This article was originally published in South Carolina Game & Fish Magazine November 1992. It was written under the pseudonym “Thomas Rose.” Dennis and I served together on the board of the South Carolina Sportsmen’s Coalition.
In his third year of hunting a huge, solitary mountain buck, Dennis Chastain began seeing abundant bear sign. Here’s how he took both a trophy buck and a trophy bruin during the 1991 season.
Pickens County resident, Dennis Chastain, quit his job as county Democratic Party chairman a few days before the opening of the 1991 deer season. In the few short weeks that followed, he would take a record-book-class buck and a trophy black bear. Reporting the Upstate hunter’s success, Greenville newspaper writer, Scott Keepfer, jested that Chastain had switched his priorities, then went hunting.
Whether or not Dennis quit his job to coincide with hunting season matters little, but his emphasis on learning the ways of bruins and wise old mountain bucks has put him in a class by himself.
After moving to Pickens County from the Rock Hill area 12 years ago, Dennis learned quickly that his Piedmont deer-hunting tactics didn’t work quite as well on mountain whitetails.
“Most of the big bucks that I’ve followed up here have a regular circuit when they start working their scrape lines, and they don’t visit them every day,” Chastain said. “If you see fresh sign, that’s probably where he was yesterday. You can waste a lot of time watching fresh tracks and scrapes. That strategy can work in other habitats. When I used to hunt in Chester County and found a hot scrape, I could sit over it, and a buck would show up sometime during a couple days. That’s not necessarily true up here. I spent three years hunting for the big buck I killed last year.”
Chastain’s persistence and love affair with hunting solitary mountain bucks has put some impressive bucks on the ground, with the 20-inch wide 10-pointer killed last season being his personal best. The hunt for this mountain monarch began three years before for Chastain, and eventually led him to not only the biggest buck of his life, but a 300-pound black bear, too.
This sportsman’s saga began when Chastain first discovered the big buck’s territory. “I bought several topo maps of the Mountain Hunt Unit to look for little pockets of flat terrain,” he said. “If you find a spot that is very different than the surrounding habitat, everything that lives in that area will pass through there at one time or another. Game animals seem to look for the differences in habitat. One reason is it will very likely be a white oak grove. “I also look for places that are as far away as possible from hunter access. This place that I found had everything. It was a little pocket in a saddle between two mountain peaks, and it was on the backside away from all the secondary roads. The nearest logging road was three miles away.
“When I went in there for my first scouting trip, I found a clearcut adjacent to where I killed the deer that gets a fair amount of hunting pressure. The clearcut is bordered by thick briars and brambles, and no hunters go through them because they find what they’re looking for in the clearcut. I didn’t get through there the first day. I tried several times. It was like a jungle. So I went to Wal-Mart and bought a pair of pruning shears, went back the next day and cut a tunnel through there.
I had to literally crawl through there on my hands and knees. When I broke through to the other side, it opened up into a tremendous hardwood stand that hadn’t been logged in over 40 years. I only went 150 yards and found a cedar tree the size of a telephone pole that had been rubbed from the ground up to waist level. I figured he had to have a pretty wide spread to get his antlers around it.”
Chastain hunted the buck cautiously, not wanting to alert the deer to his presence. After several unsuccessful tries, the 1989 season was over.
The spring and summer of 1990 passed slowly as Chastain waited for cooler weather and a chance to hunt for the big buck. What he found that fall confirmed his hopes that the buck had survived another winter. The sign Chastain encountered was more impressive that what he found the previous year. “When I went back during the pre-rut and saw what kind of damage he was doing I could tell he was a big animal,” Chastain remarked. “He would take ivy bushes (mountain laurel or rhododendron) thick as your arm and snap them off at the ground. Then he would shake them and run off through the ivy thickets dragging the stuff. It was really a horrendous scene.”
Even though Chastain hunted the buck hard, bagging the animal was not yet meant to be. He would have to wait another year to match wits with the old buck.
When fall arrived last year, Chastain awaited the opening of gun season to scout the area. He decided to wait until the season was open in order to cut down on the human activity in the area and to precisely pattern the buck’s movements.
Imagine Chastain’s surprise when he found fresh bear sign in addition to fresh sign produced by the big buck. Judging from the bruin’s spoor, Chastain realized the bear had been living and feeding in this secluded spot throughout the summer. The astute woodsman stored away this knowledge, hoping to catch the bear feeding in the area during the weeklong still-hunt bear season in late October.
