Veteran bowhunter Mark Dunn and his wife Carrie began exploring a family business in Champaign County, Ohio this fall. While walking the 80-acre property in September, ahead of bow season, they discovered a draw that looked like a good travel corridor.
“We put out three cameras to see what was going on there, and we immediately got pictures of a giant buck,” Dunn said. Outdoor living. “I knew I had to sneak back out quickly and set up some tree stands.”
Dunn waited until heavy rains from Hurricane Helene passed through the area to provide some cover.
“I thought the rain would be a good time to set up stands so that buck wouldn’t be disturbed,” said Dunn, who lives in Mechanicsburg. “I set up stands in various places so that people could hunt at that location when the wind changed.”
Dunn soon after left to hunt for elk in Wyoming. He tapped a cow, but his thoughts were still on the large atypical home.
“All the time I was thinking about that dollar in Ohio. I came back on a Saturday, saw him from a stand on Monday and killed him six days later.
Dunn says he has personally seen the deer eight times. It was always in the evening and every time the buck walked just out of reach. Ultimately, he decided to try a morning hunt instead. By the time the sixth day arrived, on October 20, the moon was bright and mostly full. He was afraid he might startle the deer as he crossed a field on his way to his stand in the moonlight.
“I walked to my stand at 5:30 a.m., almost two hours before the light shot,” Dunn recalls. “I wanted to get in there long before daybreak.”
Around 8 a.m., Dunn spotted the giant buck walking out of a field 450 feet away. The deer strolled along the draw towards Mark. He thinks the buck was headed toward a stand of oak trees full of acorns. The deer stayed on course and eventually stopped along the side of Dunn’s stand 27 yards away. He raised his Raven R10 crossbow and sent a two-bladed, 100-grain broadhead behind his shoulder.
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“He ran fast across the field, got to the edge, stopped, wobbled and fell,” Dunn said. “I couldn’t see him on the ground because the grass was high there. So I called Carrie and told her I shot the buck. Then I waited there for 90 minutes because I didn’t want to risk jumping on the deer while it was still alive.”
Dunn eventually went back to his truck and called a friend, who helped him dress and load the enormous whitetail. They brought the dressed deer back to Dunn’s home, where it weighed 235 pounds on a farm scale. He later took the buck to Ohio Buckmasters scorer Toby Hughes, who gave it a BTR score of 233 7/8s.
“It had 21 runs to score with 7-inch bases,” Dunn explains. “The main beams are each over 60cm long and we think it was at least 6.5 years old.
He says it’s his largest buck yet, on top of the 500-yard whitetail already hanging on his wall, along with about 30 other Ohio bucks. And after seeing the rack up close, he realized they had seen the same buck on a nearby property last year.
“We had trail camera photos of it [this same buck]and he was a giant in 2023, scoring about 160 inches. My son could have taken it last year, but he didn’t,” Dunn said. ‘And I’m glad he didn’t. Because that deer rack blew up within a year.”
Alex Robinson and Bob McNally