Three years ago, Ohio hunter Luke Lohan captured pictures of a buck he knew he wanted. The whitetail impressed the 19-year-old so much that he passed on multiple bucks, hoping he’d get a crack at him.
He didn’t end up getting his chance that year, but there was always next season. He managed to spot him again the following year on a few visits; they just weren’t regular sightings.
“I did get some pictures of him last year,” said Lohan. “But nothing regular. There wasn’t any pattern, and I never really got any good pictures. He’d be way in the background or it’d be rainy or foggy. Or he would come in right at that time of day when the camera wouldn’t flash and it would be too dark to really see him. At that point, I decided I wasn’t going to hold out for him because there really wasn’t any pattern to count on and I didn’t really know what he was.”
Luckily for Lohan, his patience paid off this past spring.
He set his cameras up in his hunting area and waited over the course of a few months to see which bucks had the most potential.
“I was getting 30-40 pictures of the buck every day. He was running scrapes really early—like in the middle of August. I knew where the deer was bedding, feeding, watering. He was coming to my feeder a lot. I really felt like I had him figured out,” he said.
Then one day in September the massive buck just disappeared. For weeks there was nothing, not even a single sighting. Then it popped back up in October and Lohan got pictures of him that morning and later the next night.
Lohan ended up getting rained out at work the next day and decided to make it a day full of nothing but hunting. He didn’t have any luck that morning, but after grabbing some food and heading back another location at 4 p.m. he decided to try some light rattling. And like magic, the buck appeared.
“He came in pretty hot. I was looking at the deer and thought ‘That’s a pretty good buck…then I was like, oh, I know exactly what deer that is,'” Lohan says. “I really wasn’t that nervous. My heart was beating pretty good but I wasn’t that psyched out. When I shot him, it was a perfect shot. Once I stood up after he ran off, that’s when it hit me. I about fell down.”
Lohan hadn’t seen or heard the deer fall, but he was confident his shot was clean. He decided to head home for a bit before tracking him.
“When I looked at the spot where I’d shot him, there was blood everywhere. It didn’t take very long to find him.”
When all was said and done, Lohan had claimed the buck he’d had his eye on for three years that could very well top 200 inches. This wasn’t your everyday buck.
“It’s honestly an indescribable feeling,” says Lohan. “To put your hands on something that you’ve been waiting years for. To grab it in your hands….it’s just impossible to describe.”
Luckily for Lohan and all of us, we have the pictures to help where his description fails. But even then, it’s nothing close to the real thing.
