Omigod, Dad, you-won't ... I-can't ... Huge ... Oh,
jeezeyouhave to ... now ... Just come!"
Any other time of year, Tom Brennan might've deduced that his normally
articulate son was either drunk or speaking with a mouth full of peanut
butter. The words cascading out of his cell phone were rushed, garbled and
almost indecipherable. But he got the drift, even if he never heard
the word "buck."
CONT> Rob Brennan - a younger, slightly thicker
version of Tom - hadn't been drinking. The cold was to blame for his red
nose, the dead deer at his feet for the thick tongue. Pacing while waiting
for his father to arrive, he punched in another telephone number.
"Tina, you gotta see it," he told his wife. "Bring the kids. Dad's already
on his way."
Tom wishes he'd taped the strange, one-sided conversation with his son on
Dec. 1, 2006. It was like listening to someone sitting in a dentist's chair,
gums deadened, trying to sing the national anthem around a suction hose,
drill and the dentist's too-big fingers.
"Omesay can you seeeeeee, bite dedawn's eery lide ..."
Yet both Tom and Tina knew exactly
why they'd been called. It could only mean that Rob had shot_ "Big Nasty."
That's not a particularly flattering nickname for a whitetail, but it's the
one that stuck when Rob's kids saw the photographs from the trail camera.
The rack was indeed big - its greatest (outside) spread a whopping 35
inches! And the antlers weren't clean, at least compared to your average
set, because they were encased in velvet.
Since
2005, the entire Brennan clan had looked forward to every new batch of
photos, hoping to see Big Nasty in his favorite Biologic food plot.
"That
first year, waiting for hunting season to arrive so that I could go after
this dude was like waiting up for Santa Claus," Rob said. "We were all
excited - Dad, my hunting friend, Mark Grites, and my son, Tyler. Tina and
our two daughters, Chelsea and Jenna, also were cheering for me."
When
Illinois' 2005 bow season finally kicked off, Rob hunted the buck as often
as he dared - careful not to overpressure the giant whitetail. He really
wanted to nail it with his beloved PSE, but he wasn't about to limit
himself. Knowing that he'd have six days to hunt Big Nasty with a firearm,
he wound up tying that year's archery tag on another buck.
Of course, it helped that the stand-in wore about 172 inches of antler, the
largest specimen Rob had ever seen within an arrow's reach
He saw
Big Nasty once during the land of Lincoln’s second '05 gun season, but not
before he saw him. End of story, or at least of chapter.
"My expectations were high for'06," he said. "Early on during bow season, as
Tyler and I leaving one night, his highness ran out of the Biologic , clover
patch about 60 yards in front of the deer was slightly below the horizon,
all we saw was that enormous rack bouncing along.
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My son said “dang ,
Dad, that thing is huge I sure hope you get him!”
Rob tried alright. He hunted diligently, some might say frantically with his
bow.
When the first firearms season arrived, he traded the whisper-quite stick
and string for a more thunderous stick and sling. But the buck was a
no-show.
By the time the season rolled around, Rob and his dad had worked out an
arrangement: Tom would hunt in the mornings, while Rob was at work. The
younger Brennan would get dibs in the afternoons.
On Friday, the season's second day, Rob reached his stand about 12:30. It
was 22 degrees, but the knife-like, 25-mph wind made him happy he was
wearing Scent-Lok.
"Around
2:00, 11 does filed past, heading for a thicket. I thought, `This is good.
When they come back, the bucks will follow,"' Rob said. "As the time passed,
I saw a few deer pass through, but none tempted me. And then, around 3:30,
the string of does began exiting the thicket."
The original 11 had multiplied.
Deer were everywhere, before something spooked them all.
While most of the does were
jumping a nearby fence and coming closer to Rob, Big Nasty slipped out of
the woodlot like a big gray destroyer looking for a U-boat. By the time USS
Buck decided which submarine to chase, the butt of Rob's T/C Encore was
glued to his shoulder, the stock to his cheek.
"When the buck jumped the fence
and ran straight to me, it was like it was meant to be," Rob sighed. "I'd
spent endless hours in trees, hoping for that moment. And I knew that was
going to be my only chance."
Rob squeezed the muzzleloader's
trigger as the giant buck veered broadside at 70 yards.
There would be no more
photographs of Big Nasty munching on clover, 'but there were going to be
plenty more of him in the back of Rob's truck, on the floor of the family
pole barn, and being grasped - one by one - by a grinning Rob, Tom, Tyler
and others who were telephoned afterward to join the party.
Rob's buck is second only to the
world record among velvet-clad Irregulars in the BTR's blackpowder category
- a Kentucky specimen taken back in 2001. And like the velvety 48-pointer
to which it plays second fiddle, this one will probably never be entered
into the Boone and Crockett Club's registry because Rob isn't planning to
strip the velvet from the antlers (a prerequisite for B&C).
Whitetails that carry their
velvet well into winter, often because of testicular damage and the
resulting testosterone deficiency, are called "stags." They usually don't
shed their antlers, and they're not particularly interested in breeding.
Big Nasty, however, had a
thundering libido. He might have had only one testicle the size of a
walnut, but two seasons' photographs prove that he was shedding and
regrowing that distinctive rack
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for - Rob Brennan &
Custom Signs on Metal All Rights Reserved 2006
