Editor’s Note: Dwayne Norton lives in Troy, Missouri, about an hour northeast of the arch in St. Louis. He’s been hunting deer for 35 years, and he's been a Mossy Oak pro for eight years. His favorite camo pattern is Mossy Oak Break-Up Infinity, although he uses several different Break-Up patterns. In 2015, Norton fulfilled a lifelong ambition of going elk hunting.
My dad, David Norton, has two pieces of property in Missouri that totaled about 100 acres. It’s mostly CRP land with several food plots on it. My wife and I own about 32 primarily wooded acres. My brother, Brian, and I started hunting my dad’s land when we were about 9 or 10 years old. Brian also had leased some land in Kansas where we could hunt. One of the properties that we hunt in Missouri is called the Brushy 40, that’s adjacent to some croplands where corn is planted and cut. That land is grown up with a lot of brush and grass. We had hung a stand in the northeastern corner of this property, so we could hunt with a west wind. On the morning I hunted there, I spotted a buck to the east of me, walking down the edge of the cornfield coming from the south. East was the direction from which I’d entered the stand. Once the buck hit my scent trail, he stopped but wasn’t spooked. He turned away from it, walked back south, jumped the fence and walked out into the Brushy 40, coming toward me on the upwind side of my stand. When he was at about 15 yards, I grunted and stopped him. I came to full draw, released the arrow and heard that crack you often hear when a broadhead enters a buck. He took off running southwest of my stand. Because the Brushy 40 was so thick, I stayed on my stand and called Brian. We decided to leave the deer and not go after him until dark.
The deer had run out of the Brushy 40 and through waist high grass and lespedeza. Although the weather was cool enough that we weren’t concerned about the meat spoiling, I hardly could sleep that night, thinking about that big deer out in that grass. Brain had a meeting to go to the next morning. So, I waited until the sun was up high and spent about 30 minutes searching before I found the deer about 5 feet from where we had stopped searching the previous night. The buck scored 156, and now, he's hanging on my wall.
To learn more about hunting, check out John E. Phillips’ new eBook and print book, “Bowhunting Deer: Mossy Oak Pros Know Bucks and Bows.” You also can download a free Kindle app that enables you to read the book on your iPad, computer or Smartphone.
For information on making jerky from your deer to provide a protein-rich snack, you can download a free book from http://johninthewild.com/free-books.
