October 20, 2017 - One of the main things I love about the dawn of another Texas deer season is the flurry of good story fodder that always seems to wind up in my lap.
The anticipation is sort of akin the feeling you get by tossing a topwater plug into a energetic group of burly school bass. Getting bit is a virtual certainty. You just never know when the strike is going to come or how big the fish is going to be.
Blake Laviolette of Onalaska delivered the first hit of the archery only season earlier this week, and it was a biggie.
On October 2, the 26 year-old hunter arrowed a remarkable open range whopper in Polk County that is sure to rank as one of the top scoring non-typicals reported in all of eastern Texas this year.
A main frame 10 pointer, the 5 1/2 year-old deer carried 13 scoreable points with split G3s, tall tines and exceptional mass totaling nearly 35 inches.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department wildlife biologist Chris Gregory of Livingston taped the buck for Texas Big Game Awards. The gross Boone and Crockett green score is 179; 172 2/8 net. The net score takes into account the lack of symmetry between both antlers. It's a stud of a whitetail any way you look it.
There's a intriguing story behind the deer, too, one that began with a hunt for a real estate sign and ended with another itty bitty deer lease kicking out a career buck that most deer hunters would love to have a crack at.
Here's what went down:
Laviolette is a real estate agent who likes to do some deer hunting on the side. His job often puts him in touch with property owners who are looking to sell their land, and the listings sometimes lead to temporary hunting arrangements before the deed changes hands.
Laviolette has spent the last several seasons hunting with his father on a pair of small tracts they have under lease in Trinity, San Jacinto and Walker counties. Both deals were cut through real estate relations.
Laviolette nailed down a third lease much closer to home a couple of months back. In fact, the gate to the 77-acre spread is located just down the road from his office.
The way Laviolette came into his newest lease, and a subsequent shot at the monster white-tailed buck that lived there, is somewhat bizarre. To here him tell it, it's sounds like something out of a fairy tale book.
Find That Sign
"It all started during November of 2016," Laviolette said. "My mother is the real estate broker where I work and one day she asked me to go out behind our office and look for an old 4X4 sign frame. There are about three acres back there."
As Laviolette rummaged around in the brush looking for the sign he discovered nearly a dozen rubs on small saplings about two inches in diameter. Curious to learn more about the dee, he returned to the spot with a bag of corn and a game camera. He also hung a lock-on stand in the area, just for good measure.
Five days later he returned to check his camera. The images he found on the memory card came as somewhat of a shock.
""He was in there on the second night and It was a biggest buck I'd ever seen -- somewhere in the mid-160s," he said. "I got several more pictures of him after that, but they were all at night. I never hunted back there the first time in 2016. He was only coming in there at night and I didn't want take a chance and mess him up. I definitely kept it quiet and didn't tell anyone about it. My plan was to hunt him the next year if he showed back up."
For Sale: 77 acres
The story took an interesting twist in August 2017 when a Polk County landowner contacted Laviolette about listing for sale the aforementioned 77-acre tract of property. He made arrangements to lease the land for hunting in the process and has since learned the property hadn't seen a legal hunter in close to two decades.
Located roughly 1/2 mile from Lavilolette's office, the heavily-wooded tract is dissected by a long pipeline crossing the hunter quickly discovered while scouting for sign during late summer. While walking the pipeline he found a 30-yard stretch that appeared to getting a lot of traffic.
"The pipeline hadn't been mowed in a while so it was pretty easy to tell where deer had been traveling from one side to the other," he said. "There were a whole bunch of trails right along that 30-yard stretch. I found a spot on one side of the pipeline where 4-5 trails converged and made sort of a bottleneck. That's where I put some corn out and set a camera to find out what was coming through there."
The hunter got a pleasant surprise when he returned a week later to check the camera. Several different bucks and does had passed through the area, including one with an all-to-familiar face and a kingsize rack. It was the same buck that was showing up behind his real estate office under the cover the darkness the previous season.
"There was no mistaking that buck and his split G3's," Laviolette said. "He was really tall, wide and he had put on quite a bit of mass from last year. I had him pegged at around 178 gross B&C once he shed his velvet. I was so fired up about it I told my dad he could have the run of the woods on the other two leases. I knew where I was going to be hunting."
