They're killing some funky deer in Prattsville.
Late on Nov. 13, the second day of modern gun deer season, Wesley Crutchfield of Prattsville made what appeared to be a solid shot on a nice-antlered buck with his Browning BAR .308.
The deer appeared with only about 10 minutes of legal shooting light remaining. Crutchfield said he was pleased because he'd spent most of the afternoon watching small bucks chase does.
"It was 300 yards or so away when I first saw it," Crutchfield said. "I couldn't really tell a lot about it, but I could tell that its horns were real heavy and chocolate colored. The deer was real dark colored and heavy-bodied, too."
The deer vanished after the shot, so Crutchfield called his cousin Austin Crutchfield to help find it.
"We looked all over the place," Wesley said. "We didn't find hair, blood or nothing. We finally gave up, but while we were walking back out towards the truck, Austin said, 'There'a a deer laying right there!'
"I went over to it and said, 'The dang thing has got velvet on it!' " Wesley said.
During their annual growth period in the summer, buck antlers are covered with a mass of blood vessels that look like velvet. When antlers stop growing for the year, blood flow through the velvet stops, and bucks get rid of the velvet by rubbing their antlers on trees.
A buck in velvet in mid November is very unusual.
"Austin asked if it was a doe," Wesley said. "I said, 'I highly doubt it, seeings as it's got horns.' "
Ordinarily, yes. But ...
"I picked up its leg, and it had doe parts," Wesley said. "There was no denying it."
Crutchfield's prize was a hermaphrodite doe, a rare, biological anomaly in the world of whitetailed deer. It occurs in one of 100,000 deer, according to Jeff Pritzi, a district wildlife supervisor for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Hermaphrodite does are biologically female. They are able to conceive and bear young, but an overproduction of testosterone causes them to express male traits, namely antlers.
Cory Gray, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's deer biologist, said that hermaphrodite does usually have male and female genitalia. The male equipment is usually hidden internally.
The last hermaphrodite doe known to be killed in Arkansas was a trophy 9-point doe taken by Maxine Byrd of Ida in Cleburne County in 2014. Byrd's buck measured 15 inches inside the antlers and 17 inches outside, a decent rack by most standards.
The rack on Crutchfield's doe measured 14 inches inside with the velvet. It's probably a bit wider without it.
"It's bases were 6 inches around," Crutchfield said. "The horns are real, real heavy."
Crutchfield knows a thing or two about big racks. His best was a 146-inch buck that he killed with a bow, but his antlered doe is the talk of Grant County and beyond.
"I took this blamed doe to the the taxidermist," Crutchfield said. "He's got all these huge horns and I've got this little spindly-ass doe, but everybody's talking about my doe. I've probably told the story a thousand times to different people."
Glenn Lewis of White Hall is the taxidermist, and he has a method for keeping the velvet intact. It'll make a unique trophy.
"There were a lot of people calling it Bruce," Crutchfield said. "There were some pretty politically incorrect jokes circling around it, but it's a once-in-a-lifetime deal. I might never see anything like that again."
Crutchfield said he's ambivalent about having to burn a buck tag on a doe.
"I don't feel cheated necessarily, but I don't know that I feel lucky, either," Crutchfield said.
The buck that Austin Crutchfield killed a few days later will not make as nice a trophy, but it was a conversation piece in its own right. He killed a three-legged buck.
It was a 7-point buck that had one full left leg and what appeared to be a stub on the right front.
"I could tell it still had an inch or two, it was moving, like it had a leg there before," Austin said.
Austin said he believes it was a buck that he shot last year but did not find.
"It was probably the second week of gun season last year when I saw a really good buck chasing a doe," Austin said. "It was further than I thought, and aimed real low and hit it through the leg.
"I got to thinking this was the deer shot last year. I would have hit it through right front leg, so I figured maybe I could just finish the job."
The leg had indeed broken away. New skin covered it and even grown into the bone, Austin said.
Its body looked like the one from last year, but its rack was smaller and misshaped.
"I've heard if a deer gets hit by a car, that it'll mess its horns up," Wesley Crutchfield said. "Austin's deer had never been hit by a car, but something happened to it for its horns to be that jacked up."
Wesley said Austin's buck was probably about 5 1/2 years old.
"It has good mass, and it was a big-bodied deer," Wesley said. "It wasn't like it was starved. I was really surprised how fat it was."
The Crutchfields have not seen as many mature bucks as usual, live or on camera, but Austin said they have seen and photographed a lot of spikes and forkhorns.
For uniqueness, though, this has been their most memorable year ever.
"It's been the year of the freak show, for sure," Austin said.
Sports on 12/04/2016