His second trip into the backcountry produced the first sighting of the buck in three years. “I finally saw the buck for the first time during the first week of gun season,” Chastain remembered. “I watched him and an 8-pointer fight in an oak grove. I had already gotten up from my stand to still-hunt the area and take a look around. I had only gone 30 yards when I saw the deer, but I still couldn’t tell if they were bucks or does. I stopped and they kept heading toward me, and then they split up about 70 yards away. One of them stopped 60 yards out, but I still couldn’t see any antlers, so I didn’t know whether to shoot or not. Then that deer turned and walked toward the other deer. I still couldn’t tell if they were bucks.
“They both dropped out of view, and about 100 yards away, I started hearing antlers clash. I thought, ‘Great day. That’s my big buck. This is it. After three years there he is and I can’t move.’ I was caught in the wide open. To get a shot I was going to have to stalk them. It took me about 30 minutes to cover 20 yards, and they were still fighting, mixing it up real good on the edge of the opening.”
When Chastain got to where he could see them, he was still unable to shoot. That day he had chosen to carry his Marlin .35 caliber lever-action rifle. In case he saw a wild hog he wanted, he wanted enough firepower to bag one of the thick-skinned tuskers. The rifle’s iron sights handicapped his attempts to pick an opening in the brush large enough to shoot through.
“If I would have had my scoped rifle, I could have killed either one of them,” Chastain said. “They were clearly two fine, big-racked deer, and I wasn’t about to shoot in amongst them and take a chance on wounding either one of them after hunting them for that long.
They finally quit fighting and ambled off like they were good friends again,” he said. “They went out of sight over a little hump 40 yards away, and the squirrels started raising cain. From the sound of the squirrel racket I knew where the bucks were. When I got up there and peered over the hump, they were only 20 yards away. They saw me move and split up and ran about 20 yards apart. After about five minutes they decided that whatever had spooked them wasn’t a threat.”
The first clear look Chastain got at the buck was when it trotted back toward the other buck. When the magnificent animal appeared, Chastain could only see the buck’s head and about 3 inches of his neck. “I was mesmerized by his rack,” he said. “When he stepped from behind the tree about 30 yards away, he looked straight at me. Then he turned and looked at the other deer, and I got a side view. Then I knew he had to be the one that scraped up that cedar tree.”
Even though the buck was standing 30 yards away, Chastain decided to not risk missing, or worse, wounding the buck, since he only had a small patch of neck and head to shoot at. In an instant the buck melted into the brush.
That encounter would be the last until the deer season reopened after the short still-hunt bear season.
The second day of still-hunt bear season Chastain stalked the area in search of the bear. After sitting in what he felt was a good location, Chastain recalled, a large, wild animal approached from behind him and caught his scent. Owing to the animal’s reaction, he surmised it was the bear retreating once it caught a nose full of human scent.
He returned two days later, in the late afternoon on Oct. 26, to hunt in an area where the bear had been feeding heavily on white oak acorns. “I had just finished trimming out a little shooting lane and had put my hand saw back in my day pack when I looked up and saw the bear under an oak picking up acorns,” Chastain said. It was a simple matter for Dennis to center the crosshairs of the 4X Leupold scope behind the bruin’s shoulder. He squeezed the trigger of his favorite mountain rifle, a Model 7 Remington bolt-action chambered in .308, and the bear was his.
When he got to the downed bear, he saw that it was wearing jewelry. It had an ear tag asking the hunter to contact Clemson University’s wildlife department to help provide information for a black bear research project. When he contacted the researchers, he learned that the male bear was 3 years old, and weighed 172 pounds when it was trapped and tagged in August 1991. Less than three months later, the bear had gained well over 100 pounds to approximately 300 pounds live weight. After it was field dressed, it still weighed 225 pounds.
This bear was one of only four bruins killed in South Carolina in 1991. It may also be the first killed by a still-hunter since the season reopened in modern times.
After three years of trying several different deer-hunting strategies, it was the simplest of things that finally gave Chastain the edge he needed to take this big Appalachian whitetail a few days later. He realized that he was arriving in the buck’s core area too late in the morning to catch the buck before it bedded down for the day.
“It took so long to walk into his core area, at least an hour,” Chastain said in a letter to the author, “that I could never get in there and get set up before first light. I would usually end up making it to the outer edge of his core area right about first light and then I would still-hunt, hoping to intercept him. Where I really wanted to be was in the center of his core area in a little draw that was a natural funnel. The terrain was really rough, and it turned out that this little draw was a bottle neck. The deer just about had to pass through there to travel from his feeding to bedding areas. Despite my best efforts, I could never get there before 7:45 a.m.
