Miranda Farson and her husband Grant were bowhunting out of the same tree on Oct. 4. The two were in separate lock-on stands, sitting 20 feet high in the big maple on a piece of private land in Morrow County, Ohio. Facing different directions, Miranda and Grant looked and waited for one of two target bucks they’d seen on the property before.
“One was a great 10-pointer,” Miranda tells Outdoor Life. “The other buck had an unusual rack, so I named him ‘Wonky Donkey’ because he had so many points.”
The Farsons had gotten trail camera photos of both deer. Miranda says the 10-point buck was a regular visitor on the small, 20-acre farm, while the big non-typical came and went. She says the two bucks would typically come out of the thicket in the evening and walk along a fence line into the nearby corn field.
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“That evening we expected to see the 10-pointer, and Grant was going to shoot it, but I wanted Wonky Donkey,” Miranda explains. “That evening about 6:30 p.m., Wonky Donkey stepped out and headed down a trail that led near our maple tree.”
The Farsons had gotten plenty of trail camera photos of the buck. One photo in particular would come in handy when they tried to recover the buck.
Photo courtesy Miranda Farson
The buck came straight toward Grant, stopping at 20 yards to rub its rack on some saplings. The brush was too thick for Grant to get a shot, so the two hunters waited and watched from their stands.
“Finally, he turned and walked straight toward me, coming in very close. He stopped just 8 yards away, offering me an almost straight down shot,” Miranda says, “That’s not the shot I’d been practicing. But I drew, anchored, grunted to stop him, and touched my trigger release.”
Her arrow hit the quartering-away buck right behind its shoulder, traveling all the way through its chest and exiting out the other side. It was a good hit, and Wonky Donkey took off running through a briar patch about 75 yards away.
“We lost sight of him when he got into thick cover,” Miranda says. “We didn’t find the arrow, and the blood trail was very poor. We started second-guessing how good the shot was, especially without finding the arrow.”
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The Farsons left after dark that night and returned the next morning. After six hours of searching, they still couldn’t find a blood trail, so they gave up and went home. But later that day, Grant returned to the farm to check their trail cameras, and he saw that one had captured a photo of Wonky Donkey days earlier. In the picture, it looked like the buck was heading to a nearby creek bed that Grant knew of. This was the one clue he needed. Grant hiked over to the creek bed, where he found the dead buck right away.
“It’s hard to understand how far that buck traveled without leaving much of a blood trail,” Grant says. “Miranda smoked that deer, and there was even a good exit wound behind its shoulder. Yet the deer still traveled just over 200 yards before falling.”
The big non-typical had 16 scoreable points and an official Buckmasters score of 160 2/8.
Photo courtesy Miranda Farson
The Farsons took the non-typical rack to Buckmasters scorer Lori Hughes, who tallied an official BTR score of 160 2/8 inches. The rack had 16 scoreable points, including two drop tines that were broken from fighting.
“We have trail camera photos of Wonky Donkey fighting the 10-pointer that Grant still wants to tag this year,” Miranda says. “That buck is still showing up regularly on our trail cameras.”
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