Back in late October, an Indiana hunter arrowed what might be the most impressive buck of the 2024 season. Seth Hernandez shot the giant full velvet whitetail with a crossbow from roughly 30 yards away. With forty scorable points—including two foot-long drop tines—it’s the biggest crossbow-killed buck ever measured with the BTR scoring system.
Hernandez encountered the buck for the first time last summer, he tells F&S. “I was driving around glassing with my wife, checking out some of the fields we have permission to hunt,” he says. “All the sudden she says, ‘Oh my God’ and hands me the binoculars. He was standing against a woodline about 150 yards away. I could see his double drops clearly and tines going everywhere. Five seconds later he was gone.”
Hernandez continued to watch the deer closely as the summer progressed. “He stayed pretty visible out in the bean fields hanging with a bachelor group of six or seven bucks,” he says. "We were able to glass him pretty regularly, keeping an eye on where he was coming from, where he was going, where he was eating at—just trying to get a sense of his daily patterns.”
The longer he watched the buck the more unique it seemed, Hernandez says. By late September, it was still holding all its velvet while other deer in the area were transitioning to hard-horned racks. "He was daylighting almost every day," he says. "When other bucks were sparring, he kept to himself. He was very docile—not aggressive at all. Most of the time he hung out with a 2-year-old 10-pointer. He'd send him out into the fields first and then sneak out behind him. He was kind of using him as a lookout."
When the season opened, Hernandez waited for a favorable wind to hunt the deer. The ideal wind conditions materialized on October 6, the second week of Indiana's archery season. "I finally got a good wind and set up on a weed patch in a corn field along some ditch lines he traveled," he says. "He popped out about 150 yards north of me. His outside spread looked like it was 3-feet wide. He was slowly walking away from me, and I watched him for about 35 minutes. Just seeing him in person was enough to make my whole season."
It was the first of a several encounters Hernandez would have with the deer before finally getting it in bow ranch on October 29. "It was still 84 degrees with a 20- to 25-mile-an-hour sustainable southwest wind. I got out about 2:30 in the afternoon and climbed into an 18-foot ladder stand facing a picked bean field where he'd been showing up all summer," he says. "I was second guessing myself for going out in such warm weather, but with gun season around the corner I wanted to hunt every chance I got."
Shortly into the hunt, two does began feeding in a field about 60 yards downwind of Hernandez. "Luckily, they stayed calm and never winded me. They just kept on feeding, which I took as a good sign," he says. "Another half hour went by, and that's about all I saw, then I heard footsteps behind me."
It was the giant velvet buck Hernandez had been chasing all season, and it was coming toward him at a steady trot from about 35 yards away. "I don't know what spooked him back in the woods, but he was looking around and surveying the field really quickly. He was on edge. I knew that if he hit that field, he'd bust across it pretty quick," he says. "There were some saplings over his vitals, but his shoulder was out so I put the scope on him and squeezed off. The shot pinned up his shoulders. He bulldozed about 50 yards into the field, looked straight up at the sky, then slowly lowered his head and collapsed."
When he examined the buck, Hernandez saw that it was a rare type of deer often called a cactus buck, meaning it had male sex organs but no testicles. Deer can be born this way or the condition can be caused by an injury. The result is a buck that never sheds its antlers and accumulates velvet growth year after year.
Read Next: 14-Year-Old Hunter Bags 240-Inch, 26-Point Buck While Still Hunting on Public Land in Ohio
Some cactus bucks are smaller than typical males due to low testosterone levels, but Hernandez’s deer dressed out at a whopping 272 pounds, he says. All told, the deer scored 284 inches BTR. Its four mass measurements combined for a total 48 inches with 20 points on each side of its rack and 174 inches of abnormal growth. According to Buckmasters, its the fourth-largest deer ever scored using the BTR system and the largest ever taken with a crossbow. Hernadez plans to have it scored by Boone & Crockett once the 60-day drying period ends.