“The plan was to cut him off before he bedded down. I finally decided that if I was ever going to have a chance at him, I was going to have to get up at 3 a.m.,” he said. Chastain got where he needed to be just as light was about to break over the ridge.
“When I finally got settled in I knew this was going to be the day. The weather was perfect; cold, crisp and bright, sunny with a stiff breeze blowing in my face.” Sitting at the base of an ancient white oak tree, Chastain soon began to shiver. He stuffed a pair of wool gloves in his coat collar to ward off the wind’s icy fingers that were clawing at his exposed neck.
He didn’t have long to wait. At 7:15 Chastain saw the buck sneak into the low side of the hollow to check his scrapes, enroute to a bedding area on the upper rim of the ridge above. The buck approached with his head down to about 75 yards.
“As I put the scope on his shoulder, he turned and started to skirt around the edge of the hollow,” Chastain continued. The hunter had placed “scent bombs,” filled with a doe-in-heat lure upwind of the buck’s scrape line, and the buck suddenly changed directions to locate the imaginary doe in estrus. “My heart sank because it looked like he was going to step out of view behind a blowdown, and I might not see him again if he continued along the edge of the hollow. The situation was deteriorating rapidly. He was in some fairly thick brush on the edge of the hollow, and as soon as I could pick out a clear spot through the 4X scope, I squeezed off a shot.
“The shot was good,” he added. The .308 bullet hit the buck right above the right shoulder in the lung area. “Instead of bowling over like I had envisioned, he turned and came blasting through the brush right toward me. When he was out about 60 yards, I pulled off another round to stop him. This one hit him in the shoulder at the leg joint, broke his leg and put him down. I thought I had my deer for sure.”
Both hunter and deer were at peak adrenaline levels. As Dennis eased toward the downed buck he chambered another round. He had taken only a few steps when he saw the buck’s head was still up and erect. When their eyes met the buck jumped up and “took off like a rocket” on three legs. A third round in the buck’s lower chest ended the short sprint.
What happened next brings a smile to Dennis’ face every time he tells it. “When I walked up to him, I bent over to touch him, and that glove that I had stuffed down my collar dropped out and just about made me jump out of my skin. I thought for a split-second he had come back to life and was about to run off again.”
Getting each animal off the mountain was a significant task. It took five men and a 4-wd, all-terrain vehicle each time to pack the animals out.
The help of a local conservation officer, a wildlife technician and three other men were enlisted to recover the bear. Chastain said the group returned to the mountain at 8 a.m. the next morning and didn’t get back out until 1 p.m. that afternoon.
Getting the buck out of the woods was an equally difficult ordeal. Chastain complicated the task by injuring his back while dragging the 240-pound whitetail 300 yards to the point where he killed his bear the week before. He was able to round up another crew of five men to help him get the buck out. They arrived on the mountain at 4:30 p.m., and didn’t get back out until 9 p.m. that night.
The prime whitetail was 6 1/2 years old, according to Sam Stokes, Skip Still and Richard Morton, three biologists at the Clemson office of the South Carolina Wildlife and Marine Resources Department.
It wasn’t until last March that Chastain learned the true score of his buck. Official measurer for South Carolina’s trophy-buck registry was Hugh R. Still Jr.
The buck’s 10-point rack had a gross score of 164 5/8 Boone and Crockett, and netted 159 4/8 after deductions for asymmetry. The right antler measured 25 4/8 inches, while the left measured 24 7 /8. The brow tines measured 6 inches on the right and 5 4/8 on the left. The other points on the right side of the rack measured 6 4/8, 9 4/8, and 8 3/8 inches, respectively. The tines on the left side of the rack measured 8 2/8, 10 l /8, and 7 5/8 inches, respectively. The circumference around the antler bases measured 4 6/8 on the right and 4 7 /8 on the left. It maintained nearly this much mass to the ends of the main beams. Add to these measurements an 18-inch inside spread, and you’ve got an impressive whitetail in anybody’s book.
This buck certainly deserves its ranking among the top whitetails killed in South Carolina. Chastain’s buck was the second-largest typical buck scored for the 1991 season, and is the No. 14 buck in the South Carolina record book.
Bagging a trophy buck of this caliber, and a black bear, too, is a South Carolina sportsman’s dream of a lifetime. Although difficult, it’s not impossible for those willing to get their “priorities” in the proper order.