Eye See You
Lavilolette said he spent the entire month of September watching the buck on game camera, patterning its movements and crafting a plan that he hoped would culminate with a clear shot during early days of the 2017 Archery Only season that got underway on September 30. The first order of business was hanging a lock-on stand 25 feet above ground near the bottleneck of trails. The next was keeping the area salted with corn and a homemade rice bran mixture Laviloette keeps in a 55-gallon drum.
"I was really careful how I went about my business," he said. "I only went in there once every four days to check my camera and replenish my corn and I always did it during the middle of the day, usually around noon. He was always in his bedding area by then and I'd get in and out as quickly and quietly as I could so didn't disturb anything."
The feeding regiment involved making three different corn piles with about 2 1/2 gallons of the special rice bran mixture dumped on top of each one.
"They were coming to it pretty good," he said. "I probably had pictures of 15 different does and five different bucks. They were eating 100 pounds of corn every four days. I never got the first picture of a pig."
The big buck was regular at the goodie station. Laviolette said he got more than 300 images of the deer before opening day rolled around.
"He was in there every day for three weeks leading up to the season opener and he always stayed for about an hour at a time," he said. "He would come through late in the afternoon when he was leaving his bedding area on the way to his feeding area, then again when he was returning to his bedding area, right at daylight. I felt like my chances were pretty good so long as something didn't go wrong and as long as the wind was right. That stand was set up for a east or north wind. Anything out of the south or west was bad."
Opening Weekend Blues
Laviolette arrived at his stand well before daylight on opening morning with understandably high expectations. It wasn't long before he noticed a dark silhouette around his corn pile, roughly 20 yards away. It was still much too dark to identify the deer with the naked eye, but Laviolette was able to see the animal clearly with the aid of his binoculars.
"It was him," he recalled. "Those 12X40 binoculars made him look twice as big from that distance and I was literally shaking like a leaf up there. I must have watched him for 20 minutes but I couldn't see well enough to put a pin on him through my peep sight."
Then something really frustrating happened. The buck walked straight away and faded into the darkness as mysteriously as it had appeared.
"There wasn't much I could do at that point," Laviolette said. "I went back that afternoon but he was later than usual coming back in. I got a picture of him about five minutes after I got down out of the stand."
Day 2 of the season brought more frustration, just a different kind. The wind was wrong when Laviolette arrived at the pipeline, forcing him to abort the hunt before it got started.
"It was just too risky," he said. "You normally only get one chance with a buck like that. Get busted and you may not ever see him again."
Worth the Wait
Lavoilette's exercise in patience paid off handsomely on the third morning of the season. With an east wind in his favor, the hunter went undetected as he entered the area and the big buck showed up at the corn pile right on schedule.
"He was there about 20 minutes before daylight again," Lavoilette said. "It was pretty nerve racking just standing there thinking whole time he was about to walk away any second, just like did opening morning. My blood was boiling."
Fortunately for Laviolette the buck made a fatal mistake and hung around a little too long. Laviolette finally had enough shooting light to see his sight pin at 6:57 a.m. and the all-new Rage Trypan expandable broadhead did its job. The hunter said the deer ran about five yards and crashed.
"I pretty much center-punched his heart," Laviolette said. "I was really impressed with that broadhead. I could put four fingers in the entry and exit holes. He never knew what hit him."
Big Buck, Small Acreage
Laviolette's buck adds credence to a theory many East Texas deer hunters are already familiar with: Big acreage isn't necessary to grow big antlers behind the Pine Curtain.
"All these deer need is some age them," he said. "This buck is a good example of what can happen when deer goes beyond 3 1/2 years of age. That place was perfect for a big ol' buck to hole up and hide out. It's a small tract but he had everything he needed there. Plenty of food, water, cover and lots of does. Plus, it hadn't been hunted in a really long time. There was no reason for him leave the area or venture off very far. I don't think he ever did. That was his core area. He lived there."
Matt Williams is a freelance writer based in Nacogdoches. He can be reached by e-mail, mattwillwrite4u@yahoo.com.
