yards away. “I had a good rest in my blind for my rifle, took my time and aimed for a double-lung shot. When I squeezed my trigger, Goofy ran about 160 yards before piling up. On the SCI scoring system, the buck scored 160 inches and scored 146 inches on the Boone and Crockett scoring system. Once we finally took Goofy to a wildlife biologist, he aged Goofy at 8-1/2+ years old.

“For me, Goofy was a trophy for two reasons: he was an older-age-class buck with an amazing rack that we all knew needed to come out of our herd; and he had one of the most-unusual racks I’d ever seen. Many of his points were wider than they were long and couldn’t be counted. But Goofy did have 23 scoreable points.”

To learn more about hunting deer, check out John E. Phillips’ book, “How to Hunt and Take Big Buck Deer on Small Properties,” available in Kindle, print and Audible versions at (http://amzn.to/1vIcj4m). You may have to copy and paste this link into your browser. (When you click on this book, notice on the left where Amazon says you can read 10% of the book for free).

Tomorrow: Heath Kersten’s Huge Bad Weather Wisconsin Buck